Copyright Heldref Publications Summer 1995Few motion pictures left a deeper impression on that generation we call the baby boomers than Rebel Without a Cause. Nicholas Ray's tale of adolescent angst did much to define the emerging youth culture of the 1950s. Within months of its initial release in October 1955, teenaged males throughout the country could be seen cooling their foreheads with milk bottles and donning red windbreakers as badges of youthful rebellion. Females were similarly impressed. "I loved Rebel," writer Joy Williams remembered. "It was mean, morose and pretty.... I loved it. My friends loved it. It was our picture" (132).
Yet before it could be "our picture," Rebel had to pass through the elaborate censorship mechanism that governed Hollywood production in the 1950s, the central feature of which was the Production Code Administration (PCA). Established in 1934 by the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, the PCA's principal function was to ensure that American films contained nothing that could offend. It enforced the Production Code, a four-thousand-word document that specifically recognized the potential of movies to shape the attitudes and values of the audience and sought to prohibit the production of any picture which might "lower the moral standards of those who see it."(1) In the name of wholesome entertainment, the Code banned nudity, vulgarity, obscenity, and profanity, and carefully restricted how crime, sex, violence, and religion could be treated on the screen.
Although filmmakers resented the Code and frequently protested the seemingly petty rulings of the PCA, most accepted the agency as a necessary part of the production process. For them, the Code office performed a valuable function. Its careful reading of scripts and long experience with censorship matters meant that once the PCA had granted its seal of approval, a picture almost never encountered protests at the box office or serious difficulties from municipal, state, and foreign censors. The post-production censorship exercised by such agencies could be very costly, requiring cuts in the final print, expensive retakes, and adjustments in distribution schedules. Part of the PCA's task was to ensure that this did not happen. Hence its staff sought to remove all objectionable content at the script level, long before the story was filmed. To do so, the Code officials had to read every line of every script with the greatest of care--to be, in other words, very picky.
Viewed from the perspective of the 1990s, Rebel Without a Cause hardly seems the type of picture that would have generated censorship concerns. Its violence is restrained, its sex innocent. Yet because it featured teenagers, Rebel was subjected to even more scrutiny than the typical Hollywood product. PCA director Geoffrey Shurlock was clearly aware of the growing public anxiety over juvenile delinquency. Just two months before he received the screenplay for Rebel, the Saturday Evening Post launched a five-part series on the subject entitled "The Shame of America" (Clendenen and Beaser). It reported a 45-percent increase in juvenile arrests over the previous five years and nearly one million teen encounters with the law annually. Some experts found the causes of this new juvenile lawlessness in environmental conditions--in the slums and poverty of the inner cities. Others faulted parents and teachers for failing to instill discipline and respect for the law. Still others blamed the corrosive influence of comic books, television, and the movies. With public fears mounting, Shurlock wanted to make certain that Rebel would not provide ammunition for the industry's critics.
The Code office received the screenplay for Rebel Without a Cause early in March 1955, and after an initial reading, Shurlock decided the script contained too many minor problems to convey easily in a letter. Two lengthy script conferences with Warner Brothers' Code representative Findlay McDermid ensued, in which the problem areas were identified and defined. By the close of the second conference, Shurlock had reduced the difficulties to 19 specific items requiring revision. Several were minor. One suggested that a "derisive gesture" toward a police officer "not be nose thumbing."(2) Another advised the deletion of "Good Lord" from the reaction of Jim's mother when she discovers that her son had participated in the fatal automobile "chicken-run" on the bluffs. The words might have been permitted in another context, but here they were "not used entirely reverently" and hence should go. Shurlock also ordered the elimination of "keep a cool stool" as vulgar and "damn hands" as profane.
The above would have been eliminated from any film submitted to the Code office in 1955, but Shurlock's list also contained a number of warnings that reflected the agency's special caution regarding teen films. In fact, the PCA's concerns about Rebel's target audience not only brought the script under more careful scrutiny than might otherwise have been the case, but they also led Shurlock and his colleagues to find objectionable meaning when none was intended. For example, an early scene in the film showed several girls sharing a smoke outside Dawson High School. It caught Shurlock's eye because the screenwriter described the girls as hiding the cigarette in a "cupped hand." Shurlock jumped to the conclusion that the "cupped hand" implied that the cigarette was marijuana and ordered the scene removed. McDermid pointed out that smoking was prohibited on virtually all high school campuses, so the "cupped hand" was only meant to disguise a normal cigarette. Shurlock relented, but the scene was eventually cut by the director.
