The tiresome sub-plot of Miss Hammond – a single woman of child-bearing age who doesn’t seem eager to be a mom and therefore is A Monster – chucking herself at the completely asexual Glenn Ford does serve a plot purpose. Since Dadier has kept most of his cool even after a savage beating, it has to be something real bad to force the inevitable showdown with West. Writing notes and making calls about Daddy-O’s alleged infidelity to his pregnant wife, until she gets so freaked out she gives birth prematurely and almost loses it . . . that does the trick nicely. West finally forces Dadier to make their conflict physical, daring him to back down in front of the class. West is also happy to disobey Dadier’s corporal Miller and break their uneasy alliance with his own racist abuse. Even the most enthusiastic teen rebel would, by this time, want grey, earnest Daddy-O to discover his inner animal and put West down. Miller makes the right choice, and, with the liberal tough guys now aligned, the rest of the class fall, somewhat pathetically but entertainingly, into line. The last bad guy gets overpowered by . . . an American flag!!!
Does that mean West is some kind of symbol of communism? Erm . . . no. It means that Brooks was kind of worried that all this bullish anti-racism might be construed as anti-Americanism by what was left of the McCarthyite witch hunters, and thought he’d pre-empt with hilariously overstated patriotism.
We close on Miller and Dadier agreeing a ‘pact’ that feels more like a political reconciling of black and white, of youth and manhood, than anything to do with teacher and pupil. You almost feel they should turn to camera, warmly shake hands, and walk into the White House. Instead, Brooks just gives the kids ‘Rock Around The Clock’ again. And very nice it is, too.
But my very favourite thing about The Blackboard Jungle is . . . no matter how many times I watch it, I can’t exactly tell whose side it’s on. Brooks was seriously ingenious at the cake-and-eat-it attitude you needed to make funky films before the last vestiges of the paranoid Hays Code was finally swept away in the late ’60s.
The scene that best exemplifies this is the one that features a familiar character . . . the 1950s teen movie Therapy Cop. Therapy Cop has different cop names and is always played by a different actor. He sometimes takes the pure Freud route, and at others veers more towards cracker barrel sociology. But he’s the same Therapy Cop, setting the audience straight every time.
This time he’s an oldish feller in a detective hat and trench coat. He’s supposed to be at the school to find out who beat up Daddy-O and poor wimpy teacher Josh Edwards, but is somewhat distracted by a desire to sum up ten years of weighty newspaper theories about the juvenile delinquency problem. ‘They were five or six years old in the last war,’ he drones. ‘Father in the army, mother in a defence plant. No home life. No church life. No place to go. They formed street gangs . . .’
This is obviously designed for the grown-ups in the cinema (or the critics who’ll tell the parents what to think about the film), who want to know that little Janet and Johnny with their wild music and flipped-out hair aren’t going to see a gratuitous orgy of teen violence. You could make these films, and even occasionally get mainstream affirmation, as long as they had A Message that reaffirmed the status quo.
But, as Therapy Cop drones on, we see Daddy-O’s Class of 55 Flick-knives file past him, giving him a sidelong glance and sneering. Last of these, the only boy allowed to walk across the screen behind Therapy Cop, is Poitier’s Miller, looking, literally, too cool for school. Every boy looks fucking brilliant, and you can’t help suspecting that, while the parents nod contentedly at just how comforting it is that such wise older men will keep the heathens in line, Brooks is simultaneously saying to the teen viewers: I know. They really do talk bollocks, don’t they? Let them think you’re listening and I’ll give you the altogether sexier future to look at. Deal?
This goes as far as something very weird, which I only noticed on this viewing. Dadier and Miller are at the garage where Miller works after school as a mechanic. He is explaining, in case we hadn’t got it, that there is no point in a poor black boy taking school seriously, because he’s ‘coloured’, and therefore barred from social mobility. He explains that he worked hard at first, ‘but what’s the use? Nobody gives a . . .’
What you hear is the word ‘hoot’. But it is slightly louder than the rest of the talk track. It’s also doubled, almost comically, by the double hoot of a car-horn. But I swear you can hear the beginning of an ‘F—’ sound, and that Poitier is mouthing the word ‘fuck’.
