East of Eden

East of Eden is a curious combination of optical realism with operatic acting -- James Dean's first movie, features an over-the-top performance by the beautiful young man that clashes dramatically with the pictures commitment to realism.  In the film, Dean plays a young man anguished by the thought that his father doesn't really love him.  His father, played by Raymond Massey, is close kin to the young man in some respects although the film conceals this until the end -- both father and son are dreamers, idealists, men who pursue fabulous but dangerous projects until they are destroyed.  Dean's character, Cal (short for Caleb) is a histrionic, self-dramatizing romantic -- as such he is much more attractive than the other characters, an aspect of character materialized in Dean's outrageous prettiness.  Similarly, his character stands apart from the others -- he is motivated by intense and melodramatic emotions while the rest of the people in the movie seem, more or less, normal, mediocre, oriented toward sex and prestige and money.  Caleb's all or nothing personality sets him apart from others -- and this is dramatized by the fact that Dean's style of acting is so garishly emotive that he seems an apparition from another planet, another dimension of being.  The central conflict between Dean's character and the forces of conventional morality is dramatized in the collision between his style of acting and the way the others in the film portray their characters.

East of Eden, at least in part, is a biblical allegory, a variant on the story of Cain and Abel, a point expressed sententiously by Burl Ives playing the wise and all-knowing sheriff in the county where the story is set -- the terrain, which is symbolic, encompasses both Monterrey and Salinas.  Caleb has a twin brother, Aaron.  Aaron is his father's favorite, a conventional young man anxious to please.  Caleb is tormented by the feeling that his father doesn't love him.  Both boys have been told that their mother died soon after their birth.  In fact, their mother is the madam of a very prosperous whorehouse in Monterrey and a wealthy woman.  Seeking a parental figure that he will love him, Caleb tracks his mother down at her brothel.  She has him thrown out.  The patriarch is obsessed with using ice to forestall decay -- again, another symbol of the old man's desire to defeat the corruption that exists in the world.  He runs a vegetable farm and develops technology to ship lettuce in refrigerated cars.  But this fails and the lettuce rots and the family is threatened with poverty.  Caleb borrows $5000 from his mother and invests it in war profiteering -- it is 1917 and America is on the verge of entering World War One.  The patriarch played by Raymond Massey is now the leader of the local draft board and the film suggests, although only very obliquely, that he is manipulating the conscription to keep his twin sons from serving in the army.  The conventional Aaron is engaged to be married -- he has an equally conventional debutante fiancée.  Inevitably, she is attracted to the beautiful if morose Caleb.  Caleb courts her at a local fair where there is riot in which a German immigrant is threatened.  In the fighting, Caleb erupts violently and repeatedly punches Aaron who will not respond.  Later, Caleb brings a gift of $5000 to his father on his birthday.  Massey's father is an upright and righteous man and feels guilty, it seems, that he has been sparing his sons from the draft.  He is appalled by Caleb's war profiteering and rejects the money.  Caleb, then, drags Aaron to Monterrey where he introduces him to their mother.  The strait-laced Aaron goes predictably berserk, getting drunk and enlists in the military.  Father has a stroke and, ultimately, Caleb, now in love with Aaron's fiancée, cares for his father.  Although the ending is dark in all ways -- it's pictorially very dark in the old man's bedroom -- there is a suggestion that Caleb and his father are now reconciled.  The ending isn't exactly satisfactory involving a couple of betrayals (Caleb and Aaron's fiancé both stab poor, stupidly virtuous Aaron in the back) and, of course, we are left to fret whether Aaron, now impulsively gone to be a soldier, will ever return from War to end all Wars.  Caleb is too high-strung to be a nurse-maid to the dying old man and one expects that relationship to explode into violence a few weeks post denouement.  Furthermore, Caleb is too self-absorbed and narcissistic to be a good boyfriend and we are apprehensive at the prospects of the love blossoming between Aaron's erstwhile fiancée and the erratic, unpredictable and, frequently, drunk Caleb.  In other words, the film's happy ending shows every prospect of being a deeply unsatisfactory, and indeed, prospectively disastrous outcome. 

The film's cinemascope aspect is problematic.  About every five shots, the director, Elia Kazan will indulge himself in some form of spectacle intended to exploit the wide-screen.  Some of these images are very beautiful -- one of them, showing  someone leaning on a shanty in the left foreground while an old school steam engine yanks a line of cars across the horizon toward the right is spectacular in its use of the big, narrow image.  But the plot doesn't really lend itself to wide-screen spectacle.  In fact, it's more of a gloomy film noir story told across a giant screen that doesn't exactly cohere with the pictorially modest narrative -- there are no big screen sequences:  the film is mostly a psychological drama that can be effectively shown in tight close-ups.  Thus, a sort of uneasy incongruence exists between the huge screen format and the novelistic detail invoked with respect to the characters.  Monterrey is evoked in the remarkable beginning with a series of images of a sleepy, corrupt harbor town -- the buildings are standing apart from one another as if ashamed of the company that they are keeping.  A huge black woman sits on a stoop giggling in a sinister way as Caleb wanders among the shuttered brothels.  Salinas, by contrast, is upright and tightly built, a neat little Western city with mercantile facades and nice Victorian houses.  A number of scenes are powerfully effective -- an image of James Dean like some kind of damaged god, flinging huge chunks of ice down from a storage tower is spectacular.  The scene in which James Dean first meets his mother, walking on a bright windy day outside the brothel, is shot in a kind of dusty, luminous light that makes us think that the image is a dream; it looks like a painting by Corot -- indeed, all of the action in Monterrey has the aspect of a dream.  (Hitchcock uses this same dusty, colored light in Vertigo in the scene in which Kim Novak appears in the hotel remade as Jimmy Stewart's lost lover.)  The script is generous -- there are no real villains and everyone is shown to have reasons for their action.  The most violent thing in the film is the shocking image of Aaron on the troop train butting out a window with his forehead, smashing the glass between himself and his father who is horrified that he has joined the Great Crusade in Europe.  Shots of the lettuce farm and the bean fields and corn rows around Salinas have a wonderful documentary urgency.  Images of Caleb's girlfriends, mostly Hispanic migrant workers, have a vivid, realistic ambience and Kazan's images of California in 1917 seem eerily authentic.  Raymond Massey's mask-like staring face after his stroke gives the film's unsatisfactory ending a sense of real horror particularly since Massey is shown to be kind, forgiving, and ultimately Christian in the best sense of the word -- the film never condescends to Massey's piety nor does it necessarily privilege Caleb's callow rebellion.  The scene in which Massey orders Caleb to read aloud from the Psalms is splendid -- it shows Caleb's defiance, Massey's rage and the hidden connection between father and son in a brilliant way.