Legend without a pause

If the weather is fine, as it often is that time of the year, to drive on California Highway 46 west from Lost Hills toward Paso Robles is to feel an almost indefinable sense of well-being. The road slopes downhill toward the town of Cholame with the most seductive gentleness, and even drivers who don’t like to speed will be tempted.

James Dean, who did like to speed and had gotten a ticket just two hours before, had reasons besides the pleasures of the road, then called Highway 466, to be feeling good on the early evening of Sept. 30, 1955.

Not only was he on the way to a road race in a ride he adored, a newly purchased silver Porsche 550 Spyder sports car, he had just wrapped “Giant,” his biggest picture yet, costarring Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. “East of Eden,” his debut film as a star, had opened to great success a few months before and his second, “Rebel Without a Cause” was headed for theaters. For a 24-year-old actor, things could not be more promising. Then, within minutes, James Dean was dead.

That death, the result of a head-on collision with Don Turnupseed’s black and white Ford coupe making an ill-advised left turn, ended up being the final element in a perfect storm of celebrity. It catapulted Dean into a level of “live fast, die young” fame so extraordinary -- including an unprecedented and unequaled two posthumous Oscar nominations -- even the ambitious actor himself could not have imagined it.

Dean’s young age and his good looks, his acting ability and what he was most skilled at, all combined with the cataclysmic way he died to cause an uproar that has yet to quiet down. While other actors are celebrated on the anniversary of their birth, with Dean death has always trumped life, and this year, the 50th after the crash, is going to witness an unprecedented outpouring of media attention for a man whose Hollywood career lasted but 16 months.

Although Dean books are already thick on the land (personal favorites include the 1,500-entry “The Unabridged James Dean: His Life and Legacy from A to Z” and another subtitled “James Dean’s Sexsational Lurid Afterlife in the Fan Magazines”) at least two new ones are scheduled for publication. “James Dean,” by George Perry, is generously illustrated and authorized by the Dean estate, while “James Dean: Fifty Years Ago” focuses on the remarkable series of portraits taken by Magnum photographer Dennis Stock.

There are also two major and quite different documentaries waiting in the wings. Debuting on PBS on May 11 will be “James Dean: Sense Memories,” a poetic film directed by Gail Levin for the American Masters series that leans heavily on interviews with those who knew the actor.

Coming to the Cannes Film Festival in May is Michael J. Sheridan’s “James Dean: Forever Young,” a 10-years-in-the-making event that features fascinating clips both from Dean’s hard-to-see live TV work (29 of his 37 shows have been unearthed) and from his still earlier cameos in films such as Sam Fuller’s “Fixed Bayonets” and the Jerry Lewis-starring “Sailor Beware.”

“Forever Young” will have its American debut in what’s being touted as the world’s largest digital drive-in theater, being set up in Dean’s birthplace of Marion, Ind. (“Where Cool Was Born”), in time for the James Dean Fest, an annual event expected to attract at least 100,000 fans from around the world June 3 through 5. Locally, the Nuart Theater will double-bill “Eden” and “Rebel” June 10 through 16.

The sine qua non of all these tributes will be Dean’s trio of films, to be released May 31 by Warner Bros. as “The Complete James Dean Collection” DVD gift set. All three will also be available separately and each will have an additional disc with the usual special features (including deleted scenes, wardrobe tests and documentaries), but the jewel of the crown is “East of Eden,” never before available on DVD and unavailable in any form for 10 years.

HIS INFLUENCE ON ATTITUDE

Those films hold the key to the essential Dean question: Why all the fuss? That astonishing cusp-of-stardom death at a young age aside, why has Dean attracted and held all this attention? What are the factors that have enabled him to live for so long, as the fan magazines would have it, beyond the grave?

It starts with the basics, including a name as clean and uncluttered as his profile, and Dean’s timeless, almost androgynous good looks. And not just in the movies.

For while other actors were as photogenic on screen as Dean, including “Giant” costar Elizabeth Taylor, it’s difficult to think of another star who made such an impact with his still images. Dean was not only photographed almost endlessly, he looks remarkable in just about every shot. And that was no accident.

While other stars might dislike being photographed off the set, Dean, preternaturally sophisticated about creating an image, reveled in it. And if it’s the rare actor who managed a bond with so much as a single still cameraman, Dean ended up with close relationships with at least four world-class photographers -- Stock, Phil Stern, Sanford Roth and Roy Schatt.

There is an argument to be made that Dean influenced attitude more than acting, and if that’s the case, those photographs were the reason why.

