The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Nicholas Ray · a film · 1955 · about 111 minutes · screenplay by Stewart Stern, adaptation by Irving Shulman, from a story by Nicholas Ray · Warner Bros.
Mode
Family melodrama and juvenile-delinquency picture, made from the side of the young; teenage comedy, ordeal and tragedy in one day
Mythos
The improvised holy family, father, mother and child, and the child as its sacrifice; the ordeal at the cliff edge as a rite of passage; all of it under the stars of an indifferent universe
Phase
A night, a day and a second night to dawn: from the juvenile hall through the planetarium and the chickie run to the empty mansion and the observatory steps
Presentation
Feature film in WarnerColor and CinemaScope, about 111 minutes; three young leads, three households, a school, a police station and an observatory
Register
From kitchen and schoolroom to dread at a cliff edge and a cry on a stair; expressive colour, red as the colour of crisis, and the wide frame used for distance
Scale
Three households in three failures, a school, a precinct and the stars, all reached through the family in a single day
Governing Proposition
Three young people brought separately into a police station at night meet again the next day, and in about thirty hours a fight, a death and an improvised family follow, until the youngest of them is shot at dawn on the steps of the observatory. The wager of the film is that the suffering of the comfortable young is real suffering, caused by the absence of any adult who will stand for anything, and that children left without fathers will build the family they lack out of one another, with the child among them as its sacrifice.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Under the titles a young man lies drunk on the pavement and finds a wind-up toy monkey. He covers it with a scrap of paper, as if putting it to bed. Before a word is spoken the film has shown its subject: a boy tending a child’s thing with a tenderness no one has shown him. Then the police pick him up, and the film moves indoors, to the juvenile hall at night, where it will keep its three young people for its first movement and from which it will not let them go until the next dawn.
Rebel Without a Cause was made at Warner Bros. and released in the United States in October 1955, a few weeks after James Dean’s death on 30 September. Nicholas Ray directed, from a screenplay by Stewart Stern, with an adaptation by Irving Shulman, on a story by Ray; the title was taken from Robert M. Lindner’s book of 1944, whose content the film does not use. David Weisbart produced, Ernest Haller photographed it in WarnerColor and CinemaScope, Leonard Rosenman wrote the score, and William Ziegler edited it. Dean plays Jim Stark, Natalie Wood plays Judy, Sal Mineo plays Plato; Jim Backus and Ann Doran are Jim’s parents, Corey Allen is Buzz, Edward Platt the juvenile officer. The film runs about 111 minutes and is judged as released.
Three are brought in separately: Jim drunk, Judy picked up after curfew, Plato for shooting puppies. They do not yet know one another, and the station sees them only in passing, but the family of three the film will build in its last movement is assembled here, in its first scene. That is the economy of the whole. The scene also shows what gives. The officer, Ray, exists largely to receive exposition, and each family at the station states its diagnosis aloud. The film inherits that habit from the problem picture, the form The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle had used to make youth a subject, a threat from outside; it turns that form inward, to the children of comfortable houses, and takes their side.
Movement II
On the first school day the class is taken to the planetarium at Griffith Observatory. The dome goes dark, the stars come up, and a lecturer in a flat voice describes the end of the earth and the insignificance of man. Plato hides under the seats. Jim moos at a constellation. It is the film’s cold summit and the measure of everything after: the scale against which a game at a cliff edge will be staged, and the building in which the youngest will die. Under that dome the film states its cosmos without a word of doctrine. The universe does not care.
On the terrace outside, Buzz’s gang closes on Jim and the knife fight follows. Here the width of the frame is used as the film uses it throughout: for distance and pressure between bodies, a group arranged across the whole of it and one boy set against the rest. Ernest Haller’s colour is cold in the observatory blues and saturated in the reds, and the red already marks crisis, in Judy’s coat at the start and later in Jim’s jacket. The composition in CinemaScope, groups arranged across the frame and in depth, is the film’s strongest craft, and it bears weight wherever the film sets people apart.
One law governs the planetarium and everything the film will bring beside it: in a universe that does not care, and among adults who cannot stand, the young must make their own shelter, and the shelter is play that becomes earnest. The knife fight is a game with a blade. The chickie run will be a game that kills. Where the law loosens is in the joins. The tone runs from teenage comedy through melodrama to tragedy, and not every passage between them is governed; the parents are sometimes comic figures where the law requires them to be failed ones, and the decent officer stands outside it, an adult whose existence the film’s own argument denies.
