“YOU’RE TEARING ME APART”
I didn’t see Rebel Without a Cause until I was thirty-five. I was sitting in a classroom at the New School in Greenwich Village when my professor began lecturing about it. (I’d avoided taking film theory classes that had anything to do with my father’s movies). The professor claimed that in the movie Nicholas Ray was saying the family was a ball and chain. I sat in my chair thinking my father hated me.
I wanted to prove my professor wrong. Looking in from the outside you could say Nicholas Ray ran from family. He had had three that he spent as little time as possible. Nevertheless, I have to disagree with my professor. I think Nick found family in the actors he worked with and found home on the film set. None of his films prove this sentiment better than Rebel Without a Cause.
Not long after my professor’s lecture, Rebel Without a Cause screened at the Museum of Modern Art. I called and asked for tickets. It was the first time I’d ever called a venue that was screening one of my father’s films and identified myself as Nicholas Ray’s daughter. The night of the screening was a rainy Friday night. Downstairs in the theater lobby a long line was forming. I expected there to be two older film nerds and me. The theater was packed. People were sitting in the aisle by the time the movie started. There was clapping when my father’s name appeared on the screen and seeing James Dean’s name made the audience go wild. Sure, the movie’s sustaining popularity had something to do with James Dean, but it also had something to do with my father’s directorial style.
Dennis Hopper, who plays Goon in Rebel, said, “Nick was a much looser, freer director than say, George Stevens, who directed James Dean in Giant.”
Corey Allen, who plays Buzz, remembered Nick saying, “‘Don’t get caught up in Jimmy’s rhythm.’ I knew what he meant. All the kids in town were walking around imitating James Dean. Nick told us actors, ‘Everybody has his way of working. I don’t care what it is. If it contributes to his performance and therefore to our project, he is to do it. Anybody who wants to make it difficult for anyone else can leave.’ That’s what I learned from Nick. Not only was that good for me as an actor but it was good for me as a human being and as a director. A project depends upon the security and the output of its artists and that is to be cherished and protected.”
On the set of Rebel, Nick provided a safe place for his actors to explore. Some confused his “loose” style to handing over the controls to the film’s star, James Dean. To which Nick replied, “No one makes a movie alone.”
Nick saw James Dean as a star with whom he could join forces and make movies that could push boundaries and still earn big at the box office. He had heard rumors that Dean was moody, insolent, uncooperative, and unstable. He’d heard how Elia Kazan, who had just directed Dean in East of Eden had “to babysit” the actor “to keep him from running away during production.”
In Dean he saw himself.
“He was wary and hard to catch. In the minds of many people their relationship with Jimmy was complex, even obsessive. For him it was simple and probably much less important. He was still intensely determined not to love, not to be loved. He could be absorbed, fascinated, attracted by something new or beautiful but he would never surrender himself. There were girls convinced they were the only one in his life when they were no more than occasions. Involvement was out of the question because the pain that lies waiting in human relationships was a risk he was not prepared to take,” Nick wrote.
Also, like Nick, James Dean had an aversion to authority figures.
Stewart Stern, who wrote the screenplay for Rebel, said, “Like Nicholas Ray, James Dean was suspect within the industry. Actors trained in the studio system paid attention to hitting their marks and saying their lines as written. Dean scoffed at conventions. On stage he improvised his lines constantly altering them from one performance to the next. Dean was oblivious to Hollywood as a going concern, oblivious to budgets and shooting schedules. He was openly contemptuous of authority, including powerful men like Jack Warner. Like Nicholas Ray, Dean’s radical style did not mesh with Hollywood’s corporate gears.”
Nick was not a director who was going to tell James Dean where or how to hit his marks. Instead he gave the actor free reign to develop the character, Jim Stark. It led some to think Dean directed his own scenes.
“Nick was prone to letting Jimmy do anything that he wanted to do so Jimmy did that. I think he told them where to put the camera,” Stewart Stern said.
Dennis Hopper, who at the ripe old age of eighteen thought Dean was directing the movie but later concluded, “Nick was being very intelligent allowing Dean to create what he created. At the time of filming my ego wasn’t allowing me to think that Nick Ray was a better director than I would someday be. I wasn’t looking at things clearly. I was seeing a whole new way of working that I’d never seen before.”
In fact, Nick was unlike any director anyone in the cast had ever worked with. For instance, before they started filming Nick invited the actors to his bungalow at the Chateau Marmont, the storied hotel on Sunset Boulevard, where he lived on and off throughout the 1950s.