The Code prohibited any suggestion of aberrant sex, and Shurlock and his staff were always fearful that some veiled reference to homosexuality, incest, or other sexual deviance might slip by. This fear emerged twice during the script negotiations on Rebel Without a Cause At one point Shurlock expressed concern that the script contained the "inference of a questionable or homosexual relationship between Plato (Sal Mineo) and Jim (James Dean)." McDermid was never able to determine exactly what part of the script contained that inference, and when pressed, Shurlock dropped the matter. Similarly, the Code director detected a hint of incest in a crucial scene between Judy (Natalie Wood) and her father. The scene was set in the dining room. Disappointed that her father failed to kiss her on his return home, Judy steals a kiss as he sits at the table. Visibly distressed, he advises her that big girls "don't go in for that sort of thing." When she attempts to steal a second, he slaps her. The scene was designed to establish the father's inability to express affection as an explanation for Judy's rebelliousness, but Shurlock worried about the "objectionable flavor of an incestuous reaction" in the father's conduct. The Code director's concern may have stemmed in part from the screenplay's description of Judy's father as "boyish and appealing," a young man "frightened by the adolescence of his daughter." This, in addition to Judy's obvious adoration of her father, prompted Shurlock to order the second kiss and the slap deleted. McDermid eventually convinced Shurlock that he was reading far more into the scene than was there, and the Code director agreed to withhold his objections until he could see the scene as filmed. Casting the mature William Hopper as the father may have relieved Shurlock's concerns; on final viewing, he registered no objection.
Judy's rebelliousness early in the script also proved troublesome. Because she was the only positive female character in the film, the one with whom young girls in the audience were most likely to identify, Shurlock wanted her conduct confined within acceptable boundaries. He expressed concern about her relationship with Buzz (Corey Allen), her participation in the famous chicken-run, and particularly her arrest in the opening sequence. He feared that the audience might infer from the police officer's question, "Have you talked to strangers before?" that this 16-year-old had been booked for street-corner solicitation. He advised that the line be changed, so the screenwriter substituted, "Did you stop to talk to anyone, Judy?" That apparently carried the same objectionable flavor. A third effort, "You weren't looking for company, were you?" initially met with the same objection, but this time McDermid was again able to convince Shurlock to defer judgment until he could view the scene on film. When he did, the line passed unaltered.
Shurlock cast a particularly wary eye on the relationship between Jim and Judy. It was a long-established Code office policy never to approve "stories of underage boys and girls indulging in ... illicit sex," so he sought to remove any hint of sexual passion from the relationship. In the original script, the scene in which Jim and Judy decide to sneak away to an abandoned mansion contained an element that Shurlock felt indicated their "desire to have an illicit sex affair." The dialogue was hardly pointed. Jim and Judy simply expressed their determination not to return home that evening: Jim because of a serious row with his parents; Judy because of her father's slap. But the scene contained the couple's initial kiss, and that worried Shurlock. He wanted absolutely no hint that the embrace had stirred sexual passions that were to be satisfied at the mansion, so he ordered the scene changed. McDermid, after consulting with Ray, assured Shurlock that the kiss would be little more than a peck on the cheek, but Shurlock remained unconvinced until the scene was rewritten. In the final version, the kiss remained, but Judy's lines were revised so as to express a reluctance to accompany him to the mansion, thus assuring Shurlock that her passions remained in check. Jim convinces her to go with: "You can trust me, Judy."
The romantic interlude at the mansion also fell under special scrutiny. Shurlock felt that as originally written, with two kisses, the scene ended "on a note of mounting passion" that pointed to sexual intimacy after the fade-out. It was "absolutely essential" that any such suggestion be removed, and he advised Warner Brothers to end the scene "in a note of tenderness, omitting the second kiss." This time Shurlock held his ground, but he may have achieved less than he desired. The second kiss was dropped, but the first was definitely more passionate than tender. Thus the fade-out that followed led to the conclusion that Shurlock sought to avoid. He did, however, insist that when Judy emerges in the next scene--when she rushes out to view the conflict between Plato and the police--that there must be "nothing in her appearance or actions that suggests ... a previous sex affair.... The same, of course, applies to Jim's appearance."
