Awards & Honors

Academy Awards honors for East of Eden: Jo Van Fleet (Best Supporting Actress); nominated for Best Actor (Dean, the second performer and first male to be nominated posthumously), Director (Elia Kazan), Screenplay (Paul Osborn)

Other awards: Best Picture (Golden Globes), Best Dramatic Film (Cannes Film Festival), Best Foreign Language Film (Blue Ribbon and Kinema Junpo awards/Japan), Best American Film (Bodil Awards/Denmark), Best Foreign Director (Cinema Writers Circle/Spain), Best Foreign Actor (Dean; Jussi Awards/Finland)

Other nominations: Best Film from Any Source, Best Foreign Actor (Dean), Most Promising Newcomer (Van Fleet) (British Academy); Palme d'Or (Cannes); Outstanding Directorial Achievement (Directors Guild of America), Best Written American Drama (Writers Guild of America)

Critic Reviews: EAST OF EDEN

"In one respect, it is brilliant. The use that Mr. Kazan has made of CinemaScope and color in capturing expanse and mood in his California settings is almost beyond compare. Some of Mr. Kazan's interiors--especially his final scene in the bedroom of the father, where the old man is dying of a stroke--have a moodiness, too, that moves the viewer with their strongly emotional overtones. The director gets more into this picture with the scenery than with the characters. For the stubborn fact is that the people who move about in this film are not sufficiently well established to give point to the anguish through which they go, and the demonstrations of their torment are perceptibly stylized and grotesque. Especially is this true of James Dean in the role of the confused and cranky Cal. This young actor, who is here doing his first big screen stint, is a mass of histrionic gingerbread. He scuffs his feet, he whirls, he pouts, he sputters, he leans against walls, he rolls his eyes, he swallows his words, he ambles slack-kneed--all like Marlon Brando used to do. Never have we seen a performer so clearly follow another's style. Mr. Kazan should be spanked for permitting him to do such a sophomoric thing. Whatever there might be of reasonable torment in this youngster is buried beneath the clumsy display. ... there is energy and intensity but little clarity and emotion in this film. It is like a great, green iceberg: mammoth and imposing but very cold." - Bosley Crowther, New York Times, March 10, 1955

"It is a tour de force for the director's penchant for hard-hitting forays with life. It is no credit to Kazan that James Dean seems required to play his lead character as though he were straight out of a Marlon Brando mold, although he has a basic appeal that manages to get through to the viewer despite the heavy burden of carboning another's acting style in voice and mannerisms. ... Julie Harris gives her particular style to an effective portrayal of the girl." - Variety, 1955

"One of the best films of this or any year, a film which gives a deeply disturbing insight into what psychologists call the feeling of rejection." - Library Journal, 1955

"They've taken the novel and stuffed it into a tight little psychoanalytical pigeonhole--a father problem." - Time magazine, 1955

"Kazan lets his characters unfold slowly, and when they finally erupt into anger or violence, you know exactly why." - William Zinsser, New York Herald Tribune, 1955

"Even if Jimmy Dean weren't a hometown boy, East of Eden still would be one of the most powerful productions ever released by Warner Brothers." - Fairmount [Indiana] News

"Kazan's compelling, if emphatic, realization of this psychological situation uses physical and spatial connections or barriers, and that very engrossing cinematic activity--watching. ... The place and period are convincing and integral. ...The acting is very striking. ... Above all, the imagery is like vibrato in music: Composition, movement, and color constitute feeling...." - David Thomson, America in the Dark (William Morrow and Co., 1977)

"An amazingly high-strung, feverishly poetic movie.... As the romantic, alienated young hero, James Dean is decorated with all sorts of charming gaucheries; he's sensitive, defenseless, hurting. ... Dean seems to go just about as far as anybody can in acting misunderstood. ... It's far from a dull movie, but it's certainly a very strange one. ... Julie Harris...gives a memorably lyric performance." - Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (Henry Holt and Co., 1984)

"East of Eden is Kazan's best film: partly because of Dean's prickly hesitation; partly because the absorbing clash of acting styles (Dean and Raymond Massey) suited Steinbeck's high-class weepie novel; and also because CinemaScope seemed to stimulate Kazan into treating his camera with some of the emphatic care he lavished on actors." -- David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (Alfred A. Knopf, 2000)

"Kazan's adaptation of Steinbeck's novel, about the rivalry between two teenage boys for the love of their father, is as long-winded and bloated with biblical allegory as the original. That said, it's a film of great performances, atmospheric photography, and a sure sense of period and place." - Geoff Andrew, Time Out Film Guide, 2000

"Not only one of Kazan's richest films and Dean's first significant role, it is also arguably the actor's best performance." - Kenneth Turan, Los Angeles Times, 2005

by Rob Nixon