Movement III
At nightfall the gang gathers at a bluff above the sea. Two cars will be driven at the edge, and the first to jump is the chicken. Judy stands between the headlights and raises her arms to start them. The cars run in the dusk; Jim rolls out; Buzz’s sleeve catches on the door handle, and he goes over with the car. Below there is only the empty sea. The sequence is dread exactly built, cut for the length of the run and the instant of the sleeve, and it is the place where the film’s making is surest from first shot to last.
The run is an ordeal at the edge of a cliff, a rite of passage with a girl as its priestess, and the price of the initiation is a boy’s death. The myth here is built, not summoned. The chickie run tests manhood in the only form the young have been given, a dare, and it is answered by a death that no one meant and every one of them arranged. Set beside the planetarium earlier that day, it is the lecture’s indifferent universe met at ground level: a cliff, a fall, and the sea that does not answer. The film does not say so. It shows the empty water.
Buzz’s death falls at the midpoint, and it must. The first half is a day of meeting; the second is about what Jim does with a guilt that no adult will take from him. The structure is compelled here more than anywhere. What gives elsewhere gives because the film says what it has already shown. The midpoint says nothing aloud. It turns the film from a picture of trouble into a picture of consequence, and it leaves Jim, Judy and Plato with a death between them and a night ahead in which no one older will help.
Movement IV
Jim goes home. His father, whom the film has shown in an apron, gives him nothing to stand on, and the mother takes command. The quarrel climbs the stair, the frame tilted, the camera turned upside down as the mother comes down, and Jim cries “You’re tearing me apart!” It is a height of its kind, and shrill. The tilted frames make the household’s instability a matter of space, and the wide frame sets parents and son at opposite ends of a stair. Jim goes to the police to tell what happened, and is turned away. The world built to receive his crisis is not there.
Here the film’s disclosure is plainest and most limited. It can be stated: the suffering of the comfortable young is real suffering, and its cause is the absence of an adult who will stand for anything. In 1955 a Hollywood film said this of the middle class, in a house with a television and a new car, and it holds. But the film’s account of the cause is a weak father in an apron and a domineering mother, the popular psychology of its decade, which it states and does not test. Judy’s need is read wholly through her father’s withheld kiss, a single scene held long on one note. The Stark quarrel itself repeats what the opening at the station had already said.
Where the film shows rather than tells, it goes further. Plato’s parents are absent, a housekeeper is his only family, and a birthday cheque stands in for a father; no one in the film diagnoses him, and he is the one it loses. Much of what the film knows is said in words, and would survive in another form; this is the knowledge only its images carry. The playing divides along the same line. Dean’s performance is physical and exposed, Mineo’s Plato the most affecting thing in the film, while the adults are uneven, Backus broad, the station scenes broad, and some of the dialogue stilted and explanatory.
Movement V
That night the three hide in an empty mansion. Plato shows Jim and Judy through it as an agent shows a couple an estate, and they mock the manners of property and parenthood; then, in the drained pool, they lie close together, a father, a mother and a child. The holy family improvised in a night is the myth the film was built to reach, and its child is its sacrifice. Buzz’s gang pursues them, and Plato flees to the observatory. Jim goes in after him and takes the bullets from his gun. At dawn Plato comes out onto the steps into the police floodlights and is shot. Jim’s cry, “I got the bullets!”, comes too late. He zips his red jacket on the dead boy, and his father promises to be strong.
Whether that promise resolves the film or ironises it is still argued, as is whether the film criticises the doctrine of the weak father or holds it. Those questions, and Plato’s attachment to Jim, which a later criticism has read as homoerotic and which the film half admits, have kept it open for seventy-one years. Its reach is very large: it fixed the American teenager as a sufferer in his own right, its lead’s jacket and anguish became a figure popular culture still uses, and the teen film descends in part from it. Much of that reach and presence belongs to Dean’s persona and early death, and is not credited to the film. Its surface, the apron and the slang, now reads as period; the anguish of the young has not aged.
