(2 of 2)
The story begins in a police station in a pleasant upper-middle-class suburb. Half a dozen teen-agers are hauled in for questioning, among them a boy (James Dean) who has just moved into the neighborhood. He is drunk. Why? He does not know. He only knows that his mother wears the pants in the family. "She eats my father alive, and he takes it. How can a guy grow up in a circus like that? They are tearing me apart."
Next day, the first day of school, Dean is greeted by his classmates as "a new disease," and during a field trip to the planetarium, a leather-jacketed roughneck slashes a tire on his car. "You read too many comic books." says Dean. They fight with knives. Dean wins. The boy challenges him to a "chickie run" -a dash to the edge of a cliff in two stolen cars; first man to jump out before the cars go over the brink is "chicken." Caught between folly and disgrace. Dean asks his father what to do. Father funks out. Dean makes the run. The other boy is killed.
Dean decides to tell the police. His parents, horrified of notoriety, say no. "You can't be idealistic," his father pleads. Dean explodes: "A kid was killed! Every time you can't face yourself, you blame it on me." In the end, still another adolescent goes to a senseless death.
The strong implication of this picture is that the real delinquency is not juvenile but parental. The point may be obvious and only a part of the problem, but it is well worth propounding. The best thing about the film, in any case, is James Dean, the gifted actor who made his movie start in East of Eden, and was killed last month at 24 in an automobile accident. In this, the second of his three movie roles -Giant will probably be released next year -there is further evidence that Actor Dean was a player of unusual sensibility and charm.