PeterRS Posted 19 hours ago Posted 19 hours ago It seems slightly strange that one of the screen's major icons died 70 years ago just before his third and last movie appeared. I had never seen Rebel Without A Cause until this afternoon when it was shown on a True Visions channel. I had looked forward to it but was perhaps a bit disappointed, both with the movie and with James Dean. Natalie Wood's character also seemed to me two-dimensional and more than a little unbelievable. Inevitably it is dated and the post-war rebel image of the younger characters seemed tame - at least when you compare it with, for example, the gang warfare in the 1960s West Side Story. The concept of teenagers as a class of their own was still relatively new after the war. Teenagers were regarded as being filled with a restless angst and spirit of rebellion toward the social norms which they felt restricted by, and it is this that Rebel Without A Cause doesn't quite present on screen IMHO. The interesting character I think is Plato played by the cherubic 16-year old Sal Mineo. It was a role that earned him his first of two nominations for the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor. It could never be said at the time but he admitted in a 1972 interview that he really had to be killled off. His character, he suggested, "was in a way the first gay teenager in films." For years Mineo denied he was gay, presumably to ensure he got parts. Later in his short life there was a spell when he said he was bisexual and had allegedly slept with some of the most powerful men and some women in Hollywood, including Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. Sadly for him, it did not do his career much good. the more so as his looks began to fade. In 1976 aged 37 he was brutally stabbed to death by a pizza delivery man during a random robbery outside his West Hollywood apartment. For his final six years he finally came out as gay and lived with an acting teacher Courtney Burr III. James Dean and Sal Mineo in a scene from Rebel Without A Cause tm_nyc 1 Quote
