Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Greil Marcus on Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause

Greil Marcus has included Live Fast, Die Young: The Wild Ride of Making Rebel Without a Cause in his "Real Life Rock Top Ten" in the latest issue of The Believer. Here is his review:

"Even without a single distinctive sentence -- note the tripping-over-its-own-feet-syntax of the subtitle -- this book is irresistible. With all of the principals other than writer Stewart Stern dead -- James Dean (1955), Sal Mineo (1976), Ray (1979), Natalie Wood (1981), a wipeout, as if Dean came back in that Porsche Spydter to get them -- Frascella and Weisel rely mostly on actors who in the film played gang members (Corey Allen, Frank Mazzola, Steffi Sidney, Beverly Long, Dennis Hopper) to reconstruct it. But because the movie changed the way the world looked, how it felt, they only have to apply a bit of pressure to a tiny matter -- the sixteen-year-old Woods's simultaneous affairs with Ray (on his urging) and Hopper (on hers), the fate of Dean's red jacket -- to find their own drama. Today the gravity in the picture belongs wholly to Dean, and the gravity is a matter of intellectual energy so bright the man carrying it seems constantly on the verge of bursting into flames."