Elia Kazan (1955)
Although America’s entry into World War I is an increasingly prominent theme of this adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1952 novel, Elia Kazan’s East of Eden is quintessential 1950s Hollywood – CinemaScope, James Dean, the tale of a problem child whose problem is soon revealed to be his parents. This is a highly uneven melodrama yet it’s often moving. The effect of the erratic style and tone is to reinforce – in combination with the skewed camera angles that Kazan often favours – a strong sense of psychological and emotional disturbance.
Set in California’s Salinas Valley and nearby Monterey, East of Eden is often described as a ‘retelling’ of the Old Testament story of Adam and Eve’s sons Cain and Abel. Filial and fraternal tensions are certainly at the heart of the narrative. The stern religiosity of the patriarch Adam Trask (Raymond Massey) is a significant feature too. According to local sheriff Sam (Burl Ives), who has known him all his life, Adam had a sheltered upbringing and fell for the temptations of a lovely young woman called Kate. Their marriage ended shortly after she gave birth to their two sons. Adam, a rancher turned farmer in Salinas, has always told the boys their mother is dead and in heaven. In fact, Kate, who refused to be yoked to her husband and his rules, left him to run what’s now a thriving brothel in Monterey.
In Genesis (chapter 4):
‘… the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: …
But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth.’
In the film, it’s Adam’s rather than God’s partiality for one son, Aron (Richard Davalos), that causes the other, Cal (Dean), such anguish and to believe himself to be ‘bad through and through’. Although there’s no act of fratricide as such, Cal’s reaction, on Adam’s birthday, to his grateful acceptance of Aron’s gift and censorious rejection of Cal’s, triggers a series of events that sends Aron off to fight in the Great War. Shortly before he departs, Adam demands to know Aron’s whereabouts and Cal, like Cain, replies that he’s not his brother’s keeper. At the end of an action-packed evening, Sam reminds Cal that Cain, after slaying Abel, ‘went away and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden’. ‘Now why don’t you go away some place?’ suggests the sheriff.
Yet the Biblical inspiration and references are overshadowed by more modern melodramatics, especially in the final stages of East of Eden. The film starts with Cal’s discovery of Kate’s whereabouts and occupation; as it approaches its climax, he’s driven to enlighten Aron too. He drags his brother to the brothel and, in a startlingly Freudian moment, physically forces him on their mother. When Adam dashes to the railway station and begs Aron not to leave on a train full of other enlisting men, his favoured son grins menacingly then thrusts his head through the glass of the carriage window. Aron says not a word but, as the train pulls out, gives a maniacal laugh in his father’s direction: it’s a violently garish expression of the youthful disillusionment with, and recourse to extreme forms of trying-to-get-through-to, the older generation that are staple ingredients of heavy-duty Hollywood family dramas of the early post-WW2 years. Adam collapses on the platform, having instantly suffered a stroke that leaves him paralysed.
Whenever Elia Kazan goes for a subtler effect, the result is more satisfyingly effective. Early on, Adam, Aron and the latter’s girlfriend Abra (Julie Harris) are heard singing or humming fragments of Leonard Rosenman’s original score: it’s a deft and, in a non-musical film, a surprisingly unusual way of connecting what’s on the soundtrack to the characters on the screen – making the music seem part of their lives. (Rosenman’s score is sometimes intensely overwrought but the main melody is lovely and memorable.) The figure of Kate (Jo Van Fleet), as she walks outside the brothel in relative long shot, appears to be dressed in forbidding black. Once Cal gets to meet and talk with his inside the place and Kate’s personality starts to emerge, Ted McCord’s lighting reveals the blues and browns of the clothes that had looked like widow’s weeds. When the distraught Cal dashes out of Adam’s ill-fated birthday party, he takes refuge in the garden, behind a tree. Abra follows to comfort him; she too disappears from view: unseen but heard, Cal’s distress is more painful and Abra’s attempts to console him more affecting – both are more ominous to Aron, as he listens and calls Abra to heel. In the film’s final scene, as Cal sits at his stricken father’s bedside and the two prepare to exchange words, Abra tactfully turns away and the camera briefly follows suit. It concentrates on Julie Harris’s quietly dignified attitude and mane of red hair as Abra stands facing the bedroom wall.
Kazan handles the set pieces – a patriotic war parade, a fairground episode – with characteristic aplomb. He’s able to give such sequences a sustained visual rhythm while building up the drama of what’s happening in the margins of these public events. When this moves centre stage, it tends to be less impressive: a subplot illustrating the Salinas comnunity’s switch to hostility against Gustav Albrecht (Harold Gordon), an eccentric and hitherto popular German shopkeeper, is one of the cruder facets of the film. Even here, though, there are compensations: Burl Ives’s calm, decisive quelling of the crowd’s menacing encroachment on the German’s property; the quiet implacability of a local woman (Rose Plumer) who hands Albrecht a letter informing her that her son has been killed in Europe.
Paul Osborn’s screenplay efficiently coordinates the main strands of the characters’ larger context – the war effort, rural economics, developing technology (including the motor car). Adam starts up a long-haul vegetable business, depending on refrigerated produce, that collapses and costs him several thousand dollars. Advised by his father’s longstanding acquaintance Will Hamilton (Albert Dekker) that the price of beans will go through the roof if the US enters the war, Cal resolves to win his father’s favour by recouping Adam’s losses. Cal persuades Kate to lend him the capital he needs to start up, in partnership with Will, a bean-growing enterprise. America goes to war, the venture prospers and Cal makes his father a birthday present of the money he lost on his soggy lettuces. Fiercely moral Adam, now also chairman of the draft board, refuses to accept Cal’s gift, denouncing it as war profiteering.
