The film has not aged well, and Dean's performance seems more like marked-down Brando than the birth of an important talent. But "Rebel Without a Cause" was enormously influential at the time, a milestone in the creation of new idea about young people. Marlon Brando as a surly motorcycle gang leader in "The Wild One" (1953), James Dean in 1955, and the emergence of Elvis Presley in 1956: These three role models decisively altered the way young men could be seen in popular culture. They could be more feminine, sexier, more confused, more ambiguous....Like its hero, "Rebel Without a Cause" desperately wants to say something and doesn't know what it is. If it did know, it would lose its fascination. More perhaps than it realized, it is a subversive document of its time.

Young people neglected by their parents or given no understanding and moral support by fathers and mothers who are themselves unable to achieve balance and security in their homes are the bristling heroes and heroines of this excessively graphic exercise....There are some excruciating flashes of accuracy and truth in this film.However, we do wish the young actors, including Mr. Dean, had not been so intent on imitating Marlon Brando in varying degrees. The tendency, possibly typical of the behavior of certain youths, may therefore be a subtle commentary but it grows monotonous. And we'd be more convinced by Jim Backus and Ann Doran as parents of Mr. Dean if they weren't so obviously silly and ineffectual in treating with the boy.There is, too, a pictorial slickness about the whole thing in color and Cinema-Scope that battles at times with the realism in the direction of Nicholas Ray.

Here is a fairly exciting, suspenseful and provocative, if also occasionally far-fetched, melodrama of unhappy youth on another delinquency kick. The plot bears no resemblance to the content of a book of the same title published a few years ago. The book was a clinical study of a withdrawn boy. The film presents a boy whose rebellion against a weakling father and a shrewish mother expresses itself in boozing, knife-fighting and other forms of physical combat and testing of his own manhood.

The exhibitor can expect this story of juvenile delinquency to capture the Blackboard Jungle type of audience and be a real money picture. It contains some extraordinarily good acting by the late James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo (who is coming up fast and reveals himself to be a real trouper in this one). The direction by Nicholas Ray is outstanding. Ray stages police station scenes with true realism and he catches the mood of the sub-world of teenage savagery in an attention-holding manner.... Though it is nothing to worry the exhibitor, I find much to quarrel with in the underlying ideology of the film. It seems to imply that the function of the family in guiding youth could be much better handled by the political bureaucrat. This I doubt. Parents undoubtedly are responsible for some juvenile delinquency, but to say they are responsible for all of it reminds one of those newspaper horoscopes which advise everyone in Los Angeles... to spend the morning putting up new draperies on the 23rd of September.