Smashing icons

It's always seemed unfair to me that people in the public eye who've built long careers have had to compete with their colleagues who failed to live out their four score and ten. Would Marilyn Monroe have retained her luster had she lived to grow old and fat? (Or should I say fatter?) Impossible.

Fifty years after James Dean's death, David Gritten reviews the actor's work and concludes that he hasn't worn well.

The more you see of Dean's work, the more it seems like Brando Lite. Brando broke new ground and was more versatile and technically adept. But Dean's trump cards - his youth and beauty - dazzled adolescent audiences and briefly eclipsed all other actors at the time.

As Gritten points out, when Dean hit the scene--in the mid-1950s--during a sort of golden age for male actors, among them Robert Mitchum, Montgomery Clift and Brando. Gritten compares Dean, unfavorably, with Paul Newman.

Paul Newman was nearly 30 before he achieved fame (in Somebody Up There Likes Me, set to be Dean's next role had he lived). Since then he has made fine movies, mediocre ones, and some downright bad ones. No shame in that; it's how you rise above your material.

Dean, sadly, never had the chance to do this. In his three major films, he was guided by first-rate directors: Elia Kazan, George Stevens, and, in Rebel, by the great Nicolas Ray. Could he have withstood the inevitable turkeys to deliver great later-life performances, as Newman did in The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke and The Verdict, and Brando did in Last Tango in Paris and The Godfather? One doubts it; his talent seems too flimsy.

David Thomson, so ga-ga about Dean's "potency", finds Newman self-regarding and, as a young actor, mannered. My feelings are precisely the opposite. And while Dean is lauded for burning out and dying, Newman stayed alive, applied himself, and ended up as a key film actor of his generation. A genuinely good career move.

Brando lived to become a parody of himself. But it always seemed to me unfair that Dean's untimely demise allowed him to overshadow Montgomery Clift, another actor of his era who died before his time.

Maybe it's because I wasn't around when Dean's breakthrough film, Rebel Without a Cause, became "a generation's war cry," as Gritten put it. But by the time I saw the movie, I'd been filled up to bursting with Dean's iconic image and, frankly, came away from it underwhelmed.

By contrast, I was gobsmacked, upon seeing my first Montgomery Clift film, From Here to Eternity. And I remained impressed by The Search and The Young Lions. Besides being better looking than Dean (just my humble opinion), Clift had a romantic backstory: a life debeviled by drink and a disfiguring car accident that destroyed his beauty. He also left behind a body of work.

Yet everybody talks about James Dean. Seems to death was a good career move.