Former monthly contribution by late TCM host Robert Osborne to the TCM newsletter Now Playing in July, 2004.
James Dean had one of the shortest, most dynamic film careers on record. Not counting the few, insignificant bit parts he played in forgettable films such as Sailor Beware and Has Anybody Seen My Gal, the sum total of his output as a major player was three, count 'em, three movies. And only one of those, Elia Kazan's magnificent East of Eden, was released before Dean's death on September 30, 1955. (For the record: Rebel Without a Cause was released one month later, in October 1955; his third and final film, Giant, came out in October 1956, a full 13 months after his death.) No one would argue that he died much too young, and one can only speculate how soaring, or possibly limited, his career might have been had he not made that fateful drive near Salinas, California. It's also a question mark how much of an effect his passing had on the careers of several of his peers. (One of the films Dean was set to do at the time of his demise was Somebody Up There Likes Me, which was then inherited by Paul Newman and, coming at a perfect time for Paul, jump-started Newman's career into the big time, where it has stayed ever since.) It's a subject we'll be exploring extensively this month, looking at stars who died before their time and the effect those deaths have had on the motion picture industry and the public as well as the stars' legacies.
Dean's death, for instance, helped ignite a hysteria over him which turned Rebel into a box office sensation. It's the opposite of what happened when Carole Lombard died in a plane crash on January 16, 1942. She had a new film ready for release, the saucy Ernst Lubitsch comedy To Be or Not to Be, and her death so devastated the public, few people went to see the movie when it opened two months later, in March 1942. (The good news is that, as the years ticked by and the details of Lombard's passing were less imprinted on people's minds, To Be slowly began to find its audience and is now considered a bona fide "must-see" classic.)
Marilyn Monroe's last film, The Misfits, had already been in release for 16 months before her death on August 5, 1962, although her costar Clark Gable had died three months before the film's premiere in February 1961, giving that film a reputation as a multi-jinxed project. But there was such a clamor for more Monroe material, 20th Century-Fox eventually edited a compilation feature called Marilyn, which included scenes from all her Fox films along with previously unseen footage Marilyn had filmed for an uncompleted movie, Something's Gotta Give; the new package was sent to theatres a year after her death and it performed well at the box office, though not spectacularly. The early and unexpected deaths of such stars such as Jean Harlow, Natalie Wood, Robert Walker, John Belushi, Kay Kendall and John Candy left unreleased films which created fan interest but ultimately caused no great rush to local Bijous; by contrast, others like Rudolph Valentino, who died while his final film Son of the Sheik was still playing first-run engagements, seemed to generate as much, or more, rabid interest from fans after his death as he did during his lifetime.
