East of Eden (1955)

East of Eden is an American film first released in 1955, directed by Elia Kazan.  The film stars Julie Harris, James Dean, Raymond Massey, Burl Ives and Richard Davalos.  It has also been released under the title: John Steinbeck’s East of Eden.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


California, 1917.  Cal and Aron Trask are twin brothers, the sons of Adam Trask, who owns a large lettuce farm in the Salinas Valley.  Cal is envious of his brother, believing him to be his father’s favourite, and this fuels his resentment and waywardness.  He is also deeply curious to know what became of their mother.  According to their father, their mother died years ago.  As Cal discovers, she is in fact alive and well, and running a thriving brothel in the nearby town of Monterey.  When his father’s plans to refrigerate his lettuce crop end in spectacular failure, Cal is determined to come to his aid.  He manages to wheedle some money out of his mother and invests this in a bean growing business.  America’s decision to join the war in Europe sends bean prices through the roof and Cal makes a tidy profit.  However, his father, a staunch moralist, refuses to take the money that his son offers him.  For Cal, this is the final rejection...

The film that launched 23-year-old James Dean on his short but brilliant movie career is this inspired and highly poignant adaptation of John Steinbeck’s great semi-autobiographical novel, East of Eden.  The kind of character that Dean plays here is the one with which the young actor would be forever associated – the misunderstood, unloved teenager who is driven to rebel in order to assert his own identity and free himself from the trauma of adolescence.  Dean would take on a virtually identical role in his next film, Rebel Without a Cause, the film that made him a cultural icon for a generation of Americans. 

The plot of East of Eden is little more than a reworking of the Biblical Cain and Abel story, but Dean’s tortured, brooding performance and Elia Kazan’s slick direction make it a powerful morality play which burns with an extraordinary emotional intensity.  For his first film in CinemaScope and colour, Kazan is daring with his use of the camera, employing unconventional movement and angles to darken the mood and suggest the first person perspective at certain key dramatic moments.  You could argue that such obvious cinematic artifice is superfluous, given the calibre of the performances which Kazan manages to get out of his cast.  The sumptuous location photography serves the film well; not only is it evocative of the time and place in which the story takes place, but it also captures something of the magical poetry of Steinbeck’s novel.

Interestingly, James Dean was not Kazan’s first choice for the role of Cal Trask.  He originally envisaged Paul Newman (another promising young actor from the method tradition) but changed his mind when he saw Dean perform in a production of the The Immoralist on Broadway in February 1954.  Although Kazan did not at first like Dean, considering him inarticulate, anti-social and moody, he knew instinctively that he was absolutely perfect for the part of Cal.  The director made great capital from the fact that James Dean and Raymond Massey (who played Cal’s father in the film) loathed one another.  Massey, proud of his background as a classically trained actor, resented Dean’s improvisations and modern style of acting.  It suited Kazan that there was this edge to the relationship of his two leading actors and he would even deliberately increase tensions between the two men to achieve the result he wanted on screen.  Dean was also able to draw on his own personal experiences, since he had a strained relationship with his own father that allowed him to identify very intimately with the character he was portraying.

There is a consensus view that East of Eden is James Dean’s finest hour.  His performances in his subsequent two films are impressive but there is something particularly truthful and stirring in what he brings to his first film.  Tragically, this was the only one of his films to be released in his lifetime (he died in a motorcar accident a month before the release of Rebel Without a Cause).   Dean was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in this film but did not win the award.  The film garnered three other Oscar nominations (including one for Kazan’s direction) but only won in the Best Support Actress category.  That award went to Jo Van Fleet, who would be equally impressive (and quite a bit older) in Kazan’s subsequent film Wild River (1960).

© James Travers 2008

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