James Dean

James Dean: Three Films, One Permanent Silhouette

At about 5:45 on the evening of 30 September 1955, a silver Porsche 550 Spyder with the words "Little Bastard" painted on its tail met a Ford turning left at the junction of U.S. Route 466 and Highway 41, near Cholame, California. The driver of the Porsche was twenty-four years old, was on his way to a road race in Salinas, and had at that point completed exactly three motion pictures. Two of them had not yet been released. On the strength of those three films — a body of work smaller than most actors accumulate in a single busy year — James Dean became one of the most persistently imitated figures of the twentieth century.

The Farm in Fairmount

Dean was the son of Winton Dean and Mildred Marie Wilson, and the central fact of his childhood is a subtraction: his mother died of uterine cancer in 1938, when he was nine. His father, unable or unwilling to raise him alone in Los Angeles, sent the boy back to Indiana. He grew up on a farm in Fairmount, in the Quaker household of his aunt and uncle, Ortense and Marcus Winslow. Biographers have never stopped reaching for that bereavement to explain the grievance and appeal Dean later put on screen, though it explains rather less than it appears to.

He graduated from Fairmount High School in May 1949 and returned to California, enrolling at Santa Monica College to read pre-law before transferring to UCLA and changing his major to theatre arts — the sort of course correction that reads as inevitable only in hindsight. He studied privately with the actor James Whitmore, and then, in New York, at the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, where the American variant of Stanislavskian technique was being refined into what the trade press would flatten into the word "Method."

Apprenticeship in Small Parts

The early credits are unglamorous. Dean's first work in front of a camera, in 1950, was a Pepsi commercial. He took bit parts in *Fixed Bayonets!* (1951) and *Sailor Beware* (1952), the kind of appearances that require a freeze-frame to confirm. His first substantial stage role came on Broadway in *See the Jaguar*. It was Broadway, not the screen, that put him in front of the man who mattered.

Cal Trask

Elia Kazan, preparing *East of Eden* (1955) from the final act of Steinbeck's novel, initially wanted Marlon Brando. The screenwriter Paul Osborn suggested Dean, having seen him on stage. Kazan's first impression was unenthusiastic; his second was decisive. He took the young actor to meet Steinbeck, and the exchange settled it — *wasn't he Cal?* Steinbeck agreed, and the argument was over.

What Kazan then did with Dean was less a matter of coaxing a performance than of arranging conditions. *East of Eden* was Kazan's first film in colour and in CinemaScope, and he shot it with unusually long takes, setting golden exteriors against progressively darker interiors as the story tightened. He deliberately cultivated real friction between Dean and Raymond Massey, who played the father, so that the antagonism on screen would not have to be manufactured twice. Dean built Cal Trask out of inarticulacy — fidgeting, half-turned shoulders, a body that could not settle. Much of the performance was improvised, including the anguished embrace of Massey. Kazan remarked on the expressiveness of Dean's "vivid body," and used its restlessness as visual contrast against a deliberately calmer supporting cast. The film took four Academy Award nominations; Jo Van Fleet won Best Supporting Actress.

Jim Stark and Jett Rink

*Rebel Without a Cause* (1955), directed by Nicholas Ray, gave Dean the role that fixed him: Jim Stark, a teenager whose distress is not attached to poverty or war or any of cinema's licensed causes. The picture found an enormous adolescent audience and supplied the visual grammar — the red jacket, the white T-shirt, the jeans — for a category of person who had barely existed as a marketing proposition a decade earlier.

*Giant* (1956), directed by George Stevens, was released after his death. As the ranch hand turned oil millionaire Jett Rink, Dean aged decades across the film, working in grey hair and prosthetics. It is the performance that most complicates the myth of Dean as pure instinct, because it is visibly an act of construction — a young man's calculated study of ruin.

The Porsche

From 1954 Dean took motor racing seriously, in the way that ends careers and occasionally lives. He bought a Triumph Tiger T110 motorcycle, and in March 1955 a Porsche 356 Super Speedster. His last completed race was at Santa Barbara on Memorial Day, 30 May 1955. On 30 September he was driving the 550 Spyder toward Salinas when he collided with a Ford driven by Donald Gene Turnupseed, a student at Cal Poly. Dean sustained a broken neck and was pronounced dead at 6:20 p.m. at Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital. He was buried on 8 October at the Fairmount Friends Church, before roughly six hundred mourners. He would be nominated twice, posthumously, for Best Actor — for *East of Eden* and *Giant* — and remains the only performer to have received two posthumous acting nominations.

Why James Is Called a Genius

The honest answer is that the claim rests on craft and physical intelligence rather than on intellect, and it rests on a sample so small that it can barely support statistical weight. What Dean possessed to an unusual degree was expressive control of the body under conditions of apparent spontaneity: the capacity to convey a thought the character cannot articulate through posture, hesitation and misdirected gesture, and to do so on a take that looks unrehearsed and is not. Kazan, who was not a sentimental judge of actors, singled out precisely this — the "vivid body" — and built shot design around it. The improvisation in *East of Eden*, including the embrace of Massey, indicates an actor able to generate usable material in real time, which is a genuinely rare technical faculty.

The counter-case is substantial and should be stated plainly. Three films is not an oeuvre. Kazan supplied a great deal of what audiences read as Dean's achievement — the long takes, the manufactured hostility with Massey, the lighting scheme — and a performance is a collaborative artefact that a director can substantially author. Dean's death at twenty-four removed any possibility of the mediocre middle period that tests a reputation, and the mythology that followed has been fed continuously by commerce: a Converse advertising campaign built on a 1955 photograph reportedly lifted sales by thirty to fifty per cent. The critic David Thomson put the durable part well, observing that Dean "never seemed callow" and appeared "more experienced, older, and sadder than the grownups in his films." That is a precise description of an effect. Whether the effect was genius or an extraordinary and briefly sustained talent that never had to survive contact with a long career is a question the evidence cannot close.

Afterlife

All three of Dean's films have been entered in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. He received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 and was ranked eighteenth among the American Film Institute's greatest male legends of Golden Age Hollywood in 1999; *Time* later listed him among the most influential fashion icons of all time. His influence ran sideways into music — Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, David Bowie, and Bob Dylan, who borrowed his visual attitude for the covers of *The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan* and *Highway 61 Revisited* — and forward into acting, where Robert De Niro, Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio have all named him. "There was something so raw and powerful about that performance," DiCaprio said of *East of Eden*. Seventy years on, as Thomson noted, new generations still fall under his sway.