James Dean is back

You couldn't make a film like Nicholas Ray's 1955 epic now.

It almost certainly wouldn't be financed and, besides, might well seem a little naïve.

It was one of the first big-budget movies about youthful rebelliousness and alienation, and its luck was to have James Dean as the rebel.

It's his extraordinary performance that is still remembered, right down to some of the lines he speaks.

But there are other virtues, in the shape of fine supporting performances from Nathalie Wood and Sal Mineo, and Ray's distinctive and sometimes poetic direction.

If it lacks some intellectual conviction now it is because things seem more complicated than they did then, when rebels without a cause astonished everybody.

What remains is a film more viscerally exciting than its many successors.

Rebel Without A Cause
Cert: PG