The greatest romance in cinema for my money, sharing as it does a revolutionary avant la lettre kinetisism w/ Gun Crazy and Detour, lurid sperm already hungry for the Nouvelle Vague egg. From the opening helicopter tracking (?) shots (where the helicopter blades actually affect the mis en scene) we know we are in the hands of a ‘first film’ genius, here – one, in fact, to put uncle Orson to shame. If you aren’t teering up by the time of the blackening finale’s arrival you are not only inhuman, you fail to register even as a speck in the eye of a future father anywhere at any time! Nicholas Ray is cinema itself according to Godard (and me). This is the first great B-picture about teenagers (shielded by adult sickness from real reality) and for them! and it wasn’t as though the cinema could keep avoiding the target market what with the rising budget of the absurdist glam A-pics which sat heavy-bottom’d atop microapocalyptic masterpieces like those dispens’d in the form of Ray’s stun-gun projector artillery. Farley Granger was slumming when he later worked with Hitchcock (twice). How Rebel Without a Clause (sic) became the calling card is beyond me. Even if James Dean did let bull-fag queens in leather put cigarettes out on his torso (some of them doubtlessly policemen) that still doesn’t explain the fact that he never melted anybody like this buttery no-stick-pan melts us w/ its dark shadows and tremulous teenage lust. Cinema verite! Vraiment! Makes Godard's first look a mite cute.
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