Shurlock's remaining objections to Rebel Without a Cause centered on the film's violence. Movie violence was hardly a new Code office concern. Ever since the notorious gangster cycle of the early 1930s, Code officials had sought to convince the film colony to cut back on the number of murders and brutal fights in American pictures. But eliminating violence proved particularly troublesome. Much of the difficulty stemmed from the fact that the Code office staff sought to remove objectionable material at the script level and was reluctant to order changes once filming had been completed. As Shurlock once observed, "You ask for a cut in [a] finished picture and everybody blows their top" (Oral History). Because screenplays rarely provide a detailed description of how a fight, murder, or other brutal encounter will be filmed, the Code office was forced to rely on the director's discretion. If the staff suspected that a fight scene might become too violent. Shurlock issued a warning, often reminding the director that it was "unacceptable to show any kicking, kneeing, gouging or other forms of excessive brutality." But studios and directors knew that violence, like sex, enhanced screen excitement, so they often pressed the Code to its limits. Occasionally, Joe Breen, Shurlock's predecessor, cracked down by eliminating or modifying scenes showing explicit brutality or excessive murders, but normally after a short period his interest waned and the violence returned. Shurlock, however, had less choice in the matter. Shortly after he was elevated to director in October 1954, violence in American films fell under attack from two sources that compelled Shurlock to pay attention: the U.S. Senate and the British Board of Film Censors (BBFC).
The BBFC had long been critical of American screen violence. Like the PCA, it had issued periodic warnings, occasionally deleted footage and, since 1951, had placed particularly violent films in its "X" classification, which limited attendance to those over 15 years old. But late in 1953, the BBFC cracked down with a vengeance. Over the next 18 months, it rejected seven American features and cut so much from two others that the distributors ordered them shelved. The resulting loss of an estimated $2 million in British film rentals caught the industry's attention and forced Shurlock to look more closely at the problem of movie violence. At roughly the same time, Senator Estes Kefauver announced his intention to resume an investigation into the causes of juvenile delinquency in the United States, promising to give special scrutiny to the charge that film violence conditioned the nation's youth toward antisocial conduct. Both the Kefauver Committee and the BBFC were particularly offended by films like The Wild One and Blackboard Jungle, which portrayed teenagers engaged in violent behavior. Both were banned by the BBFC, and the latter was one of only two American pictures specifically targeted by the Kefauver Committee. Consequently, Shurlock sought to remove as much of Rebel's violence as possible.
Shurlock's attention was drawn to three sections of Rebel's screenplay: an opening scene that was eventually cut, the dramatic "blade game" or knife fight between Jim and Buzz on the steps of the Griffith Observatory, and the murderous intent of Buzz's friends in their pursuit of Jim after Buzz's death. The original script began with a chilling night sequence in which Buzz's gang assaults a young man on a deserted suburban street. The setting is Easter eve, and the young man is returning home laden with packages for his family. The hoodlums stalk, surround, harass, and then brutally beat the young man without bothering to take his packages. This act of random, senseless violence was to precede the film's title and establish its theme.
Shurlock found the scene far too violent for Code requirements and insisted that the "stomping and beating" described in the script be done entirely off screen. Stewart Stern's screenplay was then revised so that the camera would pan away from the beating after the first slap and focus on a small mechanical monkey that had fallen from one of the packages. The beating would be heard rather than seen. After the hoodlums and the young man flee, a drunken Jim Stark would stumble on the monkey and play with it until the police arrive searching for the gang.
Nicholas Ray apparently filmed the scene as described but cut all except the monkey and Jim's arrival in final editing. Because Ray never provided an explanation, it is impossible to say exactly why the director eliminated the opening scene. It may have been that Shurlock's requirement of moving the action offscreen undercut its impact. More likely, Ray simply decided that the scene focused audience attention too heavily on Buzz and his gang and delayed the arrival of his principal characters, Jim, Judy, and Plato. Whatever the reason, in removing the opening sequence, Ray overlooked two references to the beating later in the film. When Jim is brought to the police station, the sergeant asks the arresting officer if he's been "[m]ixed up in that beating on Twelfth Street?" The second reference occurs later when Buzz and his friends collect Judy on the way to school:
JUDY: I'm glad they let you out.
BUZZ: Nobody chickened.
JUDY: I heard about it. You're lucky he lived.
BUZZ: They always live.
