Production notes

Warner Brothers had bought the rights to Lindner's book, intending to use the title for a film. Attempts to create a film version in the late 1940s eventually ended without a film or even a full script being produced. When Marlon Brando did a five-minute screen test for the studio in 1947, he was given fragments of one of the partial scripts. However, Brando was not auditioning for Rebel Without a Cause, and there was no offer of any part made by the studio. The film, as it later appeared, was the result of a totally new script written in the 1950s that had nothing to do with the Brando test. The screen test is included on a 2006 special edition DVD of the 1951 film A Streetcar Named Desire. Irving Shulman, who adapted Nicholas Ray's initial film story into the screenplay, had considered changing the name of James Dean's character to Herman Deville, according to Jurgen Muller's Movies of the '50s. He originally had written a number of scenes that were shot and later cut from the final version of the film. According to an AFI interview with Stewart Stern, with whom Shulman worked on the screenplay, one of the scenes was thought to be too emotionally provocative to be included in the final print of the film. It portrayed the character of Jim Stark inebriated to the point of belligerence screaming at a car in the parking lot "It's a little jeep jeep! Little jeep, jeep!" The scene was considered unproductive to the story's progression by head editor William H. Ziegler and ultimately was cut. In 2006, members of the Film Society of Lincoln Center petitioned to have the scene printed and archived for historical preservation. Nicholas Ray conducted extensive research months before filming commenced, including weeks spent travelling the country with screenwriter Stewart Stern in which they interviewed hundreds of police officers, judges, youth leaders, juvenile authorities, and welfare agency managers to gather material for the film. One of the experts who advised them was Dr. Douglas Kelley, who had gained post-WWII renown after serving as the chief psychiatrist interviewing Nazi prisoners, including Hermann Göring, prior to their Nuremberg Trials. Ray wanted to consult him on the criminological soundness of the screenplay. Ray stated his intention for the film was to "do a movie about the kids next door" as opposed to delinquent-themed films of the time set in a "slum condition", adding that Rebel was to be about "middle-class kids, kids like my own, not kids from the wrong side of the tracks."

Nicholas Ray had considered Debbie Reynolds, Margaret O'Brien, Kathryn Grant and Pat Crowley for the role of Judy, before selecting Natalie Wood. According to a biography of Natalie Wood, she almost did not get the role because Nicholas Ray thought that she did not fit the role of the wild teen character. While on a night out with friends, she was in a car accident. Upon hearing this, Ray rushed to the hospital. While in delirium, Wood overheard the doctor murmuring and calling her a "goddamn juvenile delinquent"; she soon yelled to Ray, "Did you hear what he called me, Nick?! He called me a goddamn juvenile delinquent! Now do I get the part?!" Sal Mineo would later note in a 1972 interview that the character of Plato Crawford was intended to have been gay. Speaking to Boze Hadleigh, he said, "[It m]akes sense [that Plato was killed off]: he was, in a way, the first gay teenager in films. You watch it now, you know he had the hots for James Dean. You watch it now, and everyone knows about Jimmy['s bisexuality], so it's like he had the hots for Natalie [Wood] and me. Ergo, I had to be bumped off, out of the way."

The film was in production from March 28 to May 26, 1955. When production began, Warner Bros. considered it a B-movie project, and Ray used black-and-white film stock. When Jack L. Warner realized James Dean was a rising star and a hot property, filming was switched to color stock, and many scenes had to be reshot in color. It was shot in the widescreen CinemaScope format, which had been introduced two years previously. With its densely expressive images, the film has been called a "landmark ... a quantum leap forward in the artistic and technical evolution of a format." Exterior scenes at the abandoned mansion to which the characters retreat were filmed at the William O. Jenkins House, previously used in the film Sunset Boulevard (1950). It was demolished just two years after filming. Dawson High School, the school in the film, was actually Santa Monica High School, located in Santa Monica, California.

