Les maîtres fous

Les maîtres fous is one of the French director Jean Rouch's ethnographic accounts of Nigeria under European colonial rule. The film is a bizarre and unsettling chronicle of the Hauka movement, a quasi-religious Nigerian sect in which the members enacted rituals where they are "possessed" by various archetypes of European colonialists. Rouch devotes most of his film to a document of one of these rituals, complete with a voiceover that purports to identify the various forms that the Africans are taking on: the General, the Governor, the Doctor's Wife, and other positions of military and political power within the European ruling authorities. While Rouch's narration maintains its deadpan, unruffled calm, the contortions of the ritual become increasingly ecstatic and unhinged, as the celebrants foam at the mouth, spasm and dance spastically, sacrifice a chicken and a dog, and lick up the blood from these sacrifices until their faces are smeared.

What makes the film so odd and challenging is the juxtaposition between its relaxed narration — which affects the soothing tones and distanced objective pose of many ethnographic documentaries — and the lurid, outrageous imagery of the ritual itself. Rouch's perspective is odd, too. His narration makes the claim that the ritual is intended to be a parody of the colonial occupation, that the Nigerians are channeling their disdain for their white masters into exaggerated, stylized appropriations of the Europeans' rites and and dress and manners. He might be right. But it's hard to know just how seriously to take Rouch's claims, as again and again his narration seems less like the result of informed research and more like a series of fanciful descriptions of observed behavior. His voiceover has a searching quality that makes it seem as though Rouch is trying to form a narrative based around the images he's gathered, and this impression complicates the film considerably.

Rouch is reading a great deal into the psychology of the film's subjects, and it's questionable how valid his conclusions are. Is this ritual a defense against mental illness, as Rouch claims at the end of the film? Is it a way for the colonized Nigerians to cope with the stress of their daily confrontations with industrialized Western society, or to deal with their status as indentured laborers for the whites? It's hard to tell, but Rouch's narration, with its loose interpretations of various gestures, doesn't exactly inspire confidence. At one point he puts words into the mouth of a man swinging a chicken back and forth, suggesting that the gesture is of great religious significance when, by all appearances, it's simply idle motion. Such questions about the film's faithfulness to the intent of these rituals are constantly raised, though Rouch's authoritative narration seems calculated not to encourage dissent.


There's also more than a hint of exploitation in Rouch's portrayal of Africans engaged in bloody, wild rites that not only appear as irrevocably exotic to Western eyes, but are explicitly compared to mental illness in the film's text. Rouch is portraying his African subjects as wild men, literally foaming at the mouths, the lower halves of their faces covered in white spray as they vibrate, roll around on the floor, walk with a jerking, frantic stride that truly does make it seem as though their bodies are being propelled around by some external animating spirit that jerks them around like puppets on strings. The images are, undeniably, darkly fascinating, and often horrifying as well, particularly when the celebrants ritually sacrifice a dog and then cook up a stew with its entrails, taking hungry bites out of its head and fighting to get the "best" scraps of the slaughtered animal. One man, picked out for a closeup twice in the film's half-hour, rocks back and forth, his face smeared red with blood from the feast.

Rouch continually locates such provocative images, tracing the progress of the ritual from its tentative beginnings to the point when numerous participants have been "possessed" and taken on these alternate personalities. Rouch's narration wryly notes the appropriation of English and French modes of dress and rituals, but this too is a problem. When Rouch says that the Nigerians are holding a "roundtable conference" on the subject of whether to cook the dog or eat it raw, his voice maintains its steady, even keel, but there's an obvious note of sarcasm and irony in the counterpoint between the colonialists' ceremonies and military discipline and the crudity of the Nigerians imitating their oppressors. Rouch even inserts footage of British and French soldiers on parade, and European aristocrats in their fancy cars, to further solidify the comparison.

Intended for European audiences, the film condescends to its subjects, presenting these rituals with an unmistakable tone of "hey look at these weird Africans," even while the subtext of Rouch's narration points at the exploitation of the African people by their colonial overseers. This adds up to a very conflicted film, simultaneously poking fun at colonialist pretensions and perpetrating the stereotype of the violent, superstitious African primitive. It's obvious that Rouch, who lived and worked in Nigeria for a long time and had a definite anti-colonialist bent, meant well, but Les maîtres fous, despite its compelling, raw imagery and the interesting ideas it explores, can't get over its tonal inconsistencies.

