Classic Film: East of Eden

Last week, I reviewed a screening of Rebel Without a Cause; this week, Northwest Film Forum (NWFF) continued celebrating James Dean around the 50th anniversary of his tragic death by screening Dean's first film, East of Eden, helmed by directing great and the Actors Studio co-founder Elia Kazan. Once again, it was marvelous to see a Dean film on the big screen, after years of only being able to see him on my television screen.

I was particularly interested in seeing East of Eden again because Ron Howard is planning to direct a new version next year with a script by Paul Attanasio (Donnie Brasco, Disclosure). Anytime someone wants to remake a "classic", of course, there are people who get up in arms about it, and East of Eden is no exception.

On the one hand, I can't blame the people who don't want to see another remake (there was also a miniseries version in 1981), especially of a Dean film. As the NWFF staffer who did the intro to the film noted, Kazan said at the time he was filming East of Eden that he cast Dean for the role of Cal Trask because Dean was Cal, and no one else could have played the role. Steinbeck himself, when he came to the set and met Dean, is said to have exclaimed, "Jesus Christ, he is Cal!"

On the other hand, I can also see the point of view of those who look forward to seeing a remake; Kazan's film was based on roughly the last 80 pages of 600+ page book, and there was much of the original source material left out of the film, which ran 115 minutes. Howard, rumor has it, will be starting with the original source material - John Steinbeck's classic novel about man's capacity for good and evil - not doing a remake of Kazan's film, which I think is a smart move on his part. Kazan's East of Eden is a classic film, and Dean's Cal was perfect for it, yes, but it wasn't the source material, the book was. There isn't just one version of each of Shakespeare's plays; numerous interpretations of them have been done, on stage and on film; why shouldn't the same be true for East of Eden?

Steinbeck's novel is a retelling of the biblical Cain and Abel story, with the recurring theme of the Hebrew word "timshel" (thou mayest), which basically means the free will of man to choose good over evil. In Kazan's film version, the character of Cal is more heroic than Steinbeck portrayed him, a fact Steinbeck, as the staffer duly noted in the intro, was not happy about when the movie came out.

Dean's performance in the 1955 film catapulted him to stardom, and with good reason; his acting in this, his first feature film, was just remarkable, especially for the time. Dean was a serious actor; he auditioned several times for the Actors Studio (and wrote home ecstatically when he was accepted), and his style - both his look and his acting - continue to be mimicked by actors today.

Watch Dean's performance in any of his three films, and then go watch A River Runs Through It with a young Brad Pitt, and you can't help but notice how Pitt has picked up on certain quirks of mannerism and facial expression that made Dean's performances shine. Countless actors have used Dean's unique style as a model on which to base their own style as performers. Other great actors have been modeled after too, of course - actors tend to learn a lot from watching other actors whose styles they admire - but what makes Dean unique is the tremendous influence he had after making just three films in a little over a year, early in his career. How he might have grown as an actor, what he might have become is something we can only imagine.

I'm not going to get into a lengthy comparison of the film to the book here; there was, of course, much of the original plot left out of the film, including much of the background of Cal and Aron's mother, Kate (played by Jo Van Fleet), who in the book is a much more purely evil character than she is in the film, and the character of Lee, the Chinese manservant, who serves as both moral compass and surrogate mother in the book but isn't in the film at all. I'd love to see Howard's version show Kate in all her evilness, and include the character of Lee, hopefully portrayed by an actual Chinese actor and not just a random Asian actor.

The 1955 film focuses on the fraternal twin Trask brothers, Caleb, or Cal, played by Dean, and Aron (Richard Davalos), sons of Adam Trask (Raymond Massey), an inventor. Aron is the good son (counterpart to Abel in the biblical tale), the son Adam has always understood. He is smart, pure, and holy, the favored son, but he has a dark side that later comes out. Cal is the "bad" son - the boy called "the prowler" by his female schoolmates, as Aron's girlfriend Abra (portrayed by Dean's fellow Actors Studio contemporary, Julie Harris) tells him laughingly. Cal is dark, brooding and, to Abra, more than a little scary.

