One of the best aspects of the DVD revolution has been the rescuing of films (especially documentaries) that would long ago have fallen into deterioration. My wife recently purchased a GoodTimes DVD of the 79-minute long 1957 documentary film The James Dean Story, directed by George W. George and Robert Altman, who, long before his fictive film breakthrough with M*A*S*H, was a documentary and commercial television director.
The interesting thing about this black and white documentary is not its subject matter, but its approach. On the negative side, unlike most modern documentaries, the film is flowery, verbose, purple prosed to death, and melodramatically stentorian in its screenplay descriptions of the dead young actor’s moods. In short, it is a virtual hagiography. Yet, in its setups to interviewing real life friends and acquaintances of Dean, there is something interesting about the voice-over narration of character actor Martin Gabel as he ‘talks’ to the interviewees. Also, there are some interesting cutting techniques and musical selections that make the film oddly gripping to watch.
The film’s ‘tale’ consists of following Dean from boyhood to UCLA to New York and the Actors Studio to television to his three noted film roles in East Of Eden, Rebel Without A Cause, and Giant. The best parts of the film are those insights provided by the hangers-on who give small details of Dean’s life — a former roommate, as example, pores through Dean’s personal effects and one learns that Dean was poorly organized and terminally late on bills. This says far more of the man than later documentary films on him, which probed (or rather obsessed on) whether or not he was gay. Part of this aspect of the film’s success has to do with the ‘screenplay’ by Stewart Stern (Dean’s pal, who also scripted Rebel Without A Cause).
However, the film’s aforementioned purple prose has to also be laid at Stewart’s feet. Likewise, the fawning hagiographic depictions of Dean, which start from the opening shots of 1950s moviegoers, get to be a bit much, resulting in some really poor symbolism, from ‘the tree of loneliness’ on Dean’s relative’s Indiana farm, to a dead seagull on a California beach to footprints on that selfsame beach, when Dean departs for New York to make it on Broadway. The worst aspect of this tendency results in a digression on Dean’s delve into other arts — painting and sculpture. Thus, we get a shot of a small piece of sculpture, with a male figure in a sort of Le Penseur (The Thinker) of Rodin pose. We see that it has no facial details, and the film makes a big thing out of this, even though there are no other details of the body. Why? Because Dean titled the piece Self. Oo-la-la!
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Article comments
1 - Cynthia
James Dean "was not a particularly good actor?" It seems some people thought he was; he was nominated for TWO Oscars after his death. I think you just don't like (or understand) his acting style, which was raw and intense and riveting. Some people might be put off by that; I wasn't, and neither were millions of other people. Jame Dean's acting was exceptional. You see him onscreen and you can't take your eyes away from him. And had he lived, he probably would have put both Brando and Clift to shame, career-wise. He would have outshown them both. He was that good.
2 - roger nowosielski
Whatever James Dean was, he was the first American icon - rebel without a cause - when the prevailing opinion was that America was a garden of Eden. I would assume that James Dean paved the way to the acting career of Marlon Brando.
3 - roger nowosielski
Got to add Montgomery Clift to the bunch.
4 - Etchnthn2w
James Dean was mediocre at best. The reason folks couldn't take their eyes off of him was because he was freakishly handsome, not because he transcended the screen and grabbed our hearts with his performance. If Brad Pitt died after Seven Years in Tibet, EVERYONE would be making him something he was not as well. The "what if" factor captures the imagination more than the truth
5 - Alan Kurtz
Roger Nowosielski (#2), your chronology is awful. James Dean paving the way for Marlon Brando? It was the other way around! East of Eden was released in March 1955 and Rebel Without a Cause in October of that year. By then, Brando had long since revolutionized American acting, both on stage in A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) and in films such as The Men (1950), A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Viva Zapata! (1952), Julius Caesar (1953) and On the Waterfront (1954). As for being "the first American icon" of that era, it wasn't Dean in Rebel Without a Cause, it was Brando two years earlier in The Wild One (1953). In that film's most famous lines of dialog, Brando as the motorcycle hoodlum Johnny is asked, "What are you rebelling against?" He replies, "What've you got?"
6 - roger nowosielski
Alright then. I suppose I should have doublechecked it. Dean sticks to mind because he was such a teenage icon who met an early death.
Matter of fact, just seen The Wild One only two weeks ago. Cracle Movies offers the selection this month.