What do you all think of this film?
You're gonna want to go here (http://xixax.com/index.php?topic=2.630) (Quick, before Pubrick finds out!).
I didn't know that there was a thread like that. Thanks buddy.
Nicholas Ray is a poet, of that there is no doubt, but it's not only the lyrical character of this film I want to emphasize but its tragic character. First through its form, which may appear superficial but it not unimportant. Rebel Without a Cause is a genuine drama in five acts. It evokes the memory of ancient Greeks. I don't think, in all good faith, that in this case such a parallel would be without merit. The idea of fate is deep rooted, in the works of every period and every nations. It alone is not enough for the foundation of tragedy; it needs to support of some great dissension between the forces present at every moment, in man and around him, between the individual's own pride and the society, or nature, that cannot allow it, and victimizes it, punishes it. A tragic hero is always in some sense a warrior awoken from the intoxication of battle, suddenly perceiving that he is a god no longer. Anyone who re-reads Greek tragedy for enjoyment, will be struck by the presence of a theme which the commentators have hardly touched on and which, unhappily, has never inspired our classics, the theme of violence; a violence that is dangerous, to be condemned but exhilarating and beautiful. The modern image of fate is no banal, stupid accident, like the one James Dean died in at the height of his illustrious career. It is not the absurdity of chance, but of our condition or our will. It is the disproportion that exists between the measure of man, always a noble one, and the futility of the task that he often sets himself. It is not that earlier ages have been wiser than ours, given more of themselves in the battle, they too without a cause; but more rigidly defined codes of honor always offered some pretext for the most absurd conduct. The word "honor" out of the mouths of these apathetic, petite-bourgeois juveniles, is unchanged and loses none of its pure, dazzling brilliance, kept ablaze by these kids, even though their vanity and their foolish obstinacy are condemned by society, by morality, by whatever it is, in short by fate. They are not quite guilty, but not completely innocent either, only blighted by the defect of their century. It is the task of the politicians and the philosophers to show mankind horizons which are clearer than the ones it has chosen, but it is the poet's mission to doubt that optimism, to teach us to love without forbidding us to judge, to keep always alive in us the sense of tragedy.