Part of Teenage Wasteland
James Dean dazzles Hollywood with a performance that still electrifies the screen 70 years after his untimely death, a month prior to the film’s release. In this archetypal drama of teenage angst and rebellion, three high school students who should lead idyllic lives in their stable, comfortable suburban families explode with a violence and sexuality that their parents cannot understand. This film — which ripped the façade from the post-war American dream to expose the rage of the country’s youth — resonates with an energy that has made it a modern classic and a powerful coming-of-age story.
“Like its hero, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE desperately wants to say something and doesn’t know what it is. If it did know, it would lose its fascination. More perhaps than it realized, it is a subversive document of its time.” —Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times “Easily the best-directed in the genre’s history…. The red-jacketed, Method-pouting James Dean steals every scene, but the ensemble playing is nothing short of exemplary.” —David Parkinson, Empire Magazine “REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE has such beautiful color photography that it seems almost impossible to conceive of the fact that they initially started filming it in black and white.” —Brad Laidman, Film Threat