Cult of the Cobra

[This is a contribution to the Spirit Of Ed Wood Blog-a-Thon currently running at Cinema Styles from July 6 to July 12. Greg at Cinema Styles has opened up this week-long event to posts about legendary B-movie maker Ed Wood, as well as any likeminded examples of low-budget sci-fi and horror filmmaking. I'll be following his lead this week with a series of posts about 50s sci-fi.]

Cult of the Cobra is a great movie on paper, if only on paper. It's a lurid, potentially chilling story, a truly inventive premise for a B horror flick. While waiting out the last few days of their tour of duty, a group of American GIs stationed "somewhere in Asia" get a chance to witness a strange ritual never seen by Western eyes: the ceremony of a snake-worshipping cult whose members believe that humans can transform into snakes. They're discovered at the temple, however, and barely make their escape, as the cult's priest screams a curse after them, promising them that they will die. The soldiers head back to America, but they're then stalked by the snake goddess herself, a slinky, seductive woman who slithers into their lives and kills them one by one. It sounds great, right? Sounds campy and fun? You want to see it already, don't you? Don't bother; like so many of the low-budget, indifferently made sci-fi and horror flicks pouring out of Hollywood's underbelly throughout its Golden Age, Cult of the Cobra is far more interesting in theory than in execution. Its plot would suggest a sexy, creepy thriller, but in actuality it's simply plodding and predictable, methodically draining all the fun out of its campy central idea.

Well, not quite all the fun, maybe. There's still fun to be had here, though much of it rests with Faith Domergue, who plays the cobra woman Lisa. Domergue, a Howard Hughes discovery who smoldered her way through some great low-budget genre fare in the 50s, is the perfect choice for the sinister, chilly Lisa. Her big black eyes, with their heavy lids, always seem guarded, distant, and her distinctive mouth is a twisted scrawl best suited to a sneer or a frown. She gets the big moments here, the dramatic, ambiguous closeups, her face bathed in light, accentuating the pools of shadows that formed at her cheekbones. She's creepy and mysterious, even if there's no real mystery about her; it's obvious from the moment she appears who she is and why she's around.

Upon Lisa's first appearance, she immediately attracts the attention of Tom (Marshall Thompson), one of the servicemen. He's nursing a broken heart, since the girl he loved, Julia (Kathleen Hughes) had decided to marry Tom's service buddy Paul (Richard Long). Tom tries to be happy for the couple, but can't get over the loss until he stumbles into Lisa's arms. As Tom falls in love with Lisa, she's stalking around the city at night, visiting his friends and killing them one by one, just like the priest's curse had promised. All of this makes Paul, somewhat improbably, suspicious of Lisa — not that he has any reason to be, just that she seems "strange" to him. Ultimately, the film is about the tension between its pair of female archetypes: the chirpy, sweet blonde and the dark, troubled, seductive brunette. Julia and Lisa make an interesting pair of opposites, particularly in the memorable scene where they finally meet, Julia's wide-eyed innocence and earnestness contrasting against Lisa's barely contained turmoil.


The film develops Lisa as a figure of danger and destruction. Like the noir femme fatale — a role Domergue excelled at as well — Lisa is a corrupting force, using her sexual energy as a weapon, a shield, a tool to turn against the men who want her. The other men sense that she's dangerous, but Tom just knows he loves her. Paul says that he thinks she's "bad for him," but one wonders why — he certainly doesn't know she's a killer cobra in disguise, doesn't know anything about her other than what he sees on the surface. It's just obvious, because she's dark and "different" from other girls. She doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, doesn't giggle and throw herself at men the way a perpetually smiling party girl does at one of the friends' parties. Julia, in contrast, is sweet and warm and unguarded, as Hughes does her best Marilyn Monroe impersonation (not that her best is very good: she mostly just purses her lips a lot and arches her eyebrows so high they look like they're about to fly off the top of her head). She's the girl you're supposed to want to marry; Lisa is the dangerous yet appealing girl you're too afraid to ask. These clichés are at the center of the film's depiction of these two women, and the tension between them is fascinating even though they only come face to face once.

