He slouched around the Warner Brothers lot and wrote frantic letters to a would-be girlfriend.
When Dean returned to Los Angeles, he had the chip on his shoulder that young people who’ve lived in New York for less than a year seem to accumulate. A string of bit parts, some relatively risqué stage work, and Dean found himself cast in Elia Kazan’s loose adaptation of John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, in which two brothers vie for the farm and the love of the same woman. But he was also somewhat aimless: he enrolled in a smattering of classes, tried to join a fraternity, and eventually made his way to New York, where he started taking classes at the Actor’s Studio. He was always smart and quick on his feet he was the captain of the Oratory Club and seemed to inspire the sort of love that teachers have for wounded, brilliant children. He lost his mother at a young age, and spent his late adolescent and teen years bouncing between his aunt and uncle’s home in Indiana and his relocated father’s home in California. In the beginning, though, Dean was just a bit of a punk kid.
Fast and sexy magazine movie#
He didn’t have a war-so what did he have? People called that unspeakable lack “rebelliousness,” but it was always something more: which is precisely why his image, even flattened out by endless movie posters, endures. It was this sense of “missing out” that structured Dean’s image and performances. Clift and Brando were in their late teens and early twenties during the Second World War neither served, but it was a defining experience in a way it could never be for Dean. With his rebellious image, James Dean is often grouped with Clift and Brando, but he was seven years younger than Brando and eleven years younger than Clift, and his childhood during the war years would always distance him. Brando and Clift raged against structural limitations, mostly to do with class, that may or may not have been relatable to most teenage girls, but it was the way these men crumbled, and the hope that the love of a good woman could put them back together, that animated so much female (and unspoken male) desire. These young men were just as sensitive as every teen girl dreamed their boyfriend would be. Part of it was palpable sex, especially Brando’s, but it was also the vulnerability. Critics loved them, execs were confused by them, and girls went nuts for them. They were astounding onscreen: both had a visceral, emotive magnetism. In the early 1950s, Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando tore through Hollywood, establishing themselves as “angry young men” who refused to hew to a classic understanding of Hollywood acting or behavior. But most don’t understand how the timing of his death, and the very specific timing of his films, turned a tragic death into a cultural crater-one that would be widened and exploited by the publishing industry. Everyone thinks they know the tragic story of James Dean: he died young and violently, he embodied the ennui and angst of the postwar generation, and his image lives on as a hollow signifier of youthful rebellion.