The "blade game" outside the observatory also contained elements that Shurlock found objectionable. When Plato seeks to intervene on Jim's behalf at the beginning of the duel, he is thrown to the ground and kicked. Shurlock wanted the kick removed as unnecessarily brutal. He also found one item of dialogue troublesome. As Buzz lays out the ground rules for the fight, he specifies "No killing." To Shurlock this reference seemed to imply "that these high school kids do occasionally fight to the death with knives," an implication he found totally unacceptable. Regarding the fight itself, Shurlock advised that the scene be reduced in length and handled with great care. He especially worried about the stage direction that specified that after receiving several cuts Jim is "transformed," becomes very aggressive, and "pricks Buzz again and again." Ray acceded to these requests without protest. The kicking of Plato was dropped; "No killing" was changed to "No sticking," and Buzz was not pricked repeatedly. The scene was still longer than Shurlock preferred and did conclude with Jim pressing his knife at Buzz's throat, but Ray's compliance on the other items apparently convinced him that the scene could be approved.
When Buzz's friends, Crunch, Goon, and Moon, see Jim at the police station after the chicken-run on the bluffs, they conclude that he has ratted on them and must be punished. Although the original script was unclear as to what type of punishment they had in mind, Shurlock worried that audiences might infer that they planned murder. Hence, he asked that Crunch's line, spoken on the station house steps, "We're going to bring him down. Way down," be clarified and Plato's line to Jim at the mansion, "I think they are going to kill you," be changed to remove the suggestion of lethal intent. The script also called for Crunch to display a switchblade and the others to swing tire chains ominously as they awaken Plato at the mansion. Shurlock wanted the knife eliminated, suggesting that the chains alone "would be sufficient to give the feeling of menace." As in the case of the knife fight, Ray carefully complied with Shurlock's requests. Crunch's comment was clarified by later dialogue to indicate that the boys only intended to beat Jim up; Plato's line at the mansion was interrupted before he could utter "to kill you"; and the boys were armed only with tire chains.
Ray's compliance with Shurlock's instructions on matters of violence is striking. In contrast to the scenes involving sex, where McDermid and Ray sought compromise, Shurlock's suggestions on violence almost always were heeded without question. This was probably due to Warner Brothers' concerns about the delinquency issue and the growing assertiveness of the BBFC. A typical motion picture in the 1950s barely recovered its production costs in the domestic market, and foreign rentals were vital for studio profits. In mid-March, just as Shurlock was outlining his objections to Rebel, the BBFC notified MGM of its rejection of Blackboard Jungle. Neither Ray nor the executives at Warner Brothers wanted such a fate for Rebel.
Ironically, if Warner Brothers assumed that by heeding Shurlock's advice on the violence they could get past the increasingly stringent requirements of the BBFC, they were mistaken. When Rebel Without a Cause was submitted to the board in October 1955, its readers voted to ban the film entirely unless major cuts were made. Several were from scenes not mentioned in Shurlock's correspondence with the studio. The BBFC demanded that "all shots of Jim punching and kicking the desk" in an early scene at the police station be deleted because they conveyed excessive emotion. The board also required the removal of Jim's startling assault on his father later in the film. Shurlock apparently found nothing objectionable in either scene. In addition, the board required "drastic cuts" in the knife fight so that "only the barest amount of footage necessary to maintain the continuity of the story" remained. In fact, the BBFC advised Warner Brothers that the simplest way to handle the scene would be to remove "the knife fight altogether" in such a way as to allow Buzz's initial baiting of Jim at the observatory to lead directly to the chicken-run on the bluffs.
The BBFC also wanted major revisions in that scene. Shurlock had objected only to the fact that, as originally written, the scene concluded with both automobiles plunging onto a busy highway below. The BBFC found the entire sequence troublesome: "The less we have of this whole unpleasant idea of young people meeting together to witness a contest which could end in the death of one of the participants, the better." They objected to Judy's role in the event, "in particular her unrestrained excitement over starting the race." They found the dialogue between Jim and Buzz ("Why do we do this?" and "You've gotta do some thing) offensive. And they demanded the elimination of all close-ups of Buzz's face and his scream as the car careens over the cliff.
In November, Ray and producer David Weisbart traveled to London to work out the difficulties. The film was recut to meet the BBFC's objections, resulting in the deletion of over five minutes of footage. The knife fight, although not eliminated, was transformed. Replacing the carefully choreographed duel between Jim and Buzz, the altered scenes reflected the fight through the faces of the young spectators. With cuts completed, Warner Brothers resubmitted the film, and the BBFC approved the revised version--but limited its exhibition to those over 15 years old.
In the U.S. market, Rebel encountered few difficulties. The notoriously stringent censors in Memphis banned the picture as "inimical to the public welfare:' but the local distributor simply shifted the opening across the river to West Memphis, where it did a thriving business ("'Rebel' Not" 4). In Milwaukee, the Censorship Commission also refused to approve Rebel, but when a local theater owner defied the ban, the authorities chose not to prosecute him. Elsewhere state and municipal censors found nothing objectionable in Rebel and passed it without objection.
Aside from the cuts ordered by the BBFC, Rebel Without a Cause suffered little at the hands of the censors. Although Shurlock required that Ray tone down the film's violence and exercise care in handling the relationship between Jim and Judy, the finished picture did not vary markedly from the original script. Certainly, without Shurlock's intervention, Ray might not have cut the chilling opening sequence, the "blade game" would have run longer and might have contained more graphic and frightening action, and the love scene between Jim and Judy at the mansion might have been more suggestive. Yet neither Shurlock nor the other censors forced Ray to accept any serious story changes or plot alterations. In this sense Rebel was typical of most films of its generation. By the mid-1950s, Hollywood writers and directors had become so conditioned to the demands of the censors that they rarely submitted stories requiring major changes. To do so would have been fruitless and wasteful. It was much easier and safer for them to operate within the confines of the Production Code. Hence, Shurlock and his colleagues spent much of their time quibbling over petty details, like whether a cupped hand concealed marijuana or whether a particular embrace might be too suggestive. Today it seems curious, even quaint, that grown men would have fussed over such questions, but that was what the censors of the 1950s were expected to do. And Hollywood adapted.
When Rebel was released in October 1955, most of us who went to see it detected little hint of the work of the censors. Like Variety's reviewer (6), we found the picture "exciting, suspenseful and provocative." The macabre coincidence of James Dean's fatal auto accident just weeks before the opening gave the film a special edge, but there was more to our interest than that. In the era of Father Knows Best, Rebel was the first motion picture to express our world rather than theirs. More than any other, it captured our youthful torment, our restless natures, our craving for acceptance. The censors made no effort to alter this. We, too, were causeless rebels, and Rebel Without a Cause was our picture.
NOTES
1. Recent scholarly works on the origin and early years of the PCA include Black (in both works); Leff; and Vaughn. Gardner's book features correspondence from the PCA office files, and Leff and Simmons provide an informal history of the Code based on those files. The full text of the Code is reprinted in the appendixes of Leff and Simmons.
2. Unless otherwise noted in the text, the quoted material in this article is drawn from the film, its script (a draft of which is published in Thomas), or from correspondence in the files on Rebel Without a Cause located in two archival collections: the PCA papers, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Los Angeles; and the Warner Brothers Production Files, Special Collections, Doheny Library, University of Southern California.
WORKS CITED
Black, Gregory D. "Hollywood Censored: The Production Code Administration and the Hollywood Film Industry, 1930-1940." Film History: An International Journal 3 (1989): 167-89.
----. Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics and the Movies. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.
Clendenen, Richard, and Herbert W. Beaser. "The Shame of America The Saturday Evening Post 8 Jan. 1955: 17-19; 77-78.
Gardner, Gerald. The Censorship Papers: Movie Censorship Letters from the Hays Office, 1934-1968. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1987.
Leff, Leonard J. "The Breening of America." PMLA 106 (1991): 432-45.
Leff, Leonard J., and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990.
Oral History with Geoffrey Shurlock. Interview with James M. Wall. July 1970.
"'Rebel' Not for Memphis." Variety 26 Oct. 1955: 4.
Rev. of "Rebel Without a Cause." Variety 26 Oct. 1955: 6.
Thomas, Sam, ed. Best American Screenplays. New York: Crown, 1986.
Vaughn, Stephen. "Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code Journal of American History 77 (1990): 39-65.
Williams, Joy. "Rebel Without a Cause: On Four Actors, Dying Young." Esquire Film Quarterly Oct. (1982): 132-33.
JEROLD SIMMONS is a professor of history at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He is currently writing a series of articles dealing with film censorship in the 1950s.
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