Two works set the measure. The 400 Blows, Truffaut’s film of 1959 about a boy failed by his parents, stands at 8.3: its disclosure is shown rather than diagnosed, and its form is more fully the instrument. The Catcher in the Rye, the literary founding of the same figure four years earlier, stands at 8.5, its disclosure made through a voice and its reach its own. Rebel Without a Cause holds three households, a school, a precinct and the stars in one day, reached always through the family, with labour, the state and history absent. It stands at 7.8, in Tier III: a film whose myth and reach are real and whose disclosure and swerve stop short of the tier above. It is a serious and lasting film about children making a family in the dark.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and the spine is required. The compression into thirty hours lets three children meet at the police station before they know each other, so that the family of three made in an empty house at the end is prepared in the first scene. The planetarium is needed twice: its lecture on the end of the earth sets the scale for the chickie run, and the building is where Plato dies. Buzz’s death must fall at the midpoint, so that the second half can be about a guilt no adult will take. What gives: the juvenile officer exists to receive exposition, the three family scenes at the station each state their diagnosis aloud, and the Stark quarrel repeats what the opening has already made plain.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated: the adolescent’s suffering is real, and its cause is not poverty or crime but the absence of an adult who will stand for anything; the young, left without fathers, build the family they lack out of one another, and the child among them is its sacrifice. In 1955 a Hollywood film said this of the comfortable middle class, in a house with a television and a new car. What holds the figure is how much is stated rather than shown, and stated in a period doctrine: a weak father in an apron and a domineering mother, a diagnosis the film does not question, and Judy’s need read wholly through her father’s withheld kiss. Where it shows, in Plato’s absent parents and his birthday cheque, it is strongest.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The rises are frequent and several are high. The planetarium, the dome going dark while a lecturer’s flat voice announces the end of the earth and Plato hides under the seats, is the film’s cold summit, and it returns at the close when the same building’s floodlights fall on Plato’s body. The chickie run, two cars racing toward the bluff in the dusk, Judy’s raised arms, a sleeve caught on a door handle, is dread exactly built. Jim zipping his red jacket on the dead boy is the warm height. The stair quarrel is a height of its kind, though shrill. What holds the figure: between the summits the register is often schoolroom and kitchen, and the melodrama’s pitch at times reaches for an elevation it has not earned.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The myth is built, and it bears load. The three found at the station become, in the mansion, a father, a mother and a child playing house, and the film’s structure turns on that improvised holy family. Its child is sacrificed at the end, on the observatory steps at dawn, a death the father of the game tried to prevent and could not. The chickie run is an ordeal at the edge of a cliff, a rite of passage with a girl as its priestess, and the price of initiation is a boy’s death. The observatory sets all of it under the stars. The particular stays particular: a toy monkey, a red windbreaker, a milk bottle at the refrigerator. Held from the top because the script often names its archetypes rather than leaving them to bear their weight in silence.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The inheritance is the juvenile-delinquency picture, the social-problem film and the family melodrama. The Wild One (1953) and Blackboard Jungle (1955) had already made youth a subject, and both treated the young as a threat from outside. The turn is to the inside: the delinquents are the children of comfortable houses, the film takes their side, and adult authority is weak rather than menaced. It gives a melodrama of the suburban family the width of CinemaScope and an expressive colour, a scale the studio kept for spectacle. What holds the figure: the swerve is of subject and point of view more than of form. Its means are the studio melodrama’s, its psychology its decade’s, and its surface stays within the conventions of Warner Bros.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Change the form and the film loses much of what it knows. The single day is the instrument: there is no time for any adult to catch up, and the speed of the young, a fight, a death and a family in thirty hours, is the knowledge that their crisis outruns the world built to receive it. The width of the frame is used for distance between people, parents and son at opposite ends of a stair or a room, the three children drawn close in the drained pool. The tilted frames in the Stark house render the household’s instability as space; Jim’s red jacket and his father’s apron carry meaning as colour. What holds the figure: much of what the film knows is also said in words, and the form deepens the knowledge more than it constitutes it.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Seventy-one years of return are evidence. The auteur criticism of the 1950s made Ray a central figure, and the film has been reread since in several ways: as a portrait of masculinity in crisis; through Plato’s attachment to Jim, which a later criticism has read as homoerotic and which the film half admits; as a document of the postwar family; as a study of space in CinemaScope; as the founding of an American image of the teenager. Questions stay open: whether the father’s last promise to be strong resolves the film or ironises it, and whether the film criticises the doctrine of the weak father or holds it. What holds the figure: the yield gathers around Plato and around the star, and the core diagnosis, stated so plainly, gives less on return.
