East of Eden: DVD Review
June 5, 2005
Brando slowly stroking a lap cat in “The Godfather”. Bogart coolly watching over his nightclub in “Casablanca”. Welles smirking to Joseph Cotton from an oddly lit doorway in “The Third Man”. These are the great, iconic entrances in film history; singular money-shots of Hollywood superstars at their power stature best. The shot of Welles, who by 1949 had already lost much of that power stature, as Harry Lime, with a playful kitten romping around his expensive Italian loafers in “The Third Man” will always be my favorite, but for shear nostalgic reverence, take a look at the way James Dean enters filmdom in “East of Eden”, the first of the late, great actor’s three similar themed performances before his tragic death at 24. After a sweeping three-minute overture, the camera pans away from the Monterey fishing docs to a huge Warner Brothers logo, followed by the appropriately loud credits, before giving way to the then virtually unknown Dean, hunched over with his head in his arms, sitting on a street curb waiting impatiently for his estranged prostitute mother to leave the bank. In his cream colored pants and beige sweater, Dean is all anguish and style, with a perfectly semi-long quaff combed back atop a furrowed brow and a pained face that says as much with one squint about the way he’d come to symbolize teenage alienation and frustration than any commemorative plate or garishly designed novelty Zippo lighter ever would.
In the moment, we know nothing of Dean’s character and motivation, nothing of the woman he is about to stalk, nothing of his painfully second-rate home life with a father he’s constantly struggling for affections from, and nothing of the persona the Dean character, or the allure of the Dean face, would come to mean in American history, but as “East of Eden” introduces us to James Dean, the legend, with a sharp horn blow on the soundtrack, Elia Kazan is introducing us to James Dean, the tortured method actor, and for all of the Brando’s before, and Hoffman’s since, there was never a more fittingly crumpled actor’s intro in a Being, as character and as future nostalgic entity, than Dean’s first moments in Kazan’s famous picture. Dean’s smoldering frustration and isolation on that Monterey street curb is, if anything, the glorious beginning to an unfairly short body of tremendous work, and recently released on DVD for the first time, the image looks better than ever, with a crisp digital transfer that brings that famous face back to it’s 1955 prime.
After the star-making introduction of Dean as John Steinbeck’s Cal Trask, Kazan’s film tells a tale of bitterness and sadness within a terribly repressed Salinas Valley farming family, taking the final third of Steinbeck’s huge 1952 novel and turning it’s blatantly biblical themes into an emotional melodrama rife with open wounds and festering rebellion. Dean is Cain to Richard Davalos’ Abel, named Aron in the book and 1955 movie, two brothers who constantly, though quietly, battle for the affections of their puritanical father Adam (Raymond Massey). As he would in his following picture, “Rebel Without a Cause”, Dean uses his own troubled history with an estranged father to pour emotional baggage into Cal and Adam’s generational gap relationship, a textbook trick in the method-acting handbook, and given the off-screen dislike Massey felt for the needling Dean, the two characters show strain from the very beginning. In one scene, with Aron in the middle as a divider at the dinner table, Cal and Adam get into a fight over how the bible is to be read as penance for misbehavior. “You have no repentance,” says Adam, after Cal’s latest act of rebellion, reading aloud the numbers of the Psalms, much to Adam’s disgust, “you’re bad, through and through bad.” Good and bad play a big role in “East of Eden”, but in this early table scene, shot with a slightly tilted camera to suggest just how skewed the relationship is, a device used often in the film, the stakes are quite clear; Cal loves his father, but resents his older brother’s favoritism with the old man, and jealously leads him to act out in disobedience and 1950’s anti-conformist rebellion. “I’m at my ropes end with that boy,” says the father, in another key line of dialogue, “I don’t understand him. I never have.” To ‘50’s teenagers, that was the point, and never had one face symbolized the plight so perfectly well than Dean as Cal Trask, and even more so as ‘Rebel’s Jim Stark.
Kazan’s adaptation, written by Paul Osborn, with praise from Steinbeck, deals with varying degrees of guilt and freedom, love and acceptance. The acceptance themes run throughout the Cal and Adam relationship, and so does the struggle for love, but the latter also plays big in the arch of the film’s main female character, Abra (Julie Harris, top billed over Dean and Massey), who is engaged to Aron, but feels a growing attraction to the shy and neglected Cal. Two scenes best illustrate her character; one in a ravishing field of yellow daisies, she monologues to Cal about her own scarred history when her father remarried (“girls love their fathers terribly”) and she threw the wedding ring into the lake, and a late scene where she pleads with Adam, on his deathbed, to relent and let Cal into his heart. The melodramatic aspects aside, Abra is the only emotionally stable character in the film, and her continually escalating attraction from the Good Son to the Bad Son not only gives the film a romantic structure outside of the family emotions, but foreshadows the change the Natalie Wood character in ‘Rebel’ would go through toward the misunderstood Stark, basically, that stability and repression were well and good in post-war America (1945-54, not 1917, where the story takes place), but today’s new hero, a brooding anti-establishment spokesperson looking towards the 60’s and beyond, has to mean something, stand for something, want something. “I gotta know who I am. I gotta know who I’m like. I gotta know,” he mumbles, in search of his estranged mother Kate (Oscar winner Jo Van Fleet), and at that, we’ve indeed found a new kind of hero, an outcast searcher, whose first words (“You want me?”) and actions have all the longing and puzzlement of a lost puppy dog before a hard life turns him into a seasoned attack mutt.
