Juvenile Divorce In Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without A Cause

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Nicholas Ray's Rebel Without a Cause reflects the youth-obsession of the American public in the 1950s. It also shows the ways in which many Americans viewed the family as a social institution in the Cold War years. James Gilbert has argued that "From the 1940s to the 1960s, Americans looked at the family with double vision: with optimism and despair." While they celebrated the family as the central institution of American life, they feared for its future, worried about its delinquent youth, and wondered why the divorce rate was so high. At the center of the family crisis, many Americans believed, were children who had been abandoned by their parents. Research, into the causes of juvenile delinquency, blamed parents and their inability to maintain

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