A Film Canon

This adaptation of John Steinbeck's epic novel does ample credit to its opening chapter, describing the Salinas Valley "Salad Bowl" in vivid, evocative detail. Kazan combines cinemascope, panoramic camera movement, and a series of rich, luscious tableaux to create a sensory richness that forms the common denominator with the visceral, bodily intensity of his earlier features, as does the expressionist, even Gothic, distortions of the first and third acts. Unfortunately, the subsequent narrative is less satisfactory, if only because a mere fragment of Steinbeck's magnum opus is depicted, albeit a fragment whose gravitas depends on a whole series of back-stories and associations that are omitted. This imbues the film with a curious emptiness, preventing its characters achieving the larger-than-life quality that might have contextualised their one-dimensionality, and leaving a great deal unresolved. It also ensures that Steinbeck's biblical analogies fail to fall just short of being heavy-handed, as occurs in the novel. The result is a compromise between two styles that defy interiority, or introspection - Steinbeck's epic, allegorical realism, and Kazan's behaviourist, method-inflected plasticity - but without the redeeming features of either. This compromise is embodied by James Dean's performance as ill-fated son Caleb, which oscillates between an echo of Kazan's Brando, and the elusiveness of Henry Fonda's Tom Joad, albeit occasionally capturing an emergent adolescent register that, while out of place in this film, is original in itself, anticipating Rebel Without A Cause.