Happy 50th Birthday, "Rebel Without a Cause!"

Birth of a rebellion
Reviewed By Roger Moore Sentinel Movie Critic Posted October 16, 2005

Live Fast, Die Young:The Wild Ride of 'Making Rebel Without a Cause' By Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel.Touchstone, $24.95, 372 pages.

Fifty years ago this month, a movie came out that hearkened a cultural revolution, nothing less than the rise of the teenager in American society. Rebel Without a Cause signaled and triggered a seismic shift in American pop-culture priorities, both documenting the restless energy and lack of direction of a new generation of American youth, and magnifying that restlessness -- by encouraging imitation."Troubled teens" and "juvenile delinquents" became the anti-culture's heroes. And the anti-culture became the only culture for baby boomers ready to embrace their own music, their own mores and their own icons.After this movie, who didn't imitate James Dean, the title character, a handsome and sensitive punk all too ready to live up to that teen credo of the Atomic Age -- "Live fast, die young"?Journalists Lawrence Frascella and Al Weisel take us back to that era, onto the set and into the Chateau Marmont, where Rebel director Nicholas Ray, a disciple of Elia Kazan, drilled his young troops into convincing impressionist sketches of teen gangs, girls with father issues and gay men who didn't understand the attraction they felt for their own sex because society didn't talk about such things.It's a big, lurid film with a lot to answer for, the authors say. Basically, they see Rebel as the first brick in the edifice of youth culture, the first shot in the sexual revolution and the movie that made the 1960s possible.

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