Rebel Without a Cause

Nicholas Ray's 1955 drama Rebel Without a Cause is back on Sarasota-area movie screens, where its wide CinemaScope compositions have room to work. The title came from a psychiatrist's study of a criminal psychopath that Warner Bros. had owned for years; Ray kept little beyond the name and built his own story of a middle-class boy adrift in suburban Los Angeles. James Dean is Jim Stark, the new kid in town, with Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo as the lonely teenagers who attach themselves to him and Jim Backus as his aproned, ineffectual father. The planetarium sequence at Griffith Observatory and the clifftop chickie run are the set pieces. Dean died in a highway crash less than a month before the film opened.