This couldn’t have been in the original script, for obvious reasons. So . . . maybe Poitier got so into his part that he said the offending word, and Brooks decided to keep that take and drop in the hoots. But this is not an intense scene. Miller is being amiable and matter-of-fact as he lays down the facts of black life for his white mentor. It just doesn’t add up that he’d need to curse to make the scene work. Was Brooks trying to give his teen audience a swear word subliminally?
One of the great pleasures of The Blackboard Jungle is unavoidable. Its view of everything is so outdated that none of us hip modern things can resist the belly laughs. One of the ironies that became apparent while doing this book is that the terribly serious and ‘concerned’ likes of The Blackboard Jungle are generally more laugh-out-loud funny than the knowingly daft likes of The Blob (see here). Like the bit where Dadier plies his pregnant wife with champagne (and how thrilled she is that she’s getting ravioli, too!). The bit where Dadier is recounting the tale of a teacher’s sexual assault to the missus and just gets a response that the teacher ‘provoked it’ by being too sexy, before she rejects female solidarity completely and gives him the third degree about whether he’d like to take Miss Hammond roughly up the refectory as well. Or the scene where the Principal accuses Daddy-O of being a racist . . . and then asks him to direct the school Christmas show! Or the well-meaning but misguided inverse racism of the scene where the black boys prove what fine men they are by singing a negro spiritual round the old Joanna.
Watching The Blackboard Jungle is like taking a holiday in the pre-enlightenment world that the brilliant Mad Men TV show mocks, at a point where it was still utterly convinced of its moral and ethical rectitude. As such, its overload of messages, subtexts, contradictions and unintentional laughs makes it a far richer text than the majority of the wiser, politically correct teen movies of later years. It’s Tradio, Daddy-O, and all the better for it.
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE
1956
Starring: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, Jim Backus, Dennis Hopper
Dir.: Nicholas Ray
Plot: Beautiful, doomed boy transforms spoiled-brat teen angst into The Meaning Of Life, The Universe And Everything.
Key line: ‘I don’t know what to do any more. Except maybe die.’
If you were one of the millions of kids who went to see Rebel Without A Cause within the opening months of its release, you were paying your money to watch a dead man. Famously, just four weeks before James Dean’s second starring role hit the streets, he died while speeding in a car, giving a face to the ‘Too fast to live, too young to die’ myths of the rock ’n’ roll generation. He was just 24 years old. And because of this, it becomes impossible to judge how much of Dean’s impact was down to his talent and charisma, and how much was down to the poignancy death lent to his work here. What we perhaps can venture is that Dean’s shrugging, mumbling, slouching, swaggering, weeping and hysterical ‘method’ performance had the same impact on acting style as The Beatles and Dylan had upon rockers and doo-wop singers around seven years later. He made Hollywood’s actors look ancient and ludicrously stagey with little more than the way he pulled up the collars of the many jackets that form crucial parts of this oddest of movies.
The iconic imagery forged by the partnership between Dean and legendary director Nicholas Ray is all laid out in the opening scene. As the credits roll over him, Dean’s drunk Jim Stark falls to the floor in the middle of a deserted road and plays with a cymbal-clapping to
y monkey. He grins at in delight, picks at it like a toddler torturing an insect, examines it like a scientist. He covers the toy with its wrapping paper like a pet – or a child – watching it lie there inanimate, as an enraptured parent watches their baby sleep. Not a word of dialogue nor a sniff of plot, yet we already know that this is a mannish boy caught between two warring impulses: the desire to stay a child and the yearning to be a father.
The new trend for psychotherapy was big in American popular culture in the mid ’50s, and the psychobabble comes, thick, fast and early. The first action takes place in a police station which appears to be full of troubled teens. Judy (Wood) has been picked up for walking the streets at 1 a.m., the implication being that she’s a teen streetwalker, rather than a child walking the streets. She’s escaping from a father who thinks she’s ‘a dirty tramp’ because she wears lipstick and therefore likes to manhandle and humiliate her in front of the rest of her family. But the nice-but-tough cop at the nick is a self-appointed shrink, listening to Judy’s complaints about her Bad Dad with a gently furrowed brow, and suggesting . . . nah, insisting . . . that Judy walks the streets at night to attract Daddy’s attention.
