In October of 1955, when John McCain was angry, frustrated and newly 19, the movie “Rebel Without A Cause” – a film about angry and frustrated newly-19-year-olds, among others -- was put into general release. It starred, in his most memorable role, the young James Dean as an anguished adolescent repulsed by the world of grown-up rules, conventions and hypocrisies, but with no idea whatever as to what to do about them.
And if there was one movie star who personified patriarchal rectitude in ‘50s America as iconically as Dean personified adolescent rebellion, it was Spencer Tracy -- white-thatched, authoritative, tough, decent in one film after another. While Dean was floundering in the grown-up world, Tracy was the movies’ ultimate adult – presiding over the last big-city machine in The Last Hurrah and personifying justice itself as the judge in Judgment at Nuremberg.
