James Dean: Who's that tough chick with all the algebra homework?

It’s 1958 and Sarah’s parents are worried because their teen daughter prefers doing high school math homework to hanging out with her dopey peers. The other kids think she’s stuck-up. But Sara doesn’t care because she’s a rebel–a rebel without a cause! The thing I like about this 13-minute time-warp mental hygiene film is that the James Dean role is played by a girl. And she’ll will beat your ass if you ask her to dance. It wasn’t intended as a movie about a feminist awakening, but that’s how it plays in retrospect.

Sarah is played by Vera Stough, who is excellent as the distaff Dean. It was directed by Herk Harvey, who four years later made the horror classic Carnival of Souls. Watch “The Snob” here.

More Featured Videos:

• Karate keyboard man.
• Mean jerks mock girls.
• Cringe-worthy 1978 telethon performance.
• Bay Area self-help video.
• School for aspiring beatniks. (1961)
• A ginormous three-year-old British boy. (1935)
• Phil Levine has been collecting cool crap for 52 years.
• Short doc about smartass NYC undertaker.
• Tiny Tim sings about the apocalypse to small children.
• A one-wheeled, electric car from 1932.
• Patti Smith sings Debby Boone on a children’s show in 1979.
• Ridiculously large vending machine in France.
• Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. (1972)
• “Henry Ford’s Mirror of America.” (1962)
• “The Way Things Go.” (1987)
• Ricky Gervais hassles Elmo.
• Home movie of a Michigan beauty parlor. (1941)
• “Gumbasia.” (1955)
• Watch Texas Stadium implode from the inside.
• Jay Walker’s Library of Human Imagination. (2008)
• Gary Kildall–the man who could’ve been Bill Gates. (1995)
• The end of Coney Island’s glory days. (1940)
• Balloon failure at Chicago’s World Fair. (1933)
• The hippie craft of “marbling.” (1970s)
• Fifteen-year-old guru tries to levitate the Astrodome. (1974)
• Edward Kienholz’s controversial L.A. art show. (1969)
• Timothy Leary interviewed at Folsom Prison. (1970s)