Elia Kazan was incredibly prolific between the years 1947 and 1957, directing twelve films released in that period and one each year beginning with 1949’s Pinky. Two won him Oscars while also taking Best Picture - Gentleman’s Agreement and On the Waterfront - and two more earned him nominations - A Streetcar Named Desire and East of Eden. Most of the other movies from that span are well-regarded today, such as the controversial Baby Doll and A Face in the Crowd, my choice for Kazan’s best film. He made three more movies between 1960 and 1964, including one based on his own book, America, America, for which he received a fifth Academy Award nod and seventh Directors Guild nomination. He would make only three more pictures the rest of his career, with a long gap between his final film The Last Tycoon, released in 1976, and his death in 2003.

If you go back to his feature debut A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Kazan directed an astounding 24 Oscar-nominated performances, with 9 wins, from 1945 to Splendor in the Grass in 1961. As movies, though, I’d argue that most of his directorial output is spotty and inconsistent. He was much better at making great performances than great movies. Under his direction, many actors gave the performance generally regarded as the best in their career, but extraordinary acting certainly does not always translate into high-level cinema. In fact, showy roles can often hinder a movie, turning it into an acting showcase that’s ultimately less than the sum of its parts. Of course, electric performers like Marlon Brando or James Dean can make films fascinating and enjoyable without perfect stories, but, even for Kazan’s films, those actors are more the exception than the rule.

I have a lot of conflicting feelings about Elia Kazan and his films (even excluding politics and his involvement with HUAC). I’m stunned by the raw, emotional acting of Brando, Dean, and, especially, Andy Griffith, who never even came close to being utilized like he was by Kazan in A Face in the Crowd. I see the unmistakable correlation between the great performances he directed in the 1950s and the dynamic accomplishments two decades later by Hoffman, Pacino, De Niro, etc. Yet, Kazan’s films often seem ridiculous, phony, and overcooked fifty years later. By all accounts, he was a tyrannical troublemaker on the set, stopping at nothing to elicit the best performance possible from his actors. That makes me wonder how much attention he was actually paying to the finished product, in lieu of his dogged determination to torment his actors into creative perfection. Therefore, I’ve come to the conclusion that Elia Kazan nearly ruined the 1950s for American film.

I mentioned the weakness of 1950s Hollywood movies in my last entry, without citing Kazan specifically, and I’ve thought about it a little since. As a transitional decade, the fifties were plagued by a lot of cinematic overacting, undoubtedly influenced by the Method and the Actors’ Studio, but probably exacerbated and encouraged by Kazan’s success with A Streetcar Named Desire. This style of acting eventually begat brilliance, but it also did away with the fluid gracefulness of movie acting from the 30s and 40s. Some of the magic of Hollywood was destroyed in favor of a step towards brooding realism. All of that’s fine, I suppose, since it arguably allowed the viewer a greater emotional connection and expanded the possibilities of movies, but sometimes I still lament the loss of suavity and glamour. Keeping all that in mind, I thought I’d finally sit down with East of Eden, one of the few pictures Kazan directed from this fruitful period that I’d previously not seen.

Adapted from John Steinbeck’s classic book, Kazan’s East of Eden focuses on the Trask brothers, Cal and Aron, and their stern father Adam (Raymond Massey). Cal, played brilliantly by James Dean, is different from his brother and deeply covets love and acceptance from his father. Cal sees Aron as a difficult example to live up to and struggles to please their father in the same way he thinks Aron does. The allusions to the biblical story of Cain and Abel are obvious, from the similarity in the names to the direct reference in the title. As the film begins in 1917, the United States is on the brink of entering World War I and Adam is experimenting with using blocks of ice to refrigerate shipments of lettuce. Like other Steinbeck stories, East of Eden is set amid the Salinas Valley, off the coast of Northern California. The film uses beautiful Cinemascope photography and vibrant, painterly colors, both finally well-represented on the two-disc DVD from Warner Bros., to great advantage, and is probably the most visually appealing movie Kazan ever directed.

Like many of Kazan’s films, East of Eden is engrossing, but uneven. The contrast of acting styles between James Dean and pretty much everyone else can be disorienting. Dean comes across as a living, breathing young man excitingly captured on film. The viewer is transfixed when he’s on the screen, and the film suffers when he’s not. His magnetic presence distracts from the often wooden or comparatively uninteresting performances of his co-stars (with the exception of Jo Van Fleet, who deservedly won an Oscar for her work here). Dean’s acting style makes most of the other actors seem like they’re in a different movie from a different era. It’s this problem that frequently plagues dramatic films of the decade, as actors of disparate generations often fail to mix well with each other. You marvel at one performance, such as Dean’s here, but, in terms of the evolution of screen acting, you realize how much ahead he was of most everyone else in the film.

East of Eden is nevertheless one of the stronger efforts in Kazan’s filmography. Aside from Dean’s staggering debut, the movie also has a well-told story to work with via Steinbeck’s book. The allegory is laid on quite thick, but the idea of family dysfunction remains endlessly fascinating due to its nearly universal applicability. Bitterness and jealousy, to varying degrees, are such common themes in sibling relationships that Steinbeck is able to sacrifice originality for compelling entertainment without much complaint. In Kazan’s best films, such as the two written by Budd Schulberg, the viewer becomes enmeshed in the story as much as the acting. If that’s not completely the case with East of Eden, it’s probably more the result of Dean’s acting than Kazan’s storytelling. It’s almost understandable for the actor’s presence to border on distraction given his unique position in film history. With only three significant screen roles, the iconic Dean commands the viewer’s attention when he’s on screen.

No one has played festering alienation hardly as well as James Dean did both here and in the more successful Rebel Without a Cause. His brief career, unfettered with attempts at stretching his persona, has placed a mystical quality on Dean that blurs the line between acting and being. Unlike other movie stars, we have little to explore outside of his screen performances. The footage we know of Dean consists almost exclusively of him in character, removed from the constraints of “celebrity.” Straddling between cool antihero and annoying young punk, no one was doing what James Dean was at the time. He may (or may not) have been a mostly one-trick actor, but it was a trick no one had ever pulled off before.