Plot Summary

This story is about Jimmy Stark (James Dean), who is a young man that arrived to a new town where he met Judy (Nathalie Wood) and Plato (Sal Mineo). Jimmy is a problematic man that has been travelling from one town to another because of his behaviour and his problems with the justice and the alcohol. Since the moment Jimmy arrives to his new High School he is involve in troubles with a local gang that its leader is Buzz (Judy’s boyfriend).

Jimmy wants to fit in this gang, so that Buzz arranges a nocturnal “Chickie Run” with Jimmy, that is a car race that ends in a cliff where the cars are eventually destroyed, so that the winner is the last person that jumps off its car. Unfortunately Buzz can not jump off his car and dies. Jimmy feels guilty for Buzz’s death and for the rest of the evening he thinks a lot in what he has recently done. Trying to find answers Jimmy asks his subjugated father what is the best thing to do, but his father does not help him at all and Jimmy goes for a walk.


Jimmy, Judy and Plato go to an abandoned huge house that looks like a castle. They look like a perfect family until the other gang members get there looking for Jimmy because they want to be sure that he will not say anything about what has happened in the cliff.
Scared and confused Plato goes to the Planetarium looking for a place to hide from the other gang members. Jimmy and Judy follows him and get to the planetarium, too. This is the place where happens a terrible confusion. The Police thinks that Plato is guilty for Buzz’s death and want to catch him. Jimmy helps Plato but after a discussion, The Police shot Plato causing his dead.


Images Taken from: Filmreference.com

Nicholas Ray.. an actor, scriptwriter and director.

His real name was Raymond Nicholas Kienzle. He was born in August 7th, 1911 in Galesville, Wisconsin. The youngest of his family, Nicholas Ray started to study at the University of Chicago but he had to left it in 1932. Later he went to New York where he changes his name. In N.Y he knew Elia Kazan a director who influenced his life in an enormous way. In 1948 Ray started to direct his own movies and "They Live By Night" is the first movie he directs. In 1951 he produced the movie "Flying Leathernecks" with John Wayne which was the most seen film that year. After all these successes Ray joined to the Warner Bros.
In those years the delinquency was an important topic for the directors, producers and society. In 1952 Ray started to write a story himself which was about a young man who had troubles with the authority. "Rebel Without a cause" was written by Irving Shulman and Stewart Stearn following the main idea of Ray. Nicholas Ray chose James Dean for he principal rol because the had similar lifes. As most of us know, James Dean died a week before the world-wide opening and he became an icon among young people. After this terrible lost for the cinema world, Nicholas directed "King of kings" and "55 days at Pekin".
While he was filming "55 days at Pekin" Nicholas suffered an ailment cardiac. In this point of his life he lost his road and everything. He became an alcoholic and a gambler. Finally, in 1979 he died alone.


Image taken from: Insiderone.net
Info. taken from: Wikipedia.org

Posters of the Film

Spanish*

English*

*If you want yo see the posters bigger, CLICK on the picture.
Taken from: Estoescine.com

Pictures from the film

These are images taken from the film while it was being filmed. In the first one we can see James Dean (Jimmy Stark) and Corey Allen (Buzz) in the exact moment while the were performing the famous scene of the knives fight. In the the second one James Dean was spending time with some fans of him signing some purses and books. Finally, in the third one James Dean and Natalie Wood (Judy) were preparing themselves for one of the takes of the film. One anecdote regarding the first image is that when the director Nicholas Ray was filming the scene of the knives fight, the actor Corey Allen really hurt James Dean so the director cut immediately the filming. Because of this James Dean became really upset and told Nicholas that the only person in the studio who had the ability of saying if he could continue filming or not was himself.

Images taken from: JamesDean.com
Information taken from: LaCoctelera.com