Memories of James Dean as professional actor, not idol

Like Marilyn and Charlie and a precious few other icons of Hollywood Boulevard tourist traps, James Dean is the movies, but in a way all out of proportion with the brevity of his career.

He has been dead now half a century, killed in 1955 while driving his Porsche Spyder on a Central California highway two weeks after finishing his third film (not counting a few bit parts), less than a month before the premiere of his second, and little more than a year after beginning his first. Thousands turned out for his funeral, and he was the proverbial idol of millions more, including Elvis Presley, who was briefly mooted to portray Dean in a film biography.

That movie was never made, but the story has been told many times since, most recently in “James Dean: Sense Memories,” a compact, focused documentary that begins the 19th season of the PBS series “American Masters.” Although the beginning might make you think you’ve stumbled into a perfume advertisement, the show settles down quickly into an elegant, intelligent piece driven by the reminiscences of friends and colleagues, and illuminated by outtakes, production footage, home movies and a lot of excellent, evocative photographs.

The film takes only a small slice out of Dean’s life -- the slice in which he did his major work -- and it’s a wise approach: There’s more time to explore subtleties than if they had tried to squeeze in his whole 24 years. Its eye is on the actor and the way the person informed the work, rather than concentrating on the strictly personal. It touches on the “curious androgyny that made him appealing to so many people, disturbing to so many people,” in the words of one witness, without going into oft-raised (in the canon of Dean lit) questions of bisexuality.

Indeed, there is nothing here even about Dean’s public romances and little about his family, except to establish that there was a connection, or a coincidence, between the life and the roles -- he was looking for a mother (“Eden”), he was looking for a father (“Rebel”). He also was perhaps the beneficiary, says director/actor Mark Rydell, of the “psychological perception there is at the root of all good casting -- you find out what the needs of the part are and you try to find somebody who needs those things.” His relationships with his directors -- Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray and George Stevens -- all seemed to involve some sort of ultimately productive mind games.

Younger viewers confused as to what the fuss was about may think of him as his generation’s Kurt Cobain, a beautiful boy with a gift for externalizing pain. He was, says “Eden” costar Lois Smith, “a divided soul, a person who was judgmental, suspicious, filled with need, filled with longing, with tenderness as well, and an insufficient hopefulness, a reluctance to pass through those gates on the brink of adulthood.”

Others remembering Dean here include Martin Landau, Eli Wallach, Eartha Kitt, “Rebel” screenwriter Stewart Stern and Frank Mazzola, the actor/gang member who staged that movie’s knife fight. Their stories are perhaps colored by the fact that as actors and writers they share a flair for the dramatic, but one feels they have thought often, long and carefully about Dean, because he was such a shooting star, and the one against which they measured their own brightness and velocity.

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‘American Masters -- James Dean: Sense Memories’

Where: KCET

When: 9 - 10 tonight.

Ratings: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)

Executive producer, Susan Lacy. Director, Mark Rydell.