esrosedotblog

JAMES DEAN

Today's Best NYTimes 1176 Film is pretty good.

But the main thing about East of Eden (1955) is the James Dean show that is its centerpiece.

Dean breathes oxygen into an adaptation of the Steinbeck novel. And Elia Kazan lets him have his head.

Dean was a method actor and is all tics and small moves. He steals every scene, yet it all works.

We lived through the Dean phenomenon and it is good to see that we were not kidding ourselves. He still gets the heart racing. You will not be able to keep from watching him.

The story is timeless. It is the Cain and Abel tale brought to California's central valley. It is spare and clear and except for a little anti-war rant, it moves right along.

Richard Davalos is Dean's brother and they are pretty good together. Davalos is strong enough to keep balanced with Dean.

Julie Harris is a weak reed in this. She slows down every scene she is in. It is hard to see her as anyone's love interest. The older actors Raymond Massey and Jo Van Fleet more than hold their ends up. A thinner Burl Ives hangs out as a sort of greek chorus.

It is fun to see how 'Cinemascope' take itself very very seriously. They wanted to out-do television and this was one approach.

They tried to take serious works and adapt them. This film would be an example.

They tried to focus on the sound breakthrough with special effects and music. There is an overture in a less than two hour film.

They wanted an 'in your laps' effect. Kazan is probably being pushed to do a lot of camera things that simulate 3-D. All rather pretentious and tarted up but the story still works.

Cinemascope only lasted a short time, buy it was a breakthrough in sight and sound presentation. The stereophonic sound it introduced became a basic staple of all film 'improvements' thereafter. Every theater that took the Cinemascope lens also had to install stereo speakers.

The 'sight' part was a simple optical trick that used an ultra-wide angle lens to squash the image onto a standard 35mm frame. It required a special projector lens to 'unscramble' the image in the theater.

The lens arrangement was imperfect; blurred at the edges and was soon eclipsed by other, more effective, big screen approaches. And, since the hardware was in place for stereo sound, the stage was set for the sonic revolution that we know of today.

I don't want to get off on a tangent here but I believe that this sound thing opened many, many doors. There was no stereo in the home in 1955. There was only the beginning of 'hi-fi'; high quality monaural reproduction. I remember going to hi-fi shows in Boston while I was in school and marvelling at the big speakers; the turntables; the tuners.

Wow. Look at that stylus. The arm. Age test. You might have never ever seen one of these. Keeerist we were into that stuff. Stereo came a lot later--8 years or so? But I am sure that it is the movies that got it started.

Another aspect of the stereo thing was that it introduced me to the first classical music I ever heard. Light classical, but classical nonetheless.

I went to Stroudsburg PA to see my first Cinemascope movie. The equipment had just been installed there. I don't even remember the feature. But there was a short with the Polovetzian Dances; chorus and orchestra. I was captivated. I have never ever heard anything like this. So I got the music bug and the stereo bug at the same sitting.

Oh. What about East of Eden. Today's movie!

We liked it a lot.

I will give it a 4 out of Netflix5.