Nicholas Ray was one of the foremost studio directors during Hollywood's golden age, responsible for cult classics like They Live By Night (1949), In A Lonely Place (1950), and Johnny Guitar (1954), an unconventional Western starring Joan Crawford. He followed this with was what remains his most famous film: Rebel Without A Cause (1955). A fearless genre stylist, Ray had directed Westerns, comedies, films noir, domestic dramas, action films, and crime dramas. Like his contemporary Billy Wilder, Ray was also a consummate provocateur, infusing his films with controversial subject matter that pushed the limits of what was deemed morally acceptable to show to mid-century audiences in multiplexes. Considering Ray's overall style, wit, and verve as a filmmaker, French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard once remarked, "Nicholas Ray is cinema."
In filming Rebel Without A Cause, Ray employed CinemaScope technology, a recently patented anamorphic lens used to present feature films in an ultra-widescreen format. This innovation was designed to exploit cinema's unique advantages over television, another relatively recent technological innovation showing up in Americans' living rooms. The sweeping, epic ratio of the full-color CinemaScope format often makes Jim and the gang look like looming giants, and lends the film a visual sense of lush grandeur. The studio's decision to film in full color, after sensing James Dean's rising stock as a movie star, made Rebel an even more uniquely cinematic product in 1955, captured in a style that audiences simply could not obtain from their square format, black-and-white, cathode ray tube television screens.
Widescreen technologies like CinemaScope and VistaVision were typically used to capture the sweeping landscapes and intricate choreography of musicals, Westerns, and epics, making Ray's decision to film Rebel—a domestic drama—in a CinemaScope format especially notable and interesting. The film's application of widescreen technology to domestic subject matter bridges the gap between the intimate/private and the epic/universal, and underlines the thematic point that the film's screenplay already makes between the intensity of adolescent emotional experience and the gravitational forces of the universe. Sequences featuring the spectacle of male-male violence, such as the planetarium and chickie-run scenes, in particular benefit from the CinemaScope format, with the wide frame used to emphasize the distance, hostility, aggression, and combativeness infusing the physical antagonism between Buzz and Jim.
Ray was not afraid to address uncomfortable themes surrounding gender, sexuality, and violence—in the nuclear family unit and in adolescent culture at large. His first feature, They Live By Night, asked audiences to empathize with a romantic couple who were also criminals, not unlike Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity had done four years earlier. In Rebel Without A Cause, Ray asks viewers to understand the complex social and psychological motivations behind various adolescent characters' seemingly appalling actions, like killing puppies, participating in knife fights, racing stolen cars, and attacking members of their own family. James Dean's charismatic, unforgettable performance as Jim Stark was an instrumental way in which Ray was able to win the sympathies of the audiences. Dean delivers a charismatic and sympathetic portrait of a new kind of American man bewildered by tradition that resonated with an entire generation of young American men and women.
Nevertheless, Ray still sensationalizes and even glamorizes the film's scenes of male violence, which unfold in precisely choreographed scenes of accelerating tension and release. He eroticizes violence in a number of ways, such as when Buzz slowly grazes the rubber tire of Jim's care with his blade, or when Judy leans up against it and peers up at Jim seductively. Buzz and Jim's simmering rivalry is also a kind of romantic courtship, in which they reveal they both actually have affection for one another right before one of them dies in a fiery car accident. This fact, along with the film's ending, also proves that Rebel Without a Cause is unmistakably a tragedy: Buzz's death and Plato's death are both preventable acts that represent the failures of communication between fathers and sons. The wideness of this generational rift seemed to accurately capture the mood of the American public, who were entering a new kind of sociopolitical moment in the wake of the postwar period.