If this guy reacts to his daughter’s affections by grabbing her roughly and violently rubbing the red from her lips I reckon he’s paying her rather too much attention already. But I’m not a part of the police–teacher–social-worker–authority-figure consensus, so what the fuck would I know? In Rebel, the only people who are capable of fixing the most complex of messes are confident, wise, strong but ultimately good-hearted public servants, who are qualified to judge the uselessness of parents – that is, everybody who isn’t a public servant – and entirely within their rights to intervene whenever they deem it appropriate. They are The System, and, in Rebel’s world, The System is a fine thing. So fine that, if these confused kids and rubbish parents had just stopped reacting emotionally and done what they were told from the off, the entire film would never have happened.
But within eight melodramatic, sourly funny and beautifully shot and acted minutes, we know all we need to know about exactly what’s wrong with this picture. This bit of Los Angeles is full of gorgeous children who have been royally screwed up by . . . Bad Dad.
Judy’s dad is too domineering, but also, apparently, too distant. When the cop tells Judy that Mom is picking her up, the girl lets out a shriek of pure pain. Turns out the cop was right about that attention stuff. Whooda thunk it?
Meanwhile, Jim has the opposite problem. When his parents come to pick him up, all togged out for some function or other, we know poor old Pa Stark is a disaster. Memorably played by Jim Backus, in a thankless role where he has to be the quivering fall guy foil for a boy so gorgeous and talented he was changing the entire face of acting in every scene the pair shared, Jim’s Dad’s badness derives from being too weak to stand up to either Jim or stereotypical Mom. Jim mocks Dad for his clothes, Dad goes along with it, laughing, and gets a proto-Joe Pesci, ‘You think I’m funny?’ for his pains. The right thing, the thing that Jim craves, is for Dad to walk in, smack Jim around a bit, and then, presumably, smack Mom around just to be on the safe side. Men are so disappointing.
If you’re thinking that Rebel inhabits a world where fathers can’t win, well, award yourself a clapping-cymbal toy monkey, ’cos you’ve got it. At one point, Jim actually advocates the benefits of Dad punching Mom unconscious, an idea treated with gently amused agreement by Therapy Cop, who promptly starts a local self-help group where troubled couples can attend together and Dad can be encouraged to give Her Indoors the full pummelling she deserves in a safe, nurturing environment.
Nah, just kidding about that last part. But the Stark home is an especially enduring middle-class nightmare, where Dad talks entirely in Jolly Nice Chap homilies, Mom bullies him, and Gran bullies Mom in order to show Jim that she was a much better mother than her own daughter. It’s a mother-in-law joke without a punchline, and you can start to see why they have to keep moving town because Jim rips apart other boys with his bare hands every time someone calls him ‘chicken’.
So let’s get this straight: Rebel Without A Cause is a massively dated melodrama where cops are better than parents, and where middle-class kids with all the advantages of money, status and education whinge constantly about how appalling their lives are because Daddy is too butch/not butch enough/both, using this an excuse to beat each other up. It advocates domestic violence and insists the world is being destroyed by the rise of strong women. It has a ludicrous orchestral soundtrack that screams every passing emotion at us like Celine Dion after being shown 24 hours of films about dead kittens. And it’s entirely dominated by an over-acting stud-muffin whose obvious agenda is forcing every viewer to look at him and only him, all of the time. The only rational reaction to its overblown pretensions is so-bad-it’s-good laughter, especially in the first cop shop scene when gay symbol Plato (Mineo) is cringing heroically under various chidings from a stereotype black mammy (who is still wearing her apron!), and another cop therapist asks him: ‘So . . . do you have any idea why you shot those puppies?’
So . . . do we have any idea why Rebel Without A Cause is still one of the best teen movies ever?
Well, for a start . . . it does make some good points. Our parents do fuck us up . . . I think someone pointed out once that they do not mean to, but they do. Strong male role models are key and, although I think most of us have moved on from the idea that male strength is best represented by slapping the old ball and chain around, there are still too many absent fathers in the world, and many of them are absent even when their big fat arses are glued to the living-room sofa.