On the acting side of things, essential to Dean’s success was the nature of the roles he played. Though it’s difficult to believe today, when all of American popular culture holds its breath waiting to hear what teenagers think, Dean’s films and the roles he played in them had the quality of revelation at a time when no one thought to pay realistic attention to adolescent turmoil.

For what Dean did was to create the notion of teenagers as a permanently disaffected underclass, to define adolescent rebellion for his time, our time, and the foreseeable future. Working, it is important to remember, with top-of-the-line directors, he was able to play both defiant and sensitive, boyish and dangerous. With an ability to tap into inner anger added to what Marlon Brando called “a subtle energy and an intangible injured quality,” Dean enabled us to take his pain as our own, to grieve for his characters’ missed connections and disappointments because they so reminded us of what we’d experienced ourselves.

This was never as true as in “East of Eden,” directed by Elia Kazan from Paul Osborn’s adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel. A Cain and Abel story set in Salinas and Monterey before and during World War I, it is not only one of Kazan’s richest films and Dean’s first significant role, it is also arguably the actor’s best performance, the one where he formed the template for what was to come.

Dean plays Cal Trask, the skittish-as-a-cat bad son, the lonely outsider who desperately wants the acceptance and love of his father, played by Raymond Massey, though he acts at times like he couldn’t care less. Cal’s transparent, unashamed anguish, his hunger for good words, reaches its climax in the celebrated scene where, his birthday present for his father rejected, the son’s need and disappointment are so great he delivers a moan seemingly wrenched from his very soul. As Julie Harris’ Abra puts it in another scene, “It’s awful not to be loved. It’s the worst thing in the world.”

Helping make the Dean-Massey interaction the paradigmatic generational conflict in all of American film is the unhesitating way Kazan exploited the personal problems the actors had with each other. “This was an antagonism I didn’t try to heal; I aggravated it,” the director writes in his autobiography. “I didn’t conceal from Jimmy or from Ray what they thought of each other, made it plain to each of them. The screen was alive with precisely what I wanted: They detested each other.”

ANOTHER CRY OF ANGUISH

“Rebel Without a Cause,” Dean’s next film, this time under Nicholas Ray’s florid direction, also dealt with the tortured relationship between parents and children, but in a different, more teen-centric way. The parents here, especially Jim Backus’ emasculated father, are portrayed as inept clowns whose persistent cluelessness forces the teenagers -- Dean, Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo -- to in effect form a cockeyed family of their own.

Dean’s performance is not only billed above the title, it redeems the uncertainties of the rest of the film. Working from Stewart Stern’s sensitive screenplay, Dean, dressed in jeans, white T-shirt and bright red windbreaker (chosen after Warners switched from black and white to more upscale color), delivers another cry of pure anguish. When he pounds a desk in a police station scene so hard he had to be taken to a hospital after shooting, when he screams his trademark “You’re tearing me apart!” at his bickering parents, there can be no doubt that Dean is coming from the most real place in the entire film.

Among the special features in the “Rebel” package is the spookiest piece of Dean ephemera, a public service announcement for the National Safety Council, filmed less than two weeks before his death, in which Dean, in full “Giant” regalia, looks at the camera and says, “Take it easy driving. The life you save might be mine.”

“Giant” was Dean’s last film, a three-hour, 21-minute behemoth directed by George Stevens from Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat’s adaptation of the Edna Ferber novel that was Warner Bros.’ highest-grossing film for some 20 years (until “Superman” dethroned it). It is in many ways Dean’s least successful performance, and not only because the picture was unable to convincingly age Dean’s character, successful wildcatter Jett Rink, the 20-plus years the script called for. “Dean had no technique to speak of,” Kazan scathingly wrote in his autobiography. “When he tried to play an older man in the last reels of ‘Giant,’ he looked like what he was: a beginner.”

Just as troubling is Dean’s willingness to indulge himself, to run the danger of being too twitchy, too mannered. Though his power remains undiminished, Dean’s slouching, sliding and shuffling threatens to turn Jett Rink into a sideshow act. Though no one can say what Dean would have done had he lived, his Jett Rink gives a hint of how things could have gone wrong. Perhaps Humphrey Bogart got it right when he said of James Byron Dean, “He died at just the right time. If he had lived, he’d never have been able to live up to his publicity.”

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On the Web

To see scenes from the classic James Dean movies “Giant” and “Rebel Without a Cause,” visit calendarlive.com/jamesdean.