“Cain rose up against his brother Abel and slew him. And Cain went away, and dwelt in the land of Nod only east of Eden.”
When this line is uttered and that Biblical parallel drawn most openly in the last ten minutes of Elia Kazan’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s ubiquitous novel, its intention is one of ill-will -the sheriff comparing a young man to one of the famous early villains in the Bible, encouraging him to step out of the life of his family and community for good. But what this movie does, and was likely the intent of Steinbeck, is make this descendant of Cain the sympathetic figure in this story, at worst an anti-hero unfairly sidelined and stigmatized. Cain is supposed to be the ancestor of mankind, his violence, jealousy, and rage an explanation for humanity’s -the implicit theory of the story that we would have been a better, more virtuous race descended from Abel. But supposing that we’re not, it is even more necessary to find understanding with Cain, and interrogate the virtues of that myth as a whole. Steinbeck very much was interested in that, to the point of basing a self-declared magnum opus off it.
Kazan’s 1955 East of Eden is really only an adaptation of the last quarter of that epic book, which begins in the previous generation of the Trask family and depicts the backstory only alluded to by the film. Perhaps this was done because the meat of the story just takes place in that final act, or because one central character was easier to follow for a film’s runtime than two or three. This character being the disenchanted, rebellious Cal Trask, a spiritual compatriot potentially to Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in Kazan’s previous film On the Waterfront may have poised an attractive thematic consistency for the turncoat director. He even envisioned Brando for the part again, but figured he was too old to play a late teenager.
The part instead went to one of Brando’s younger Actors Studio colleagues.
Part of the legend around James Dean concerns just how brief his stardom was -his film career lasted just five years, but his leading man status was around for little more than one. He died in September 1955; this breakout role in East of Eden arrived only in April. Given Rebel Without a Cause released a month after his accident and Giant the year later -this was his only star vehicle of his lifetime, the only fruits of his success that he could enjoy came from it. There is something both very sad and haunting about that. Yet it encapsulates well his talents and his entirely unique screen presence -he was more than just the pretty new star. The first of his two posthumous Oscar nominations is well earned.
Part of the legend around James Dean concerns just how brief his stardom was -his film career lasted just five years, but his leading man status was around for little more than one. He died in September 1955; this breakout role in East of Eden arrived only in April. Given Rebel Without a Cause released a month after his accident and Giant the year later -this was his only star vehicle of his lifetime, the only fruits of his success that he could enjoy came from it. There is something both very sad and haunting about that. Yet it encapsulates well his talents and his entirely unique screen presence -he was more than just the pretty new star. The first of his two posthumous Oscar nominations is well earned.
His role of Caleb “Cal” Trask is the tragic driving force of the movie, this young guy on the cusp of adulthood in the Californian Salinas Valley in 1917, contending harshly with personal demons of vice, identity, inadequacy, and belonging, all stemming from a dim relationship with his entrepreneurial religious father Adam, played by Raymond Massey. At least as he perceives it, his father favours his older, obedient and seemingly more well-adjusted brother Aron (Richard Davalos), and he is consequently desperate to earn his father’s love and approval.
It’s crucial to note that Adam is not a cruel or arrogant father to Cal, but he is neglectful, ignorant, and dispassionate in attitude towards his second son, completely unable to notice the effect his lack of paternal affection is having -and though the story keeps close to that foundational analogy, it strikes a chord too with many relationships and tensions between second children and their parents, especially those in wealthy, powerful, and patriarchal families (the current Royal Family in particular appears to reflect this dynamic). It is a tangible kind of bitterness, even if Cal’s take on it is very dramatic. Yet it encompasses a lifetime of these feelings and his very insular grappling with them, unable to have any kind of an outlet to express them or the will to confront his family openly on them. His demons become only more embedded by this, his dim view of himself in spite of a lack of evidence only more ingrained.
This is a moody yet complex character, warped too by his feelings around identity and where the family comes from. From his first moments on screen, you can sense these difficulties, this darkness, and are drawn to them. James Dean’s natural mystique was his greatest asset, at least as far as we saw. A classic method actor, a lot is communicated in merely his body language and expressiveness -those constantly furrowed brows over his intense blue eyes, that melancholy scowl. The desperate idealism is there too though, that hope he clings to that there is something he can do to change things -what he settles on is a bean business to take advantage of a lucrative market should the U.S. enter the war as it seems set to (capitalist success is the way to a father’s heart). Some reviews of this movie when it first came out compared the newcomer Dean unfavourably to Brando, and felt he seemed to be simply copying the elder star’s performance style. And while both do tap into the rawness of their melodramatic material, I think Dean is sufficiently different. The spark at the centre of his emotions is stronger than Brando’s usually was and his anguish seems in direct relation to his youth -he was the better choice for this movie on that factor, Cal needs to be a kid essentially. That particular essence of pain, he captures through the combination of his age and performance style better than anybody else in this time. It hurts to watch some of what he goes through here, even in his moments of excitement and hope -because they are so sure to fall.