And, of course, teenage emotions are more melodramatic, pretentious and self-absorbed than either pre-adolescent or adult emotions, so Rebel’s hysteria and Dean’s attention-grabbing is thematically immaculate. And, in essence, the cod therapy that Rebel’s authority figures bandy about with sanctimonious certainty is exactly the kind of half-formed shite that has forged a billion-dollar industry of quacks, gurus, self-help books and TV soap-Oprah, and that me and you spout to each other every single day when faced with anything too complicated to fix with money, a shag or an Elastoplast. So when we laugh at Rebel we laugh at what we’ve become and wonder if this wonderful movie was symptom or . . . ahem . . . cause.
And then there’s the dialogue. Rebel’s kids – and Natalie Wood’s Judy actually uses the term ‘The Kids’ – use this uniquely entertaining vernacular which is part beatnik post-jazz wiggerism, part sixth-form poetry, and part post-Sartre existentialist nitwittery. It is bloody marvellous. Par exemple, these edited highlights from the first exchange between Judy and Jim, as he tries to give her a lift to school in his flash motor.
Jim: Hi. I’ve seen you before.
Judy: Well. Stop the world.
Jim: You don’t have to be unfriendly.
Judy: True. But life is crushing in on me.
Jim: Life can be beautiful . . . You live here, don’t you?
Judy: Who lives?
Jim: I got my car. You wanna go with me?
Judy: I go with The Kids.
Jim: Yeah. I’ll bet.
Judy: You know . . . I’ll bet you’re a real yo-yo.
Jim: I love you, too.
One Of The Kids (nodding at a departing Jim): What’s that?
Judy: Oh – that’s a new disease.
That’s a new disease?! Man, I don’t know about you. But looking at that written down almost makes me want to cry. When you’ve got James Dean and Natalie Wood actually bringing this stuff to sneery, sexy life, it damn near makes you melt into a muddy puddle.
And then there is the stunning run of iconic set-pieces. Toy Monkey and Cop Shop Therapy (‘YOU’RE TEARING ME APART!!!’) we’ve already mentioned. But the planetarium scene is visionary, with Jim’s humiliating attempts to ingratiate himself with his new classmates, and he and Plato’s gently homoerotic bonding given a magical realist feel by a man’s voice poetically describing t
he stars, and the darkness, and the twinkling of the heavens, and the final, explosive flashes and roars of the Big Bang, presenting the suddenly freaked-out tough kids with an imminent future where ‘we will disappear into the blackness of the space from which we came, destroyed, as we began, in a burst of gas and fire!’, and where ‘the problems of man seem trivial and naive indeed’. A tale of juvenile delinquents and petty complaints becomes transcendent, cosmic and bathed with a kind of luminous apocalyptic glow that never quite leaves the film.
This leads quickly – after a knife-fight between Jim and chief hood Buzz (Corey Allen) where a watching Observatory security guard would rather give us a meta-movie quip (‘Look . . . there’s your audience’) than intervene – to Rebel’s most famous scene, the Chickie Run.
Neatly parodied in the likes of Beat Girl (see here) and Footloose (see here), the Chickie Run involves Jim and Buzz driving at high speed towards the edge of a cliff in stolen cars. First one to jump out is ‘chicken’. We already know that ‘chicken’ has the same effect on Jim as the words ‘cleaning woman’ have on Steve Martin in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid, so we suspect this won’t go well. It does give Wood’s Judy (currently Buzz’s girl, inconveniently) the opportunity to be a kind of Master Of Ceremonies, bathing in the sexual thrill of men in danger, giving future orgasmic frenzy acting tips for Nancy Allen to pick up on 20 years later in Carrie (see here). And shows off Ray’s skill with action scenes, of course, in a display of fast edits and kill thrills that made Rebel teen film’s first true work of art.
When Buzz inevitably gets his leather jacket snagged on the car door and cops it – bomber jackets do a lot of work here as symbols of doomed rebellion – his abandoned thugs get real mad at Jim’s attempts to join The Machine by reporting it all to those nice Therapy Cops. So Jim, Judy and Plato end up on the run.
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