Nicholas Ray - History and Rebellion

Rebel Without a Cause is most remembered for being the film that best presented the talent of young cult star James Dean, shortly before his premature death in 1955. It also served as a springboard for the acting careers of its two other stars; Natalie Wood (in her first non-child role) and unknown actor Sal Mineo. (Unfortunately, all three leading stars suffered death under unusual and tragic circumstances later on)

It is a film that sympathetically views rebellious, American, restless, misunderstood, middle-class youth. The screenplay (by Stewart Stern, from an adaptation by Irving Shulman of an original storyline Ray) was based on an actual case study of a delinquent, teenage psychopath. The story provides a rich and stylised (and now partly

As the film draws to it’s end, an enigmatic, mute figure [director Nicholas Ray] walks toward the front steps of the planetarium, appearing beneath the end title.

Throughout the film, the hero Johnny Guitar is associated with manual dexterity and control. He enters the bar confrontation in the beginning after he prevents a rolling shot glass from falling off the edge: a memorable figure of style. He is an expert guitarist, as his name implies. Later, we see what a remarkable shot he is.

· the climactic challenge of the daredevil 'chicken run'

Few Westerns more obviously begged the question "What were they thinking?" than Nicholas Ray's brilliantly perverse Johnny Guitar. Ray had a knack for finding subversive subtexts in standard material, and on the surface Johnny Guitar's outlaws on the run, factions battling over a town's future, and love and betrayal among the dusty pub tables seem like the stuff of a typical Western. But in Johnny Guitar, nearly all the men are unwilling or afraid to fight, the action is dominated by two aggressive women who hate each other (but are also oddly drawn to each other), the title character is at once the lover and the employee of the female lead, and her arch-rival is driven to near-psychotic hatred and violence by unrequited affection for a handsome outlaw. Lust rules nearly everyone in this film, and in ways that generally fall outside the boundaries of mainstream Hollywood's sexual economy; one look at Joan Crawford's butch Western outfit, complete with string tie, should be enough to signal that this isn't an ordinary sagebrush shoot-'em-up. Ray plays this saga of unusual appetites in an emotional style against a broad and colourful backdrop, and the result feels more like an opera than a Western.

The reactionary film is considered Hollywood's best 50's film of rebellious and restless youth that spawned many other lesser teen exploitation films in its wake (another film that caused the same sensation was Marlon Brando in the earlier film The Wild One (1953)). It has been surmised that Sal Mineo's teen-aged character in the film was gay and troubled by typical problems of in-the-closet homosexuals in the 50s - the film disguises his problems, but hints at the possibility that he is seeking out Dean.

Some topics in this essay:
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