There's certainly not much else that's fascinating about this film. Lisa's transformations between snake and woman all happen offscreen, for the obvious reason that it would doubtless look silly if they'd tried to show it onscreen. (And when they finally do, during the finale, it's so laughable it winds up being one of the film's most enjoyable moments.) Even her attacks are mostly unseen; at most, a shadow of a cobra's profile appears as the snake creeps closer to its victim. Director Francis D. Lyon doesn't have much of a sense of pacing. The scenes leading up to each attack are interminable and slack, with tension building only to be tossed away. At one point, one of the men is about to be attacked at the bowling alley where he works. Lyon shows Lisa in the area, shows the open window leading inside, shows the mysterious stirring in the back that knocks over a bowling pin. But then nothing happens, the man walks outside, is interrupted and has a conversation, walks back inside, comes out again, gets in his car — and is then finally attacked as expected. The timing is all off, the tension fizzles out as Lyon spends too long simply watching this guy going about his business, doing mundane tasks. So much of the film is like this, just slightly off in its timing and pacing, expending long stretches of time on prosaic moments while rushing through the encounters with the actual supernatural horror elements.

The film's main problem (besides the unfortunate shift in Lisa's character to make her declare her scaly love for Tom) is that it's just one big tease. There's nothing there: the "mystery" is so obvious it barely deserves to be called one, and the killings are sloppily executed and obviously hamstrung by the lack of an effects budget. The absence of any real shots of the snake shouldn't be a problem if the director had been capable of creating suspense and terror in other ways — one imagines what 40s horror producer Val Lewton would have done with the pungent psychosexual subtexts of this material, or with the potential for creating horror in the shadows, in what isn't seen rather than what is. Instead, this is a missed opportunity, an inventive premise squandered in a lame, dull film.

Land of the Pharaohs

During his four decades in Hollywood, Howard Hawks worked on virtually every type of picture possible within the studio system of the time. Though he is today known primarily as a director of manically fast screwball comedies or rambling, low-key Westerns, he also made musicals, proto-noirs, sci-fi and war movies, along with now-forgotten genres like racing pictures and aviation adventures. And he also made one grand historical epic, Land of the Pharaohs, a big-budget blockbuster on a truly staggering scale. On its surface, it's an odd type of film for Hawks to make, considering his usual comfort with small-scale wit and romance, his touch for handling simple stories of people interacting, forming relationships and friendships. His best and best-known films are the definition of what the critic Manny Farber appreciatively called "termite art," films where the director's aesthetic and thematic concerns gnaw away subtly beneath the surface. Land of the Pharaohs would seem to be the very opposite, a towering "white elephant" carrying its pretenses aloft and carving its themes out of tremendous stone blocks.

Indeed, the film is grand in every sense. Its epic story takes place on a level almost entirely above human concerns, taking to a bird's eye perspective from which individuals are just dots in a sea of similar dots. The film's events are set in motion by the powerful Egyptian Pharaoh Khufu (Jack Hawkins), a man who arguably sees other human beings from exactly this aloof vantage point. According to his people's customs, he is the embodiment of a god on Earth, and by divine right he is able to command his people to do nearly anything. He is beyond worldly concerns, beyond any thought of his fellow beings. What consumes him is the thought of his afterlife, the eternal rest after his death, in which he will be buried with the massive treasure he has accumulated through the bloody wars he fought while on Earth. He dedicates the final two decades of his life to the construction of an enormous and elaborate pyramid, a crypt designed with clever traps and rigged so that, upon his death, once the lid is lowered on his coffin, the pyramid will be sealed with solid stone, the great pharaoh and his treasure unreachable for grave robbers or other desecraters who would come along after he was gone. Towards this end, the Pharaoh enlists one of his prisoners, the architect Vashtar (James Robinson Justice) and his son Senta (Hawks regular Dewey Martin), to devise the pyramid's ingenious self-sealing mechanisms. In doing so, Vashtar knows that he dooms himself, but he agrees if the Pharaoh will release his people as prisoners.

