Nicholas Ray understood inner rebellion.  His impressive body of film work corroborates this proposition.

Ray as cinema's "laureate of night" was a natural inside the world of film noir, but the triumph for which so many remember him was a story about youth rebellion featuring three fascinating talents playing teens groping for meaning in life in mid-twentieth century America.  The dynamic trio consisted of James Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo, and the 1955 film was "Rebel Without a Cause."

While "Rebel" by definition fit into the category of a psychological study of troubled youth, Ray's extensive background in film noir was evident in the film's most dramatically gripping scenes as the troubled teens met amid evening darkness in an abandoned Hollywood house.

This film had its evolutionary roots in Ray's groundbreaking 1949 noir classic, "They Live by Night."  Just as the later pairing of James Dean and Natalie Wood captivated world filmgoers in "Rebel," the earlier duo of Farley Granger and Cathy O'Donnell also tugged mightily at the heartstrings.