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Commerce should be well satisfied. The picture is brilliant entertainment, and more than that it announces a new star, James Dean, whose prospects look as bright as any young actor's since Marlon Brando. Kazan has less reason to be pleased. Steinbeck reduced the story of Cain and Abel to a sort of rutting party in a California lettuce patch. Kazan although he cleans out a good deal of the false dirt under Steinbeck's fingernails has diminished the story still further and stuffed it into a tight little psychoanalytic pigeonhole: father problem.
The story, as Kazan tells it covers less than half of Steinbeck's book. Caleb (James Dean) and Aron (Richard Davalos) are the sons of Adam Trask (Raymond Massey), a California farmer who just before the start of World War I develops a method of shipping-vegetable's on ice Aron the "good" boy, takes after his father. Caleb, the "bad" one, takes after his mother (Jo Van Fleet). Adam tells his sons that their mother is dead, but one day when the bad boy is about 16 he finds her living in the next town, the madam of a bawdyhouse.
When Father Adam goes broke in the ice business, Caleb secretly borrows $5,000 from his mother, turns a big profit in the war boom and tries to give back to his father the money he lost. In self-righteous anger the old man refuses Caleb's "blood money," not truly caring that it did not come from Caleb's pocket but from his heart. And Caleb's brother Aron orders him to stay away from Abra (Julie Harris), the girl they both love, because he is not fit for her.
In a fury of grief and vengeance, Caleb tells his brother the truth about their mother. The shock drives Aron almost out of his mind. When the father sees what has happened to his favorite son, he suffers a stroke. Caleb, repentant but despairing of forgiveness, prepares to leave his father even as Cain "went out from the presence of the Lord, and dwelt in the land of Nod on the east of Eden"; but Abra persuades rather and son to a reconciliation.
Much of this is genuinely high drama, and some of it is high cinema too. The four major players play together like a fine string quartet, not as though they were creating the beauty but as though it were passing through them. Julie Harris is the viola, a wonderfully tactful performer, the subtlest of them all. Raymond Massey is the cello: the interpretation is right, though he thumps a little. And Richard Davalos as Aron plays a strong second to the soloist, James Dean, a young man from Indiana who is unquestionably the biggest news Hollywood has made in 1955.
Dean, like Julie Harris, Marlon Brando, Eva Marie Saint and most of the young people Kazan uses, is a product of The Actor's Studio, sometimes known as "the tilted-pelvis school" of naturalistic acting. Like many Studio students, who have been brought up on "the Stanislavsky Method," Dean tries so hard to find the part in himself that he often forgets to put himself into the part. But no matter what he is doing, he has the presence of a young lion and the same sense of danger about him. His eye is as empty as an animal's, and he lolls and gallops with the innocence and grace of an animal. Then, occasionally, he flicks a sly little look that seems to say, "Well, all this is human too—or had you forgotten?"