A less persuasive plot element is Adam’s seeming ignorance of what kind of successful businesswoman Kate has become, and response to Cal’s revelation that he knows his mother is alive. Adam may lead a determinedly blinkered life but his local standing and connections with the likes of Sam and Will make it hard to believe he’s still in the dark. There’s another, more narrowly dramatic reason why it would have made more sense to indicate clearly that Adam is in the picture about Kate’s afterlife. On the fateful night, when Cal finally tells his father that ‘I know where she is and what she is … she owns one of them houses’, Adam doesn’t react enough. The pretext for this seems to be that his priority is to find out from Cal where Aron has disappeared to, but this raises another difficulty with the storyline. When Cal first tells his father that he knows his mother isn’t dead, Adam makes him promise that he won’t tell Aron. Cal agrees to keep the secret but, since his father sees him as deplorably unreliable, it’s puzzling that Adam subsequently shows no sign of anxiety that Cal might not prove to be as good as his word.
East of Eden was the only one of James Dean’s three films released during his lifetime (in the spring of 1955). Returning to it for the first time in at least a couple of decades, I was surprised by how mannered some of his acting is. Whenever he’s spurned, Cal hugs himself – seems to try to retreat and hide within himself. This is a remarkable series of movements but it has the quality of a drama-class invention – a quality emphasised by Kazan’s concentrating the camera on Dean. As Cal and Abra sit together, preparing to ride on the fairground Ferris wheel, their growing mutual feelings blossom into a sudden and prolonged kiss. It’s noticeable that Cal’s free hand doesn’t, as might naturally be expected, move to touch Abra’s face. This is because Dean needs to keep the hand free for the graceful gesture he’s already decided to make when the kiss ends. Kazan has encouraged his leading man to express his character’s helpless turmoil through a headlong physicality that’s occasionally overdone. Yet Dean is often wonderful too – this is his most eloquent performance. Cal’s distress when Adam rejects the money is exceptionally upsetting; his passionate, imploring embrace of his father is almost as shocking to the viewer as it is to Adam. And the rhythms of Dean’s line readings really do come across as fresh and novel.
Unlike Rebel Without a Cause, East of Eden isn’t a case, though, of an inventive young star’s exposing the limitations of older generations of actors. Jo Van Fleet, although nearly forty and an esteemed stage actress, made her film debut here (and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress). She’s very persuasive in suggesting the accumulated layers – and the strain – of the persona Kate constructed after leaving Adam and their sons. Burl Ives plays the sheriff with fine controlled authority and Albert Dekker is unshowily good as Will Hamilton. James Dean’s energy level seems to rise in his exchanges with these flexible actors, as if he’s relishing the experience. You don’t get the same impression in his exchanges with Raymond Massey or Richard Davalos. As self-righteous Adam, Massey has a stiffness that, because it’s familiar from other roles feels partly the actor’s rather than the character’s, though Massey is better in the latter part of the film. To be fair to Davalos, Aron’s lurch from smiley complacency into vengeful jealousy is a thankless task.
Glowering and sinister, Aron successfully upstages Cal at their father’s birthday party, which Cal and Abra have arranged, even before Adam opens Cal’s gift-wrapped parcel of bank notes. Aron’s present is the announcement of his and Abra’s engagement – which delights Adam and stuns his prospective daughter-in-law: while still professing loyalty to Aron, Abra knows by now which brother she’s in love with. James Dean looks to enjoy himself most of all in his scenes with Julie Harris and for good reason: she’s marvellous. All three of Dean, Davalos and Harris were significantly older than their characters are meant to be – she especially so – but none of them is awkward in acting younger. For Harris, the age difference here must have been a piece of cake, only three years after she brought Carson McCullers’ Frankie Addams to the screen in Fred Zinnemann’s The Member of the Wedding. Harris’s vibrant Abra is a beautiful blend of sexual innocence and observant sensitivity. Her acting negotiates with ease the narrative’s jarring tonal shifts. A sequence in which Abra and Cal talk together in a field of tall yellow flowers is, as a visual conception, a studied pastoral. James Dean and Julie Harris make the scene completely natural.
They’re equally, differently impressive in the closing scene. Abra tells Adam that she loves Cal and pleads with him to give his son ‘some sign that you love him … or else he’ll never be a man … if you could ask him for something’. She pleads too with Cal, to talk to his father ‘before it’s too late … get through to him somehow’. Cal, with difficulty, does so. Adam, who seemed to have lost the power of speech, manages a few words in return, and does ask Cal for something. Adam wants rid of the obnoxious, callous nurse (Barbara Baxley) who’s been hired to attend to him. In the last lines of East of Eden, Abra asks Cal what his father whispered in his ear and Cal replies: ‘He said, “Don’t get anybody else.” He said, “You stay with me… and you take care of me.”’ The camera pulls back to create the final image in the dark bedroom: Cal almost locked into position beside his father’s bed, Abra watching a few feet away. The tableau is another melodramatic composition yet it’s unarguably right. It puts the seal on Elia Kazan’s unstable, absorbing fable of absent parents and needy children, of blood ties and family chains.
4 August 2019