Cal is scary to Abra because Abra has her own dark side that she is scared of. She continually reassures herself, "I love Aron, I really, really do", as if by saying it enough, she can make it so. In the end, of course, she and Cal are drawn together inexorably, no matter how she tries to convince herself to love the "good" brother. Aron is not without his own darkness, though - one of the most interesting things to me about the brothers is how Aron seems to need Cal to be bad, in order to be good himself. The more successful Cal is - when Cal works hard at the lettuce business, earning the praise of their father; when Cal comes up with the idea to use a chute to unload the lettuce more quickly; when Cal comes up with the plan to surprise their father with a birthday party - the darker Aron becomes. He only likes Cal when Cal is the bad brother.

My other favorite part of this film is the relationship between Cal and his mother, Kate. Although she's not as evil as she is in the book, Kate is still not a nice person. Cal has been searching his whole life to understand why he's bad, through and through. He sees his father and knows that he is "good"; he sees Aron and believes Aron to be "good"; all he sees in himself is badness, and when he meets Kate, who runs whorehouses, and shot her husband in the shoulder to get away from him, abandoning him along with her two infant sons, he thinks he understands himself better, and why he is the way he is.

What Cal learns, of course, is Steinbeck's greater message - that man can overcome any inherent flaws and can choose to make good choices. Cal struggles to overcome his dark side. He wants so badly for his father to love him, and he feels responsible for his father losing all his money in the failed venture to refrigerate lettuce and ship it by train from California to New York, so when the US gets involved in World War One, Cal decides to invest in beans with his father's friend Will Hamilton (who is a much more integral character in the book).

Cal needs $5,000 to buy into the bean investment, so he goes to his mother to ask for the money. Whether out of a sense of belated guilt, or because she admires his tenacity in coming to her in the first place, or perhaps because she just sees it as a good business investment, she gives him the money. Kate says she isn't ashamed of what she does, though she covers her face with a veil when she walks to the bank to deposit her money. She and Cal understand each other, especially on the issue of his father, who is prone to reading lots of Bible verses and trying to "make" people be good.

"Nobody owns me," Kate tells Cal. "Nobody tells me what to do." She laughs mockingly as she tells Cal about all the important men in town who frequent her establishments. "They sneak in at night. I walk in this door in the daytime, see?"

Aron opposes the war, Adam serves reluctantly on the draft board, and Cal and Hamilton make a tidy profit. Cal just sees it all as a way to earn back the money for his father, and in the process to earn his fathers love. In the book, a younger Adam and his brother Charles give their father Samuel gifts - Adam gives their father a stray puppy, Charles gives him an expensive Swiss army knife. Their father loves the dog, and never uses the knife, and his rejection of Charles' gift (mimicking the biblical storyline of Cain's gift being rejected, which spurs his jealously and ultimately his murder of his brother Abel) fuels the jealousy between the brothers.

This theme is repeated in Cal's gift of money to his father in the next generation; Adam rejects Cal's hard-earned gift, and is ecstatic over Aron's gift - an announcement of his engagement to Abra (which takes Abra by surprise, as she is now well on her way to loving Cal). The tension between Cal and his father is crucial to the film; Kazan said in his autobiography that Dean would deliberately provoke Massey off-camera , and that Massey grew to despise Dean.

In one of the most wrenching moments of the film, after Adam rejects Cal's gift of money to make up all he lost from his failed lettuce venture, Dean embraces Massey. This was an impulsive decision on Dean's part, not a part of the script, and Massey reacted with genuine surprise, saying only, "Cal, Cal!" This is one of the truest moments of the film, and, much like Dean's improvisational intro to Rebel,  shows Dean's innate understanding of the characters he portrayed and what the story was about.

It will be interesting to see what Howard does with a remake of East of Eden - what the script will be like, who he'll cast in the leads, and whether he focuses his story more on Adam and Charles than on Cal and Aron. In the meantime, rent Kazan's version, for the sheer pleasure of watching Dean's performance. Kazan at one point had considered casting Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift in the roles of the brothers, but decided that they, in their 30s at the time, were too old to play teenagers. Imagine how different East of Eden would have been without Dean as Cal, and how different film might be today, had Dean not gotten that role that led to him becoming an icon.