Of no help to this is his bitter and miserable mother Kate, played by Jo Van Fleet, whom his father told him had died, but had actually run out on him, unwilling to abide Adam’s controlling personality. And as was a custom for stories of this time detailing women rebelling against their social limitations and patriarchal norms, she has been consigned the status of a villain and avatar of sexual vice, operating a brothel under the name Cathy Ames. However, Kazan and Van Fleet -who won an Oscar for her performance here- do not depict her in the typical manner of sex workers in this era. In perhaps a more classier move, they draw her instead as something of a Miss Havisham figure, often limited to a single dimly lit room and a morbidly black dress -the context that Cal routinely sees her in, once he discovers her and goes to to seek answers. The inner turmoil and reputed dark side of Cal is said by even her to be a reflection of her influence in him; in this assumption, it is interesting to see him attempt to curry favour with her in a way equivalent to his father. There is an interesting bond that they form that Dean and Van Fleet play well that connects them as flawed kindred spirits, while also suggesting her as an image of the mood that might consume him. But she supports him financially at least out of guilty motherly obligation -though she does not have regrets about leaving Adam. From a gender politics and representation perspective, she is an interesting character, in this movie form at least -both an approximation of the unsavory archetype for defiant women, and a character whom some sympathy is allowed towards through small choices in direction and performance. Of course it helps that her role is much reduced from the novel, which more emphatically paints her as wicked. You could argue this comes off in the movie too, via her conscious reinforcement of Cal’s cynicism, but I think there is some nuance there, even if substantively she remains a regressive trope.
In contrast to her is the woman who is a good influence on Cal, his brother’s girlfriend Abra -played by Julie Harris in only her second screen role (and having gotten an Oscar nomination for her first). Like many an archetypal nice girl, she is drawn to the moody rebel, and though the film can only go so far in defining their romance -per the typical censorship of the era- her sweetness and affection goes a ways towards lightening his spirits and giving him some semblance of a normal human relationship. It’s not one of the more interesting performances from the five-time Tony winner, and she is tangibly a fair bit older than her character is meant to be, but there is real grace there, especially towards the end of the film where Cal needs it most.
Because it doesn’t go well at Adam’s birthday party, where he is first extremely pleased by Aron’s ‘gift’ of a proposal to Abra -the promise of a traditional family unit apparently being very appealing to the old man. But then , Cal’s gift of the money he has earned with his bean business -a substitute for the money lost by Adam’s own failed shipping endeavour earlier in the film, is greeted with disgust, as Adam considers it exploitative of the troops and war profiteering. It is a good moment, Massey’s apathetic disappointment contrasted against Dean’s palpable heartbreak -with of course the knife in the wound of Adam directly comparing Cal’s gift unfavourably to his brother’s in seeming confirmation of all Cal’s suspicions. Aron doesn’t help by chastising him also and a little later he is even thrown under the bus by his business partner in the scheme, Burl Ives’s sheriff Sam.
Of course he snaps. And what follows is a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy that, to Kazan's credit, he doesn't much simplify or modernize -letting hyperbole and epic emotion carry out the trauma of Aron being exposed to his mother, both on him and on Kate, his subsequent immediate disillusionment with everything his father stood for prompting him to enlist in the war and hop on a train, shocking Adam into a stroke. Of course in the book all of this takes place across a greater span of time -Kate commits suicide in remorse while Aron dies abroad before Adam suffers for it all. Condensing it and omitting the deaths makes the series of events very over-dramatic; and yet as presented it functions well as nightmare illustration of the consequences of Cain's "killing" Abel for Cal. And the final scene still manages to breathe with the insinuation of a possible reparative relationship between son and father as Cal dotes on Adam, if it may also merely accentuate his pathetic desperation for any scrap of approval.
Whether triumphant or pitiful, the ending of East of Eden is certainly interesting -Kazan seems to employ a conscious Prodigal Son aesthetic to those last moments in the composition. It was his first film in colour and makes good use of it -especially where Dean is concerned. The film does well at achieving the story's sense of grandiosity in a rather limited context -the epic that Kazan never made otherwise. He would come back to its subjects though, in fact East of Eden could be read as the middle-part in a thematic trilogy including On the Waterfront and Splendor in the Grass of mid-century character studies of youthful disillusionment. It is perhaps a tame translation of its source material, and its status is simply the result of being intertwined with the legend of James Dean. But it does achieve the provocative spirit of Steinbeck, its rich allusion still stands out, its tragedy still resonates, whether Dean's own is connected to it or not.
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