Rebel without a Cause (1955)

Ray’s eloquent use of architectural space in his epochal account of middle-class teenage angst reminds us that he’d studied under Frank Lloyd Wright. Their painful paths first crossing in a police station, Jim, Judy and Plato form a surrogate family at a deserted mansion, while Griffith Park’s Observatory puts their problems into perspective with a lesson about the unfeeling enormity of time and space.