Restoration was completed from an 8K scan of the original CinemaScope (widescreen 2.55:1) camera negative at Warner Bros. motion Picture Imaging. Due to color fading, the original camera negative could no longer yield an acceptable photochemical print. The stereo soundtrack was reconstructed by Chace Audio at Deluxe from the magnetic soundtrack stripes of release prints. Director Nicholas Ray shot this lm using early single-strip Eastman color 5248 negative, which was a low-cost alternative to the 3-strip Technicolor process. Unfortunately, this early color negative yielded poor color imagery. is was a ‘WarnerColor’ feature, which meant that the Eastman negative would be processed and optical sections created at the Warner Bros. laboratory, rather than at Technicolor.

Ned Price

Rebel without a Cause is the striking, quintessential Hollywood lm about the emergence of modern youth on screen (Italian and other European cinemas had made rede nitions earlier) – no longer represented by the zombielike presences of Shirley Temple or Mickey Rooney, but by recognizable fragile, searching souls and their vertigo on the threshold of adulthood. No lm went into this so profoundly, nothing even came close. The premise – Dr. Robert Lindner’s study – had been in the Warner archives since 1946; it was tackled at the precise moment when young peo- ple became an independent force.

Young actors found in their director an understanding soul brother who saw honor and dignity – already beyond the grasp of older people – as defining characteristics. us, Nicholas Ray’s portrayal of James Dean (and of course of Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo as well) seemed real and somehow sovereignly irreverent even about Actors’ Studio concepts; symptomatically Ray, contrary to Kazan or Stevens, was the only one who didn’t complain about Dean’s behavior. is vision’s truthfulness was based on anthropological research, always close to the heart of Nicholas Ray. But it could not have become timelessly true without the touch of color and CinemaScope (in its great early period of 1:2.55 format – ten days were filmed in black and white before Warner Bros. made the change), epitomized immediately in the sensational first minutes at the police station. e mise-en-scène means everything in this subtle melodrama that takes place in 24 hours, and its improbable story, condensed for the sake of deeper truth: the young faces of Dean and Wood, previously strangers to each other, confronted with the great unknown, tenderness as a surprising counterforce to the too cruel world, the miraculous feeling that the best human potential is still untapped; and the places, like the planetarium and its artificial night, followed by the short real night there and its ash of a true family in contrast to the perverted realities in the homes of each of the three adolescents.

François Truffaut, for whom Dean was “a Baudelairian hero”, wrote the most eloquent lines about him: “In James Dean, contemporary youth recognizes itself completely, less for the reasons that are usually said – violence, sadism, frenzy, darkness, pessimism and cruelty – than for others infinitely more simple and everyday: emotional modesty, fantasy every moment, the eternal taste of adolescence for the test, drunkenness, pride and regret at feeling ‘outside’ of society, refusal of the desire to belong, and finally the acceptance – or refusal – of the world as it is”.

Peter von Bagh