Score: 7.7 / 10
Released in 1955, so force and reach are scored together, in the cinema of the 1950s. The intrinsic force is moderate: the film joins the problem picture to the family melodrama under a wide expressive frame more than it reorganises what film can do. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is very large. The film fixed the image of the American teenager as a sufferer in his own right; its lead’s red jacket, posture and anguish became a figure the cinema and popular culture have used ever since; the teen film, from the late 1950s to John Hughes and beyond, descends in part from it; and Ray’s place in the auteur criticism it fed changed how cinema was read. The discount: much of that reach belongs to the star’s persona and early death, which is fame, not force.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed over seventy-one years, on form, presence and fabric. The form is whole: the film survives complete as released, and restorations of its colour and its CinemaScope frame are repair. Presence has been continuous and very wide, in repertory, on television and every home format, in teaching, and beyond the cinema in the image of its lead, though some of that presence is the star’s rather than the film’s, and wide presence earns little on its own. The charge is on surface. The diagnosis of a weak father in an apron, the vocabulary of its teenagers and some broad playing among the adults are fixed to the mid 1950s and are now often watched as period. The anguish of the young has not aged. The bar of 8.5 is cleared by a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium, measured against the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the set pieces: Ray’s composition in CinemaScope, arranging groups across the frame and on stairs in depth; Ernest Haller’s colour, saturated in the reds and cold in the observatory blues; the chickie run cut for dread; Leonard Rosenman’s score, modern and unsettled for a studio picture. James Dean’s performance carries the film, physical and exposed, and Sal Mineo’s Plato is its most affecting. The charges are several: the adult playing is uneven, Backus and the station scenes broad; some dialogue is stilted and explanatory; the gang is thinly played; the final siege is staged with less precision than the chickie run. The command is high in moments and less sure across the whole.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the planetarium lecture on the end of the earth, under a dome of indifferent stars, and the scene in the mansion where three children mock the manners of estate agents and parents. One law governs both: in a universe that does not care, and among adults who cannot stand, the young must make their own shelter, and the shelter is play that becomes earnest. The chickie run, a game that kills, obeys it, as does the close, where the adults arrive with floodlights at a place the children reached first. What holds the figure: the tone runs from teenage comedy through melodrama to tragedy and the joins are not always governed, and the decent juvenile officer stands outside the law, an adult the film’s argument says does not exist.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a film of about 111 minutes holds. The family is held in three households, each in a different failure: the Starks’ weakness and quarrel, Judy’s father’s withdrawal from his daughter, Plato’s absent parents and the housekeeper who stands in for them. Consciousness is Jim’s chiefly, Plato’s in part, Judy’s thinly. School, police and the law enter; the cosmos enters through the planetarium; death, ordeal and sacrifice through the bluff and the observatory; gender as the film’s governing anxiety about what a man is. Class enters in Plato’s wealth, race only at the edge, in the housekeeper. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: labour, money beyond comfort, the state beyond the precinct, and history are absent, and every order is reached through the family and its children in a single day.
Score: 7.0 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0. A film whole as released and continuously present for seventy-one years, its surface partly fixed to the mid 1950s; an improvised holy family built into the structure, with a rite of passage at a cliff edge and a child sacrificed at dawn under the observatory dome; and a reach that fixed the image of the American teenager, discounted for the share that belongs to its star.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.0: three households, a school, a precinct and the stars held through the family in a single day, with labour, the state beyond the precinct and history absent. Above it, The Inevitable and The Unconcealment at 7.6: a structure required in its spine but carrying exposition its officer and its family scenes speak aloud, and a disclosure that holds but is stated more than shown, in a period doctrine of the weak father that the film does not test.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5, by a tenth. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 7.8, The Made at 7.8, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.0, Pressure on Tradition at 8.0, The Swerve at 7.7 and The Unconcealment at 7.6 fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: of the eleven axes it covers, none falls below 7.6, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.8, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Rebel Without a Cause as released by Warner Bros. in the United States in October 1955, in WarnerColor and CinemaScope, about 111 minutes, from the toy monkey under the titles to the dawn at the observatory: directed by Nicholas Ray, screenplay by Stewart Stern, adaptation by Irving Shulman, from a story by Ray, the title taken from Robert M. Lindner’s book of 1944; produced by David Weisbart, photographed by Ernest Haller, with music by Leonard Rosenman, edited by William Ziegler; with James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Jim Backus, Ann Doran, Corey Allen, William Hopper, Rochelle Hudson, Edward Platt, Marietta Canty and Dennis Hopper. The film was nominated for Academy Awards for Mineo, Wood and Ray’s story, and named to the National Film Registry in 1990. Restorations of the colour and the frame are weighed as repair. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Dialogue is quoted only where its words are certain, in two lines of four words each; the rest is described. Facts that could not be verified, among them the exact day of release, an account of the production’s change from black and white to colour, the identity of the mansion used as a location, the box-office standing of the lead when shooting began, the names of particular critics who wrote on Ray, the shot counts and the share of the dialogue, are not given.