EAST OF EDEN (76)

Directed by: Elia Kazan (1955)

Starring: James Dean, Raymond Massey, Julie Harris, Jo Van Fleet

The Pitch: A virtuous farmer's wayward son clashes both with his father and his straight-arrow brother : not a million miles from the story of Cain and Abel.

Theo Sez: Fragments of an epic novel : a loose patchwork of scenes, woven together imperfectly (if memorably) by Dean's deliriously hypersensitive performance, the archetypal mixed-up kid - only this time as tragic hero instead of rebel-without-a-cause (if he's rebelling against anything it's against himself, his own true nature). Unsurprisingly, some sequences work better than others - specifically, though most of the middle third (especially Cal's big scene with his mother) is excellent, the ending is rather bathetic, the film's true climax having come a quarter of an hour earlier with the swirling OTT melodramatics at the train station, the old man falling to the ground and the "good" son, drunk and deranged, smashing a window with his head. It's the most overwrought of movies, and - as in the films of Oliver Stone - its rather purple quality can obscure Kazan's very real gifts as a visual stylist : you can spend ages debating details like the shot of the three protagonists lined up contiguously so that each is increasingly obscured by those nearer to the camera (possible interpretation : each character is trying to suppress their love for the one behind him / her), or an amazing composition early on where a train carrying the cargo that's supposed to make the family rich appears in the background, seeming to snake out of a foreground building (train = money = snake in the garden of Eden?), but the point is they make for a great-looking movie. The combination of extravagant visuals and a brooding star makes for a texture that, for all the film's weaknesses, isn't easy to forget. It's moodiness of truly Biblical proportions.