The human dramas in the film are generally sketched out on a broad scale like this; motivations tend to be simplistic and characters are defined by one trait. For the Pharaoh, it's a love of power and a greed for gold, both attributes that find their match in his rebellious mistress Nellifer (Joan Collins), a proud princess who marries the Pharaoh but secretly lusts after his treasure, scheming and plotting to undo him. This is a lurid melodrama with a schematic plot, with both Hawkins and Collins turning in stark, iconic performances, their characters reduced to walking symbols. For his part, Hawks hardly seems interested in these petty human affairs. He's working on a very abstract level here, populating the film with literally thousands of extras — reportedly close to 10,000 for one scene — and dramatizing the mechanical and physical processes involved in constructing the pyramid rather than the human dramas behind the scenes. Next to the spectacle of massive slabs of stone being hauled across the desert via complicated pulley-and-crane systems, the Pharaoh's love affairs and the machinations of his mistress seem trite and inconsequential. The actual human events play out in disconnected vignettes, with large gaps of time yawning in between. In one scene, Senta is a boy; in the next, it's fifteen years later and he's grown into a man. Similarly, at one point early on the Pharaoh tells his first wife (Kerima) that he wants an heir, which might've provided another film with its driving force and drama, but this script simply presents the boy not long after, already around ten years old.


If the film's human dramas are largely inert and so elliptical as to nearly disappear, this hardly means that the film is without drama altogether. It's merely that the characters here are consistently dwarfed by the physical spectacle of the processes they set into motion. There are long sequences in which Hawks fully exploits both the long Cinemascope frame — the first time he'd shoot outside of his favored Academy ratio — and the tremendous quantity of extras he had at his disposal. The frame is frequently packed with people, thousands of them struggling through the desert sand like ants scurrying around in the dirt, hauling massive stones with ropes and complex riggings. Long trains of people and animals sprawl across the desert in dense crowds and rigidly uniform lines. Hawks always maintained an interest in documenting how real people work, and here was the ultimate subject for him, the ultimate group effort: thousands of people subjugating their identities to the will of the pharaoh in order to accomplish a demanding, impossibly complicated task of building and design. His images, remote and sweeping, strain to take in the entirety of this bustle of activity within a single frame. There's an epic grandeur to these images, a sense of large-scale work and action that Hawks had only ever approached before in the exhilarating cattle drive sequences from Red River. This film's pyramid-building scenes lack that same excitement, since Hawks proves equally adept at capturing the drudgery of this work, the slow process by which the Egyptian workers, initially happy to be working for their Pharaoh in this way, begin to wear down, to become bitter and sluggish, driven on only by the pounding of the work drums and the crack of the whip.

These sequences reach their fruition in the film's great final set piece, following the Pharaoh's death, when the mechanisms that will seal the pyramid's tomb are at last set in motion. This is a harrowing sequence, staged from a perspective at the heart of the tomb: all around the interior of the pyramid, various stone slabs slam into place with a crushing finality, accompanied by a reverberating and terrible clamor. It's a claustrophobic nightmare of being locked up behind impenetrable stone walls, buried alive, a horror worthy of Poe. Hawks accentuates the geometry of the pyramid's labyrinthine interior, the elegant interlocking structures that come together once Vashtar's brilliant design is triggered. Stone slabs crawl across the frame, slowly blotting out the lines of sight through the pyramid's interior, closing off all exits, each door closing accompanied by that final sinister thump, the sound of another escape being closed off. This sequence traps the audience along with those at the pyramid's center, the retainers and workers who are sealed up with their dead master.

The grim automated processes of this final scene are indicative of the macroscopic interest Hawks takes in this story. His grandly effective mise en scéne comes alive whenever he's charting the hefting of a stone block into its position within the pyramid's architecture, or visualizing the vast hordes of slaves working on this massive construction project. The more human scale of the story fails to advance beyond clichéd melodrama. Moreover, the Hollywood convention of casting white actors as Egyptians yields the distracting and uncomfortable spectacle of Joan Collins made up in brownface makeup that darkens her skin to a strange glossy orangish hue.

Equally distracting is the overbearing music, and especially the periodic outbursts of singing, clapping and chanting. The Baptist fervor of the music turns quite a few of the early scenes into weird approximations of Christian masses rather than Egyptian rituals; one almost expects the chanting Egyptians to shout out "Hallelujah!" Indeed, these early scenes sometimes seem like subtle commentaries on religion in general, slyly suggesting that all religions, with their convoluted, fanciful conceptions of the afterlife, are equally deluded. Hawks has the most sympathy for the pragmatic architect Vashtar, who, though obviously modeled on the Jewish people, has a skeptical detachment from all this fascination with the afterlife and would much rather live for the present than the future. It would seem that, within the overbearing façades of this "white elephant" of a film, Hawks the termite was nicking away at the stone edifices of his creation, subtly tweaking the solemn religiosity of his protagonists and their vain desires for immortality.