Leonard Rosenman, who composed the film's score, had previously worked with Dean on East of Eden, and he played a role in introducing the composer to Hollywood filmmaking. The score has continued to receive attention beyond the film's original release. The Los Angeles Philharmonic has performed a suite of Rosenman's music and has presented screenings of the film accompanied by a live orchestral performance of the score.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 91% of 85 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "Rebel Without a Cause is a searing melodrama featuring keen insight into '50s juvenile attitude and James Dean's cool, iconic performance." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 89 out of 100, based on 19 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo, and Nicholas Ray were nominated for Academy Awards for their roles in Rebel Without a Cause, which grossed $7,197,000 (equivalent to $86.5 million in 2025) in domestic and overseas screenings, making it Warner Bros.' second-biggest box-office draw that year. James Dean was also nominated posthumously, albeit for his other 1955 film, East of Eden. (Academy rules prevent an actor from potentially being nominated for more than one film per category.) The movie opened to mixed reviews when it was released on October 27, 1955, less than a month after Dean, whose performance was praised all around by film critics, died on September 30. William Zinsser wrote a scathing review of Rebel in his New York Herald Tribune column, concluding his summary of the film's plot with the words, "All this takes two hours, but it seems more like two days. The movie is written and acted so ineptly, directed so sluggishly, that all names but one will be omitted here. The exception is Dean, the gifted young actor who was killed last month. His rare talent and appealing personality even shine through this turgid melodrama." Bosley Crowther, writing in The New York Times, described Rebel Without a Cause as "violent, brutal and disturbing", and as an excessively graphic depiction of teenagers and their "weird ways". He referred to a "horrifying duel with switchblades", a "brutal scene", and a "shocking presentation" of a race in stolen automobiles. Although he admitted that there are moments of accuracy and truth in the film, he found these "excruciating", and discerned a "pictorial slickness" in the production's use of the CinemaScope process and its filming in the widescreen format, a slickness he declared was at odds with the realism of Ray's directing. Crowther was not impressed by James Dean's acting, and cited the various mannerisms he believed Dean copied from Marlon Brando, asserting that "Never have we seen a performer so clearly follow another's style" and calling Dean's interpretation of the Jim Stark role a "clumsy display". Reviewer Jack Moffitt of The Hollywood Reporter, who correctly thought the film would be a money maker, wrote a less critical, more laudatory review. He found the acting of James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo to be "extraordinarily good", and the direction by Nicholas Ray to be "outstanding". He praised the realistic manner in which Ray depicted the police station scenes and the engaging manner, according to Moffitt, in which he captured the nihilism of the teenage subculture for his audience. Moffitt took issue with the underlying ideology of the film, especially its implication, as he saw it, that professional bureaucrats could better guide youth than the American family unit itself. He criticized the film for overgeneralizing, calling this aspect a "convenient cliche", and summed up his review by describing the film as "a superficial treatment of a vital problem that has been staged brilliantly". Robert J. Landry, managing editor of Variety magazine at the time, wrote a review published on October 26. He described Rebel as a "fairly exciting, suspenseful and provocative, if also occasionally far-fetched, melodrama of unhappy youth on another delinquency kick." Unlike some movie critics, Landry thought that James Dean, under the influence of Nicholas Ray's direction, had mostly freed his acting of the mannerisms characteristic of Marlon Brando's style, and that his performance in the movie was "very effective". He praised Dean's interpretation of a maladjusted teenager, noting his ability "to get inside the skin" of his character as "not often encountered". Wanda Hale of the New York Daily News found fault with Rebel's depiction, in her view, of its adults as cardboard figures and of its middle-class teenagers as hoodlums, arguing that it lacked credibility and that "[a]s an honest purposeful drama of juvenile hardness and violence the film just doesn't measure up." On the other hand, she praised James Dean's acting, writing, "[w]ith complete control of the character, he gives a fine, sensitive performance of an unhappy, lonely teenager, tormented by the knowledge of his emotional instability."

Rebel Without a Cause is closely tied with the rise in youth culture during the mid-1950s, in which teenagers became seen as "a distinct social group". The box office successes of Rebel and Blackboard Jungle in 1955 caused a "chain reaction" in Hollywood, according to Army Archerd, who wrote that every Hollywood studio after was "making films on the same subject, with varying degrees of violence, humor, or rock 'n' roll music." The switchblade James Dean's character used in the fight scene at Griffith Observatory was offered at auction on September 30, 2015, by Profiles in History with an estimated value of US$12,000 to $15,000; the winning bid was US$12,000. Also offered at the same auction were production photographs and a final shooting script dated August 17, 1955 for a behind-the-scenes television promotional film titled Behind the Cameras: Rebel Without a Cause hosted by Gig Young and that had scripted interviews and staged footage by the cast and crew (script winning bid US$225.) The 1949 Mercury two-door sedan James Dean drove in the movie is part of the permanent collection at the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada.