Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glen Holland.

Tonight's film is "Rebel Without a Cause," directed by Nicholas Ray and released by Warner Brothers in 1955.

"Rebel Without a Cause" stars James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, with Jim Backus, Ann Doran, Corey Allen, Dennis Hopper, and Edward Platt.

The movie covers the events of a single day.

It begins in the early morning at a Los Angeles police station, where three different high school students are being held on three separate charges.

The first, Jim Stark, has been brought in for public intoxication.

The second, John Crawford, also noticed Plato, has been arrested for shooting a litter of puppies.

The third, Judy, is being held for curfew violation.

All three attend Dawson High, and all three live near one another in a wealthy Los Angeles suburb.

All three are in conflict with their parents in one way or another.

Jim reveals in a conversation with police officer, Ray Fremick, that his family has moved several times recently.

Each time in an attempt to remove Jim from the company of bad influences.

Jim blames his father for never standing up to his wife, or his domineering mother, who lives with them.

Plato's father left when he was a toddler, and his mother spends most of her time away, leaving her son under the authority of the family's housekeeper.

Judy's father is neglectful now that she is no longer his little girl.

When she stays out late with friends, he calls her a dirty tramp.

At the first day of school the next morning, Jim does his best to fit in.

Plato is drawn to him and helps him find his way around, but Jim falls afoul of the group of delinquent Judy runs around with, particularly her boyfriend, Buzz.

During a field trip to Griffith Observatory, Buzz tauts Jim is a chicken, and challenges him to a knife fight, a fight Jim wins.

To save face, Buzz proposes another contest that night, A chickie run on a cliff overlooking the ocean.

Jim and Buzz will each drive towards the cliff, and the last one to jump out of his car before it plunges over the edge wins.

As the time for the contrast draws near, Jim violently confronts his father and asks him, "What do you do when you have to be a man?"

Juvenile delinquency was a major social concern in the mid 1950s, as teenagers with access to money and cars began to exercise their freedom by spending less time at home with their families and more time out and about with other people their own age.

Between the Great Depression and the Second World War, this was the first time American teens had enjoyed any kind of independence since the late 1920s, which had seen its own version of wild youth.

Post-war America, following its victory in the war, and newly concerned with the threats posed by the Soviet Union and domestic Communism, emphasized social conformity and wholesome American values.

But young people, as they will, often went their own way, and inevitably, some of them became involved in crime.

Then as now, there was a multitude of theories to explain what appeared to be an epidemic of wayward youth.

Some focused on social factors, like the family, peer influence, or teenagers' lack of interest in the community.

Other theories emphasized psychological factors, like alienation, lack of purpose, and nihilism inspired by the prospect of nuclear annihilation.

The motion picture industry was not slow to take advantage of the public's fascination and concern with what the young people were up to.

After the success of Stanley Kramer's 1953 biker crime film, "The Wild One," starring Marlon Brando, major studios and independent production companies alike released a steady stream of B-pictures about young people in trouble.

"The Wild One" established the rules in several ways.

It was shot in a realistic style in black and white.

It featured establishment authorities, parents, and police, doing their best to deal with the problems caused by a brooding young man, often played by a method actor, or at least someone trying to pass as one.

And "The Wild One," like the films that followed, emphasized the leading character's alienation and estrangement from mainstream American society.

Two lines from "The Wild One" pretty much sum up every film about juvenile delinquency made in the fifties.

When a local girl asked the biker gang leader, "Hey, Johnny, what are you rebelling against?"

the brash young Marlon Brando replies, "What do you got?"

Director Nicholas Ray said he wanted to set "Rebel Without a Cause" apart from the other films about juvenile delinquency that emphasized the threat criminal youth posed to society.

Instead, he wanted to create a classical tone, claiming his inspiration was the best play written about juvenile delinquents, Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet."

The same idea had also occurred to Jerome Robbins, who with the assistance of Arthur Lawrence, Leonard Bernstein, and Steven Sondheim, turned it into the Broadway musical, "West Side Story" in 1957.

Ray took the title for his movie from psychiatrist Robert M. Lindner's 1944 book, "Rebel Without a Cause, The Hypnoanalysis of a Criminal Psychopath."

But otherwise, the film had nothing to do with the book.

The screenplay was written by Stewart Stern from a story by Nicholas Ray, adapted by Irving Shulman, with a number of scenes that were later considered too emotionally provocative for the movie.

In the event, it was Nicholas Ray alone, out of the three writers, who was nominated for an Oscar for Best Motion Picture Story.

When production began, Warner Brothers considered "Rebel Without a Cause" a B-picture, like other films about wayward teenagers, so it was initially shot in black and white.

Later when Jack L. Warner realized James Dean was a rising star, the film was upgraded to an A-picture.

Director Ray had to re-shoot already completed scenes in color using the widescreen Cinemascope format.

The result has been called a landmark, a quantum leap forward in the artistic and technical evolution of a format.

This is particularly evident in the climactic scenes at Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles.

As it happened, the observatory was also used for the climactic violent scenes in another film about juvenile delinquents, a B-movie titled "Teen-Age Crime Wave," released by Columbia Pictures less than a month after "Rebel Without a Cause."

Needless to say, those black and white scenes, though more violent, were far less impressive.

One of the actors who played members of Buzz Gunderson's High school gang was Frank Mazzola, the leader of a real gang called The Athenians.

He ended up acting as the film's technical advisor on gangs and gang behavior.

He choreographed the knife fight between Jim and Buzz based on a knife fight Mazzola himself had been part of in a Hollywood park.

Director Ray also deferred to Mazzola in choosing the cars the actors drove in the film, and the clothes they wore.

The wardrobe department bought clothes at a store favored by LA's teen gangs, and dirtied and washed more than 400 pairs of Levi's for use by the teenage cast.

Among the many actors playing high school students in "Rebel Without a Cause," most were in their late teens or early twenties, with James Dean the oldest at 24.

Only two actors were actually the age of your average high school student, former Child Star Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo, appearing in only his third film, were both 16.

Wood and Mineo were also nominated for acting Academy Awards in the Best Supporting category.

Warner Brothers released "Rebel Without a Cause" on October 27th, 1955, less than a month after James Dean's death in a car crash outside Bakersfield, California.

Although critics had mixed reactions to the movie's dramatic narrative and its depiction of juvenile delinquency, Dean's performance received almost universal praise.

Wanda Hale, for example, writing for the New York Daily News, felt the movie's depiction of adults as cardboard cutouts and middle class teenagers as hoodlums, undermined its credibility, saying, "As an honest, purposeful drama of juvenile hardness and violence, the film just doesn't measure up."

But of Dean's performance, she said, "With complete control of the character, he gives a fine, sensitive performance of an unhappy, lonely teenager tormented by the knowledge of his emotional instability."

"Rebel Without a Cause" was an immediate hit, with an eventual box office of over $7 million.

Unfortunately, the movie also inspired teenagers around the world to take part in knife fights and chickie runs, leading to it being banned in several European countries.

But it was James Dean himself who made the biggest impact.

Actor Martin Sheen, who himself played a teen hoodlum in 1973's "Badlands," later wrote, "There are only two people in the fifties, Elvis Presley, who changed the music, and James Dean, who changed our lives."

Please join us again next time for another "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.