Buck, For what it's worth from me, no, "Rebel" isn't that great despite Dean's rep and end and depsite director Nicholas Ray's high-auteur status in some circles. I find some of it almost expressionistically silly, much of it just melodramatic. But it does have a kind of earnest style all the way through, and I think it simply tapped into a youthful zeitgeist of the time, so it became a kind of cultural text. This one was released slightly before my time for watching films of that ilk--but that makes me realize we can't quite see it in the same way as someone from the time, and can only get close to that through imaginative sympathy primed by some scholarly apparatus. This is really a film *of* its time primarily, though it has a unique and rare display of Dean's acting craft that's kind of detachable from the film if you prefer to view it that way. Jeff