In The International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, film scholar Doug Tomlinson wrote this about Rebel Without a Cause: "In this, his first film in Cinemascope, Nicholas Ray signalled his reputation as the American master in the format. Having studied on a Frank Lloyd Wright scholarship, Ray had a clearly defined sense of spatial relations, an ability which made much of his film noir work especially charged. In the Cinemascope features he developed an aesthetic of the horizontal which, particularly in Rebel Without a Cause, lent a sensuality to the images of alienation. If this feeling pervaded exteriors, a sense of claustrophobia permeated the spatial tensions of the cluttered interiors."
Natalie Wood was 16 when this powerful story was filmed.