If “East of Eden” should be read in biblical terms of familial love and abandonment, than its WWI politics (draft dodging, patriotism, racism towards German immigrants, Steinbeck’s familiar theme of migrant farmers and big government bullyism) should also be read as a mirror (another big one) into 1950’s paranoia and Cold War idealism. The film premiered a few weeks before Kazan would sweep the Oscars for his first great symbolist statement, “On the Waterfront”, where Brando’s ratting on local mobsters was an obvious mirror of Kazan’s “naming names” to HUAC, and in “East of Eden”, it’s easy to read Cal/Cain as the symbol of Kazan struggling to accept, and get past his embattled history with a stern father, both his own, and his surrogate, America. In the film this is best seen in one particularly stunning long take, as Aron calls out Abra and Cal, who are hidden in a clinch beneath the leaves of a willow tree, after a birthday party for Adam goes terribly wrong. The scene is all about hidden faces (Aron with his back to the camera, Cal and Abra in the leaves) and emerging developments, leading up to the climactic revelation of Kate’s profession to Aron, and it can be seen as a device for Kazan to get his characters, and himself, out of intense scrutiny and isolation and into cathartic dialogue and life changing revelations. A lot is happening here, and to fully understand it, you may need a good grasp of everything from brotherly love in the bible to the post WWII zeitgeist of communistic fear and oppression, but to understand it in its basest dramatic elements, it’s shear filmic melodrama, played out to the tune of heartbreak and duplicitous therapy by way of secrets revealed and pent up emotions exploded. In its larger than life themes of recognition and biblical love, Kazan’s classic Cinemascope weeper not only made a star of it’s young, brooding hero, advancing the plight of teenagers across the nation, but set in motion a notion that the ideal conformist family of post-war America may be nothing more than a mask, shielding resentment, pain, and frustration. James Dean will forever be the poster boy of such a heavy conception, and “East of Eden” was its beautiful birth.
“East of Eden” has been released by Warner Brother’s as
part of The Complete James Dean Collection, culling Dean’s film work,
‘Eden’, “Rebel Without a Cause”, and “Giant”, into one
must-have collection. It’s
an important collection, befitting an important Hollywood idol.
X-X-X
Disk one of the two-disk special edition features a commentary track by veteran Time critic Richard Schickel, one of the more astute authors and speakers of the ever-aging American generation of film critics. It’s a highlight of the package, but the real goods lie on disk two, with a new 20-minute documentary on the making and lasting impact of the film, and a 60-minute 1988 documentary on the life of James Dean. The latter, “James Dean Forever” features some loving stories from Julie Harris and Dean’s good friend William Bast, who tells of their young Poverty Row days at UCLA, before Dean went off to New York, and ultimately was discovered by Kazan for his ‘Eden’ star turn. Interesting tidbits in the doc include a rare Pepsi commercial for which Dean was paid 30 bucks, and an explanation from his auto mechanic about why exactly Dean’s Porsche Spider swerved off the road on September 30, 1955, weeks after wrapping “Giant”, killing the burgeoning star instantaneously. He just ran out of road on a sharp turn away from a truck, says the mechanic, even an experienced racer like Dean could do nothing about it. One wonders how the Dean legend would have played out had he lived. Would he have beaten Earnest Borgnine at the ’56 Oscars, Yul Brenner in ’57, and would the three films be so revered today had he gone on to continue the trend of playing troubled loners (his Jett Rink in “Giant” doesn’t get the girl, unlike in the other two movies), possibly petering out, like Brando, in middle age. One of the great aspects of a legend is that you don’t have to speculate on such things, you just look at what’s there, and cherish the genius. As it stands, Warner Brothers is now only second to Criterion in classy extras-filled DVD editions of cinematic masterworks, and “East of Eden”, as well as the new ‘Rebel’ and slightly older “Giant” editions, are essential and beautifully packaged DVD’s, worthy of the source material, and it’s famous angry star.
by Adam Suraf