Films I Love #22: Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955)

Kiss Me Deadly throws Mickey Spillane's pulp novel detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) into the midst of a plot that, finally, can't be solved with the private dick's brute force interrogation methods and clever sleuthing. It is a deliberate gesture on the part of director Robert Aldrich, who positions Hammer as an anachronism in his own time, a throwback whose relevance is vanishing in the nuclear age. Nobody says it better than Hammer's sexy secretary Velda (Maxine Cooper), who bitterly mocks the detective's quest for "the great whatsit." Hammer, driven by greed and naked self-interest, cares only about himself. The mysterious hitchhiker (Cloris Leachman) he picks up in the film's famous, visceral opening minutes grasps this about him right away, immediately getting that this is a guy who cares only about himself. So when the girl winds up dead and Hammer barely escapes himself, his subsequent quest to figure out what's going on is not driven by revenge or any deep sentimental feelings for the girl he couldn't protect: he simply guesses that for anyone to go to all this effort to rub her out, the girl must've been involved in something real big, something potentially valuable.

As a result, the film is structured like a conventional detective story, though it's really anything but. Hammer traces his leads, following up with contacts, roughing people up when necessary, as his shadowy adversaries pile up the dead bodies around him. The film has the texture of a pulpy noir mystery, complete with the hard-boiled dialogue — often over-boiled in this case — characteristic of the genre. But Hammer is brutish and stubborn, keeping the cops and the feds in the dark even though they keep trying to impress upon him the importance of this case; he doesn't seem to realize just how far in over his head he is. He's equally blasé in his treatment of women, who are compulsively drawn to him even though he treats them with a brusque, careless manner; he kisses them and then casts them aside when he's done using them. Hammer's no hero, and the film's staggering climax represents his complete failure: his realization of the horrible forces he's been toying with, followed by a nuclear meltdown from which he barely escapes. And then the film simply ends, with abrupt finality, leaving Hammer as a broken, irrelevant archetype, an out-of-date relic whose time has passed with the relative innocence of the pre-atomic age.

La Pointe-Courte

Agnès Varda's film career began with the quiet, neorealist poeticism of La Pointe-Courte, a loose, contemplative film that's equally about a couple whose marriage is in trouble, and the tiny rural fishing village where they go to vacation and work out their problems. Varda's central romantic couple is never the sole focus of the narrative. Rather, they seem to be wandering in and out of the action, meandering through the slow-moving fabric of life in the titular town. There are many other dramas to be found here: the travails of the local fishermen who must constantly butt heads with the health board over the quality of the town's shellfish output; the single woman whose promiscuity has saddled her with an unmanageable herd of kids; the developing romance between one of the local young men and the daughter of an ornery, disapproving fisherman. Other than the two leads, the rest of the cast is composed entirely of the real town's residents, giving the film its strong verité quality.

Varda's pace is leisurely, peeking in on these ordinary little stories, her camera drifting weightlessly through each scene. The graceful camerawork in this film is extraordinary, seeming to float and bob with the wind. There has seldom been a film that so evocatively captures the feeling of the air in its setting, the gentle sting of the constant winds whipping through this seaside village: maybe Malick's Days of Heaven, or the island breezes of I Walked With a Zombie. In the streets, dangling on thin lines, sheets billow in the wind, and Varda's camera is blown along with the breeze, caught up in its currents, quietly whistling through the town's nearly empty streets, shuffling into corners or gently drifting sideways to pan across a scene.

