If young people in the 1950s were expected to behave like Ozzie and Harriet Nelson’s sons, Ricky and David, or the Cleaver boys, the popular culture industry also provided teenagers with alternative role models. Hollywood films offered several. In Rebel without a Cause (1955), actor James Dean portrayed Jim Stark, a seventeen-year-old filled with anguish about his role in life. A sensitive but misunderstood young man, Stark muses that he wants “just one day when I wasn’t all confused . . . [when] I wasn’t ashamed of everything . . . [when] I felt I belonged some place.” After making only three films, Dean died in a car crash, further enhancing his mystique among young people. The Wild One (1954), which starred Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler, also popularized youthful angst. Strabler, the leather-outfitted leader of a motorcycle gang, rides into a small town, hoping to shake it up. When asked by a local resident, “What are you rebelling against?” Strabler coolly replies, “Whaddya got?” Real gangs did exist on the streets of New York and other major cities. Composed of working-class members from various ethnic and racial backgrounds, these gangs were highly organized, controlled their neighborhood turfs, and engaged in “rumbles” (fights) with intruders. These battles came to Broadway with the production of West Side Story (1957), which pitted a white gang against a Puerto Rican gang in a musical version of Romeo and Juliet; its popularity later spawned a Hollywood film.
Hollywood generally did not portray women as rebels; rather they appeared as mothers, understanding girlfriends, and dutiful wives. If they sought a career, like many of the women played by actor Doris Day, they pursued it only as long as necessary to meet the right man. Yet the film industry did offer a more tantalizing woman, a sexual being who displayed her attributes, albeit in decorous fashion, to seduce and outwit men. Marilyn Monroe played such a woman in The Seven Year Itch (1955), as did Elizabeth Taylor in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), revealing that women also had a powerful libido, though in the end they became domesticated or paid a terrible price.