Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. No notes or highlighting. See images. Fantastic book.

About the book >.>.> Dressed in blue jeans white T-shirt and red windbreaker Jim Stark sits behind the wheel of a stolen car coolly smoking a cigarette and waiting for the start of the chickie run. Sitting in a police station in her red Easter coat Judy scowls at the Juvenile Officer rails against her insensitive father and bursts into tears. Frightened by an apocalyptic display he planetarium Plato says of the lec- turer “What does he know about man alone?” These are the prototypical American teenagers of Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. Because the images have become so ingrained in our consciousness and our culture we may forget that the film once belonged to a particular place and time: America in the mid-Fifties. Dwight D. Eisenhower was President then. The nation was politically and socially conservative the economy sound and growing. The Korean War had ended two years earlier but the Cold War showed no signs of waning and the threat of nuclear anni- hilation was still a daily reality. Senator Joseph McCarthy had fallen from grace dur- ing the Army-McCarthy Hearings the year before but fears of an organized communist conspiracy still ran high. People were moving out of the cities and into the suburbs. Spurred by the devel- opment of the Interstate Highway System sprawling communities like Levittown on Long Island seemed to spring up overnight. “Little boxes made of ticky-tacky” as Malvina Reynolds described them in a song lined street after identical street all across the country.