The camerawork is as relaxed and supple as the rhythms of life here, which is not to say that it is accidental. Rather, Varda maintains a tight control over her seemingly languid images, often offsetting the balloon-like floating of the camera with striking formalist compositions recalling the early films of Bergman and Antonioni, though Varda has always insisted that she was no cinephile and had seen hardly any films when she made this debut. If so, her instinctive eye for composition and motion is even more impressive, especially since there is nothing self-consciously showy about what she's doing. The camera always seems to be doing exactly what it should be to get the most out of a particular moment. At one point, the two lovers (Philippe Noiret and Silvia Monfort as the unnamed husband and wife) are framed in tight closeups with one's profile cutting across half of the other's face — an image that would later most famously appear in Bergman's Persona. Also remarkable is the scene in which a mother grieves for her dead little boy, and Varda's camera, framing the woman in a doorway, begins pulling back, creating another frame within a frame as it passes through yet another door. Outside, the women of the town begin gathering around this exterior door, finally blocking the mother's grief discreetly from voyeuristic view.


Though Varda has a light, subtle formalist's touch, the film is even more evocative in its less mannered moments, when the wandering camera mirrors the wandering of the young couple as they stroll through the town. The town is populated by cats, a visual echo of the teeming, active kittens of Vigo's L'Atalante, and Varda even gets some fun, improvisatory "performances" out of these tiny extras. At one point, while the couple sits on a bench, moodily exchanging hesitant abstractions about love — their favored activity throughout the film — a black kitten stirs from sleep on the crates stacked above their heads, stretches and yawns, walks around, and finally hisses at the girl before strolling off. It's just one small indication of Varda's ability to keep her images interesting by being open to the play of peripheral elements. At another point, as the lovers are walking together, Varda's camera begins roaming away from them, letting them disappear at the edges of the frame, focusing instead on the chopped lumber by the side of the road. In another scene, only the couple's feet are seen at the top of the frame, while Varda explores the textures of the sandy beach they're walking across.

It's apparent that Varda is not so much interested in telling a story as exploring a setting, probing the emotions awakened by a particular place. The young couple's romantic problems aren't actually that interesting, and they talk in such cold, analytical terms about their love that it's hard to really feel much for their arguments and reconciliation. They're opposed, in broad terms, as a dichotomy between the country boy (calm, tranquil, emotionally restrained) and the city girl (stormy, inconstant, fast-paced), but neither of them ever quite gets into the rhythms of this town over the course of their vacation. The boy identifies very strongly with this place, where he was born and still knows some people, but even he is oblivious to the small stories that Varda probes into, the everyday dramas of the fishermen and their families. He has left the town, and is now nearly as much of a visitor as his truly outsider wife. If a film this ambiguous and ephemeral can be said to have a point, it's to emphasize the extent to which one's life is tied to setting, the ways that a sense of place informs the character of life itself. Varda's film, more than anything, aims to capture that sense of place, to evoke the languid rhythms of this seaside life.

10/12: Rebel Without a Cause

Rebel Without a Cause is today the movie for which James Dean is most fondly remembered. Even those who wouldn't even be able to tell you the least detail about the film's plot have probably heard the name and would recognize Dean's iconic appearance in the film, with his white t-shirt and bright red jacket. It's the kind of film that has in many ways been removed from the cinematic realm altogether, catapulted into the environs of pop culture, its actual qualities as a film largely disregarded in the fuss over Dean's legend. This is in some ways understandable; after all, Dean's legacy in the movies rests on just 3 roles, and neither of the others has quite the swagger and energy of this one. But it's shame in that there are probably few people nowadays who can come to this film without the weight of that legacy hanging over it, to appreciate the film on its own terms.

For me, the film is interesting not so much for Dean, but for director Nicholas Ray, whose In a Lonely Place I'd place among the best few films of the 50s. Rebel, made 5 years later, is not quite on the same plane as the earlier masterpiece, but it's still a fine film. The film introduces Dean, as the high school delinquent Jim Stark, drunk and stumbling into a fall so that he lies across the frame, his head towards the camera. As the credits roll, Dean plays with a toy monkey lying on the ground and passes out, a fitting introduction for this deeply troubled character. What's interesting about Dean's legacy is that he's often thought of as an archetypical tough guy, but his character here is sensitive, frustrated, lonely, and vulnerable. His constantly bickering family is the root of his troubles, and he comes across as desperate rather than tough. In this film, the insouciant posing and flippant attitude for which he is remembered come across as an act, a cover-up for his inner turbulence and lack of self-confidence.

