Indie & Classic Movie Northside: REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

I've always appreciated that so many of you northside Austin folks were willing to make the trek south of the river to come to my movie nights. But maybe every couple of months until someone else decides that they would like to start holding events up in your part of town, let's try this.

In August...I'm gonna trek to you.

I've been looking for an appropriate place to host a movie night in north Austin for some time now. As it turns out, a couple of other specialty movie Meetup groups in Austin use this neighborhood sports bar, and I figured we'd give it a try.

Mister Tramps is an old school, kind of divey sports bar on Research Blvd between Burnet Rd. and IH35. The food is good, and they are going to create a special happy hour drink menu just for us. But most importantly, they have a separate, free, private media room in the back that we can close off with a relatively soundproof partition and enjoy our movie. If this works and people come, we'll continue to use it in the future, maybe alternating with my place down south and here every couple of months.

But what movie? I wanted our inaugural northside event to be a doozie, and since our last film was deeply strange indie film, I figured we'd get back to the classics this month.

Filmmakers have always been drawn to stories of disaffected and lost youth going back to the earliest days of cinema. Early on it was apparent that exploitative subjects such as youth gangs, reform schools filled with street toughs and wayward daughters, and adult fears of rampant teen violence sold movie tickets. With a few exceptions, most of these early films were simply lurid excuses to get forbidden subjects on the screen under the guise of public service and education. Many of these films, such as the hilarious TELL YOUR CHILDREN (1938), better known as REEFER MADNESS, have become cultural touchstones of mockery and parody.

But after World War II, these films started to change and become much more serious. A generation returning from war had come home and started having babies in vast numbers and then tried to assimilate those children into a rapidly changing society with neither the inclination nor the societal infrastructure to do so. Suddenly we started to see semi-serious films about disaffected youth turning to hooliganism and violence and quite frankly not giving a damn what older generations thought of them. An excellent example of this is 1950's GUN CRAZY about two young people going on a crime spree which served as the blueprint for many movies to come, including Jean Luc Godard's BREATHLESS (1960), Arthur Penn's BONNIE AND CLYDE (1967), and Terrence Malick's BADLANDS (1974).

But it was this month's movie that really changed youth cinema forever.

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) was arguably the first film to try and depict the very real issues that young people faced in a world and in a society that tried and failed to treat them as clones of their parents without considering that the world had drastically changed since their parents had grown up. In 1950's America, children were expected to be silent, obedient, and sexually chaste, something that most of their parents had never been themselves. But even more important, and what REBEL depicts with an honest frankness perhaps better than any film in history, is just how little the parents understood about their kids.

As such, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE became a rallying cry for the disaffected youth of 1950's America. Every teenage boy wanted to be James Dean, and every girl wanted to be Natalie Wood. And parents looked on with a kind of bewildered horror as their little darlings became members of middle class law-breaking youth gangs. Although certainly tame by today's standards, many local city and town censorship boards refused to let this film be shown in their towns at the time for fear that their youth would be influenced by it.

This fear wasn't new. What was new was the film's implication that it just might be the parent's fault. Throw in a sympathetic depiction of a teenage supporting character who is probably although not overtly gay, and you can just imagine how much controversy this film stirred up in Eisenhower's America.

And we haven't even mentioned James Dean, who would tragically die in a car crash 30 days before this film was released.

This is how legends are made, and it is certainly possible that, as some have suggested, that it was James Dean's passing, and not his acting, that gave this film its mystique. But as we once again watch this bona fide classic though, I only ask that you put aside your preconceptions about it and re-examine it with a modern eye. Not only will you be able to see its considerable influence on modern cinema, you will also see how well it has held up. Although clothing, hairstyles, lingo, and music have changed over the years, every teenage generation has rocked to its own beat of universal discontent. And every time you feel yourself wishing that the characters in this movie would "just grow up," you can take solace in the realization that you have, in fact, become your parents.

We'll meet at Mister Tramps at 7:00 pm and start the movie about 7:30 after a brief discussion. If the partition in the back is closed, look for a hallway in the back to the left by the bathrooms and walk to the end, where there is a door into the media room. I'm not sure yet if we're going to have waitstaff back there or if everyone will just need to order food and alcohol at the bar. I'll update when I find out. All I ask is that you do order something, even if its just an appetizer or soft drink. They are giving us this space for free. So enjoy a drink or two, maybe order some food (the Pub Burger I've had was really good), and be sure to tip the waitstaff. We'll see how everything goes and then make a decision if this is a viable space for the future.