Actor James Dean famously made only three movies before his untimely death. Until recently, I’d only seen two of them. I rather liked his most famous role in Rebel Without a Cause, but Giant isn’t really my kind of movie. Dean’s barely in Giant, however, and he’s easily the best part of that movie. But there was one more, namely East of Eden, based on a John Steinbeck novel and directed by the talented, if controversial, Elia Kazan.
Guess what else was leaving HBO Max by the end of the month…
East of Eden tells the story of two brothes, Cal (Dean) and Aron Trask (Richard Davalos). It’s 1917, and their father Adam (Raymond Massey) owns a ranch around Monterey, California. Adam is a very religious man, but the two brothers could not be more different. Cal is troubled, and he has some suspicions about the identity of the madam (Jo Van Fleet) for the local whorehouse. Aron is a good boy, a pacifist who does what his father wants and is more or less engaged to neighbor girl Abra (Julie Harris). The brothers do seem to love each other, with Aron more or less saying it and Cal, well, not being overly hostile though he too seems to have feelings for Abra, feelings she may be inclined to return under the right conditions. However, when Adam loses a few thousand dollars under a failed vegetable shipping business, Cal makes it his business to raise some beans to get the money back. Cal knows that if America enters the Great War, then beans will be a valuable commodity, and that will be an easy way for Cal to earn back the money Adam lost.
Of course, things are never that simple. The war sweeps through town, causing citizens to turn on the lone German family that lives there, and Cal’s eventual conversation with Kate the madam provides some insight into why he is the way he is. But with war fever sweeping the land, can a pacifist like Aron keep himself out of it? Can Cal earn back the money his father lost? Would Adam even approve of such money if he knew where Cal got it and why? Can these three men stay together even as Abra is perhaps inadvertently coming between the two brothers?
Steinbeck apparently based this story off the Bible tale of Cain and Abel. It’s not quite as violent–Cal doesn’t murder Aron or even really lay a finger on him as his worst is to simply tell Aron a truth his brother probably never wanted to know–but it does have those parallels. If anything, this is an intense drama about a family trying to hold itself together when the two brothers are both very different people. There’s no doubt they love each other, but that doesn’t mean people can’t sometimes hurt those they love. Heck, they arguably can hurt them much, much worse that way.
On a side note, I’ve seen a few of Kazan’s best known movies, but this may be the first time I’ve seen one in color. It’s a little unusual. This was fine, a good showcase for what Dean could do (Rebel Without a Cause is still his best work), but really, I do wonder how much more this would have hit me if Kazan had shot it, as he had with A Streetcar Named Desire, A Face in the Crowd, and On the Waterfront in the black-and-white I am personally more used to.
Grade: A-
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