Rebel Without a Cause

Nicolas Ray.
Rebel Without a Cause
Film still matted as lobby card
Warner Bros., Burbank California, 1955
Motion Picture & Recorded Sound Division (80.5)

Nicholas Ray was in the vanguard of a new generation of directors whose careers began in the late 1940s and who used cinema to articulate the psycho-social problems of post-World War II America. When the first generation of studio heads retired in the 1950s, control was loosened over the mainstream genres of Hollywood melodrama, and Ray was able to make films that focused more on the emotional development of protagonists and less on their actions.