For the first half of the film, this psychological aspect of Dean's tough-guy character is presented with a somewhat heavy hand, especially in the scene at the police station which opens the film. The script sometimes seems to have little faith in audiences to figure out those kinds of insights for themselves, and Dean's problems are initially spelled out in very obvious ways. His father (Jim Backus) is emasculated and unable to stand up to his wife (Ann Doran), who browbeats both him and Dean and refuses to tolerate even the least sign of family strife. She has carted the family around the country over the years, making them uproot and move every time a problem confronts them; she wants to be continually starting fresh, erasing the past and hoping that things will be better this time. In this repressed, unstable family environment, with no support or true communication, Dean naturally acts out and drifts into bad situations. But the main reason for his lack of confidence is the absence of a real father figure in his life. His father is early on established as a wishy-washy coward unable to stand up for anything or even to express his own opinions, especially to his wife. His father's cowardly streak is presumably the reason why Dean responds so vociferously when anyone calls him a chicken. If the point wasn't clear enough already, Backus shows up at a crucial point wearing a flowered apron as he cleans around the house, and when asked for advice by his son, all he can tell him is to write down a list of pros and cons before making a decision.

Naturally, Dean is infuriated by his father's inability to say anything of meaning, and he flees into a car race to prove his honor and bravery to the kids who taunted him at school. At this point, the car race forms a pivot point in the film, in which the audience hand-holding of the film's first half is largely discarded, and the film becomes much more interesting. If the first half of the film showed Dean and his female counterpart Natalie Wood as kids without a real family, the second half shows them forming their own family. Fucked-up, dysfunctional, ultimately doomed to be broken up, but still a much more smoothly functioning family than their real ones. The trio is completed by Sal Mineo, the younger kid who idolizes Dean from the start and seems to latch onto him as more of a father than a friend, a replacement for his own absent dad, who sends child support checks but nothing else. The trio — mother, father, son — runs away to an abandoned mansion, where they hole up hiding from the gangs of kids who want revenge on them. There's violence lingering in the air, especially in the form of the pistol that Mineo has stolen and stashed in his pocket, but it's on hold while the trio forms their own new family.

In an exceptional series of scenes that subtly develop the group's collective relationship, Ray shows the trio touring the huge house, lit by flickering candles, with Dean and Wood pretending to be newlyweds wanting to buy it. It's funny, light, and yet infused with undercurrents of real emotional depth. The characters are playacting, fulfilling fantasies, mocking the clichés of adult lives while simultaneously creating their own new idea of adulthood. The sequence culminates in a scene that arranges the "family" into a suggestive tableau of closeness, with Dean resting his head on Wood's lap and Mineo sitting at their feet, resting back against Dean's prone body. There is an undercurrent of homosexual desire here, running perpendicular to the dominant familial dynamic, an unexplored (and, in 1955, unexplorable) hint that Mineo is sexually attracted to this tough father figure. But this is clearly a sideline here, a repressed secret just as it would have been in the 50s nuclear family. So after Wood and Dean tuck Mineo in while he sleeps, they sneak off for a private moment.

Ray shows the couple in medium shot, with their faces seeming to blend together into one. Dean is seen from the side, with Wood's face half-obscured by the contours of his profile; surprisingly enough, it looks forward to such radical examples of facial blending as Persona, though the love scene context here is manifestly Hollywood material. It's through shots like this that Ray infuses even the film's obligatory material, like this love scene, with greater complexity and visual interest than is usually seen in a Hollywood melodrama. During an argument between Dean and his parents, the camera sways and tilts in response to the power shifts, as the characters jockey for position against each other on a cramped staircase. The scene comes to a head with Dean's mother poised on the stairs a few steps above him, with his father at the foot of the stairs, sitting crumbled and helpless to intervene. The camera, in response, is tilted to one side, exaggerating the hierarchy so that it becomes a drastically sloping downward line, like an arrow pointing at the ineffective father.

Ray's film isn't perfect as a whole. Its script is often heavy handed, and its themes would probably be better served by a much more subtle rendering at times. Its ending, too, though potent in many ways, wraps up some of the familial tensions at the story's core a bit too easily, and one senses that in some ways this is just bowing to the convention of the happy ending. But script flaws aside, Rebel Without a Cause is a powerful and probing examination of teenage loneliness and frustration with the inadequacy of the family structure. That a film made over 50 years ago, and in some ways dated in its specifics, can still have so much to say about growing up and family relationships, is testament enough to its quality.