"A Mass of Histrionic Gingerbread"

Tonight I happened to catch the end of East of Eden, a movie that I probably haven't seen in 15 years.  For a while, I preferred it to Rebel without a Cause, but the more I watched Rebel, the darker and more powerful it became. 

I love James Dean.  My most beloved shoes in college were a pair of Jack Purcells that I bought just because he wore them in the photo above.  But I haven't watched one of his movies in a few years, so this was kind of fun.  (I've seen Rebel quite a bit; East of Eden a few times; Giant only once, because of its length and Dean's comparatively minor role.)

I know that Marlon Brando is his obvious predecessor, but Brando's emotion expressed itself in too much anger and violence for me to relate to - or, in a sense, even want to be near.  The energy he brings to the screen makes me nervous in the same way that being out on 6th Ave and 8th St in the Village late on a Friday night used to make me nervous - there's a hint of something wild.  You just get this feeling that anything could happen.

Montgomery Clift was an emotional actor, too, but in a different way.  Although similarly expressive, he was less animalistic, more calculating than Brando.  Where Brando might've punched someone, Clift would've plotted revenge.  But Clift had an actorly polish, and a more formal bearing than Brando or Dean. 

Dean came down in the middle.  He had the physical looseness of Brando - his movement in films that are 55 years old still looks like the way lots of kids walk and talk today - and like Brando, his characters (all three of them) struggled against their circumstances, caged, unable to progress or articulate their needs.  But Dean, like Clift, navigated his confusion internally and tried to plot a way out.  Dean was a lover, not a fighter, but like Clift, he had no problem rising to the occasion if he had to.

So when I finished watching the end of East of Eden tonight, I looked up its entry in wikipedia and saw a quote from the NY Times calling Dean's performance "a mass of histrionic gingerbread."  I found the full review, and it appears that one Bosley Crowther said the following:

James Dean is a mass of histrionic gingerbread. He scuffs his feet, he whirls, he pouts, he sputters, he leans against walls, he rolls his eyes, he swallows his words, he ambles slack-kneed—all like Marlon Brando used to do. Never have we seen a performer so clearly follow another's style. Mr. Kazan should be spanked for permitting him to do such a sophomoric thing. Whatever there might be of reasonable torment in this youngster is buried beneath the clumsy display.

Oh, dear.  Since he died in a car crash not long thereafter, you can't really say that James Dean had the last laugh, exactly, can you?  But audiences certainly recognized the realism in all of that ambling and leaning and eye-rolling, so his legacy remains in tact.  So what, I then wondered, of Bosley Crowther?  His wikipedia entry is an interesting one, too, detailing his sensitivity to "movies with social content" and his opposition to McCarthy, HUAC and "stridently patriotic movies." 

This is the line that really killed me.  Of Lawrence of Arabia, he said it is a "thundering camel-opera that tends to run down rather badly as it rolls on into its third hour and gets involved with sullen disillusion and political deceit."

Lawrence of Arabia is, of course, another one of my favorites.  But I have to admit - this guy could turn a phrase.

Comments

[Ian]

"Since he died in a car crash not long thereafter, you can't really say that James Dean had the last laugh, exactly, can you?"

Well, that made me laugh.

[Valarie]

I'd actually started to write "James Dean had the last laugh", and that's when I paused and thought, well, no, he didn't.

[Irene]

I've always been more obsessive about Marlon Brando, for his lingering and evolved weirdness, but there is a purity about James Dean. At the NW Film Center many moons ago, they showed this tv short that Dean appeared in before his films called "The Bells of Cockaigne." Dean's feral and introverted performance is so wholly at odds with the tear-dabbing theatricality of the other characters that it was like they were co-existing on parallel worlds. The contrivances of this sentimental little Hallmark card of a play are totally shredded whenever he appears. None of the actors seem to know what to make of him, so they just go on as if they didn't notice.

[Irene]

By the way, love the Bosley Crowther investigation. I run into his reviews all the time when researching random old movies. Reading his hilariously withering comments makes me want to sit down with some nice histrionic gingerbread cookies and enjoy a thundering camel opera.

[Valarie]

It's so funny you say that because I was watching this big emotional scene in EoE last night, where Julie Harris was fighting back tears while talking to James Dean's character's father on his deathbed, and I just thought, ugh. It looked like it could've been the Oscar clip for any actress throughout history. And then all of the sudden James Dean is on the scene, alternating between a deeply intimate grief and lashing out ("feral and introverted" - EXACTLY), and I was completely at attention. He crashed through all that period piece melodrama and made the story urgent and real and relevant. He made everyone around him seem like porcelain.

I think 'purity' is a great word for him, too - it articulates an aspect of him that I would occasionally see in River Phoenix, too. There was something vulnerable, something unprotected about them both.