If direct politics was not possible, a sort of indirect protest indeed was. This was most evident in the actions of America's so-called 'rebel' stars : Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean, as well as stars that hailed from other countries such as Polish actor Zbigniew Cybulski, France's Jean-Paul Belmondo and Albert Finney of England. They were their generation's angry young men and their acting relied heavy on scowls, sneers and pained looks, they played exclusively - the parts of pariahs, transients and tearaways, even off-screen they were notoriously difficult with the press and less than cooperative with the studio's publicity machine. Yet no one really knew what they were so angry about - their characteristic inarticulateness from Clift's long piercing silences to Brando's mumbling incoherent delivery, Belmondo's throwaway style - all these were expressions of the very unfocused nature of their collective discontent. Unsurprisingly it was Brando's Johnny Strabler that was confronted with the unforgettable query from 1953's The Wild One that inquired as to what precisely was he rebelling against to which Stabler's flippant riposte was - 'What have you got?' Albert Finney during the closing scene of 1960's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning hurls a stone at the housing estate, an unquestionable symbol of everyday conformity but it is really no more precise than that. Sure the rebel stars were 'anti' - but as a lifestyle rather than a political position as many at the time had deemed their angst as such.
All the rebels were men. However inarticulate and unfocused it might be, male stars could at the very least register protest. Discontent emerged in more distorted ways with their female counterparts. Women, far more than men, were the center of scandals concerning the stars. There would be exceptions, most notably Robert Mitchum's heavy-handed conviction for the possession of a minuscule amount of marijuana but even when the scandal concerned couples, as with the on-off relationships of Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, or Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the Sixties, it was the women who garnered the most attention. The first grand-scale scandal was Ingrid Bergman's affair with director Roberto Rossellini, by whom she had a child. No matter that they were subsequently married - Bergman would never bring down the wrath of Hollywood upon herself and seemed to be defying the whole moral order in breaking her own previous virtuous off-screen image. Yet only seven years later, she was welcomed back to Hollywood with open arms as they offered the estranged actress a plum role as Anastasia in Anatole Litvak's 1956 biopic about the survivor of the Russian royal family and would go on to secure and Oscar for her performance. Her scandals only made her ultimately more an object of interest and empathy. A similar result attended Lana Turner's ambiguous involvement in the murder of underworld figure Johnny Stompanato, which would be reflected in her film - Portrait in Black (1960).