Dennis Hopper, who had come to Hollywood via performing Shakespeare at The Old Globe Theater in San Diego, remembered how Nick had them “improvising right away. I’d never seen anybody do it. I’d never heard of it. It was a revelation; a learning curve. Later, working this way got me in trouble. I’d work that way with Nick but after it was not going to be that way.”
Nick also asked for input from the actors about the credibility of how the script portrayed the teenagers. Frank Mazzola, who played Crunch, remembered pointing out that the gang didn’t feel authentic, and he was one to know because he was a member of a Hollywood gang called The Athenians. “The dialogue seemed kind of funny to me. And the cars were like Model T’s. In our gang we were putting custom hot rods together. The car was an extension of our culture. Coming out of the second world war, a car was what you could relate to. I had a car with a V8 engine with motorcycle tires in the front and big tires in the back,” Mazzola said.
It was over the course of these afternoons spent at the Chateau Marmont that they built the bonds that created a family of sorts.
“Nick was everybody’s father. I could talk to him. I didn’t. But I could have. He was everything,” Corey Allen said.
There’s a scene in the movie where you can see how disappointed Jim Stark (James Dean) is in his father. Jim has just come home after agreeing to participate in a chicken run with the neighborhood tough guy, Buzz. Jim is in the kitchen, drinking milk from a quart bottle when he hears a loud crash coming from another room. He follows the sound and is walking upstairs when he sees a figure on his hands and knees wearing a yellow ruffled apron. Jim says, “Hi, mom,” and his father, played by Jim Backus, answers back, “Hi, Jimbo.”
Backus is picking up the pieces of scrambled egg and bacon that have fallen off a dinner tray and littered the floor. Jim tells it to leave it there. You get the sense that all hell will break loose if the mother discovers a mess has been left on the carpet. Backus refuses to leave the spilt food where is even though Jim Stark his pleading with him not to clean it up. Finally, Jim Stark pulls his father up by the apron’s shoulder strap, he wants to know why his father won’t stand up to his mother but can’t get the words out of his mouth.
You get the feeling that Jim Stark wouldn’t have to participate in a drag race to prove himself to the neighborhood’s tough crowd if his father wasn’t emasculated.
I disagreed with what my professor said about Rebel Without a Cause. My father isn’t saying the family is a ball and chain. He wants family. He wants communication. He wants to discuss the struggles parents have talking to their children. In Nick’s personal life he was in turmoil over his treatment of his oldest son, Tony, who he basically discarded from birth, and then, when the boy was just a teenager, accused him of seducing his second wife.
Stewart Stern remembered during a script meeting how Nick, “fastened me with his eyes and said, ‘Tell me about Tony.’ What Nick wanted to get across was how much his relationship with Tony was making him suffer. He was concerned about what a terrible father he was. He said, ‘I have such rage against me. I have fucked up being this boy’s father. And that’s one of the reasons I wanted to make this movie.’”
Nick wants to sit down at the dining room table—in his case the dining room table was the film screen, and the movie theater, the chairs. But he could not do it in his personal life. Nick had extreme difficulty with intimacy. I think it’s why his best work is always deeply personal and intimate.
The lasting effect of Rebel Without a Cause has had on American audiences for almost sixty-five years is a result of the connections Nick built behind the scenes and how he got his cast and crew to expose truths that were not a part of the public discourse yet. On screen we watch as a group of teenagers snuggle to break away from their parents and form a family of their own.
If you think about it, it’s a really dark movie, which may have been one of the reasons Nick first shot it in black and white. Switching to color, which he uses in melodramatic effect, gives the darkness a subtlety the movie would otherwise lose. It brings us closer to the characters and enables us to identify with and experience how they are struggling to find connection. In the process, they suffer a great deal of loss. I’ve never thought about the movie in this way. I’ve always been stymied by the idol worship of James Dean. I couldn’t see past him, that red jacket and his celebrity. It kept me from seeing what a timeless masterpiece this movie is.
“Nick in the fifties was a man who said, “Hey, I care. And if you care you work your ass off. And if you don’t care I don’t want to work with you. If you do care, I’ll protect you.” This was the most wonderful thing about him.”
“James Dean ate Nicholas Ray”
Sources:All quotes from Dennis Hopper, Corey Allen, Stewart Stern, Charles Bitsch and Frank Mazzola from interviews conducted by myself and Stacey Asip © property of Nicca Ray Archive All Rights ReservedNick Ray quote from Nick Ray journal © property Nicca Ray Archive All Rights Reserved