|
The wounds of adolescence might as well be Biblical to those feeling them (everyone else sees solipsistic weirdness), thus Cain and Abel in the Salinas Valley on the verge of the First Great War. Lettuce fills the Garden, Adam is an old rancher (Raymond Massey) with his faith in refrigeration. Good Son (Richard Davalos) has paternal affection and a sensitive fiancée (Julie Harris), Bad Son (James Dean) covets both, he's nicknamed "The Prowler." The idealized dead mother turns out to be the tough local madam (Jo Van Fleet), amid the primal shocks is the wayward boy venturing down the bordello's dark corridor only to fall on his knees and get dragged away screaming. "It's awful not to be loved. It's the worst thing in the world." Elia Kazan turns up the temperature of Steinbeck's turgid parable, galvanized by color and CinemaScope and Dean's anguished pantomime. Frames within frames, the living room masked by gloom and divided with an overhead lamp, dwarfed figures turned away in the foreground while a slowly chugging train provides a horizontal sprawl in the distant background. "Kindness and conscience" are to be valued, errant Eve and willful Cain have none in the eyes of the paterfamilias, war profiteering exacerbates the rejection. "Talk to me, Father!" A volatile luxuriance out of Rimbaud emanates from Dean throughout, up on the Ferris wheel and down in the bean fields and behind the weeping willow, a bundle of spastic shrugs tearing through the period Americana. The Beckettian rupture is a smashed train window that might be the widescreen itself, the brothers trade places as the patriarch finally becomes a paralyzed monolith. The lachrymose reconciliation at the end is relieved by a little joke, neither men can stand the irritated nurse. "If you don't think it's funny, you better not go to college." Visconti in Rocco and His Brothers builds on the charged perspective. Cinematography by Ted McCord. With Burl Ives, Albert Dekker, Lois Smith, Harold Gordon, Nick Dennis, Barbara Baxley, and Timothy Carey.
--- Fernando F. Croce |