Why so much hype?

Touches You

Purely Joyful Movie!

It's complicated... I really like the directing, acting and writing but, there are issues with the way it's shot that I just can't deny. As much as I love the storytelling and the fantastic performance but, there are also certain scenes that didn't need to exist.

The story talks about two brothers living with there father, and their father is almost the perfect man that can you see, but his biggest problem is that he loves one of his sons more than the other, and that's because he never understand him. And that Affects Cal ( Dean ) very much because no matter what he did he just can't win his father love, he feels that he is the unwanted son.James Dean delivered one of his best performances ever to the big screen, and for me among his three films this was his finest and that's because of the brilliant guide by Elia Kazan, now don't get me wrong Dean was a great actor and had a great talent but when you have a great director like Kazan you will bring the best of you, take a quick look at Kazan movies you can see that any actor who worked with him took an Oscar nomination.Dean really gave us an unforgettable performance of a complicated guy that no one could performance it, he stole almost every scene he was in, and who could forget the way he is looking with eyes full of tears after his father refused to take his birthday present. and the unforgettable ending which is full of love and forgiveness.Alongside dean there was a great cast most best of them was the talented Julie Harris and i really can't think of this film without remembering Harris Character which had a very sad childhood just as Cal's life.

Based on a John Steinbeck novel, Elia Kazan's "East of Eden" stars James Dean as Cal, the son of entrepreneur Adam Trask. Cal feuds with his younger brother and father, both of whom perceive Cal to be "bad". Also deemed "bad" is Cal's mother, the owner of a local brothel.As Kazan has truncated Steinbeck's novel, each character's actions and motivations become slightly cartoonish. Adam himself is portrayed as a religious fundamentalist, so scarred by his now absent wife that he deems everything unsavoury to be a "mark of wickedness". Psychologically abused by his judgemental father, Cal embarks on an unhealthy quest to both find his mother and earn daddy's favour."East of Eden" is filled with artificial, exaggerated oppositions, trite melodrama and strained allusions to the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. On the flip-side, it's beautifully shot, boasts amazing wide-screen photography and contains a number of interesting passages. Elevating things further is Dean's performance. Dean would act in only three films before dying at the age of 24 ("Giant", "East of Eden", "Rebel Without a Cause"). In each of these films, he played sensitive, troubled young men. These characters are outsiders, idealists, confused, ashamed and filled with a burning desire to belong. More than this, their on-screen suffering seemed to echo Dean's own off-screen troubles.Dean's performance in "East of Eden" has been called "groundbreaking", but it wasn't really. Brando and Montgomery Clift were already making waves as Method Acting Mega Stars, and Paul Newman and others would soon do so as well. What Dean did well was popularise a certain turn-of-the-century teenage archetype; all adolescent ache and emotional turbulence. And as Dean was immortalised as an adolescent and never allowed to grow up, his characters only seemed more doomed. As the years went by, his three performances would accumulate almost mythological proportions. This sentimental necrophilia would blind fans to Dean's flaws – his obvious attempts to mimic Brando, his overly mopey scenery-chewing etc – but in a way is also wholly deserved. "East of Eden" boasts gorgeous colour cinematography by Ted McCord, a lush score by Leonard Rosenman, and fine performances by Julie Harris and Jo Van Fleet.7.5/10 – See "Marjorie Morningstar", "Some Came Running" and "Rebel Without a Cause".

This movie simplifies the book down to a plot of a troubled "teen" (James Dean a bit too old at 24) trying to win approval from an overly puritanical father.This boiled down story from Steinbeck's book is not particularly lame by Hollywood standards and stands on its own. Dean is decent in the role...Kate is simply a hard hooker not the demonic character in the book who burns her parents alive. However it disappoints because the book has such interesting characters like Kate and Lee. All the movie offers is some sort of dull coming of age thing.But how can a movie possibly cover a long novel?---it can't in fact when movies try to cover books too fully the result is always bad---with rapid untethered jarring snippets of dialogue and action from the book which if covered fully would take 50 hours of screen time.The German who is barely covered in the book gets much too big a role in this movie in some sort of Hollywood PC moral lesson...other than that I guess the biggest complaint is it is all rather boring.In the end Caleb wins his Dad's love when his Dad asks him to take the place of the nurse. Yawn...Do Not Recommend

The film was a poorly directed and disappointing rendition of the novel and its moral.To be fair, one can only fit so much of such an extensive story into a movie, providing the director reasonable excuse to start so late into the novel, but also making him even more responsible for the fragment of the story he chose to recreate. The film in its entirety felt much like a roller coaster, having many interesting/exciting parts but lacking any real direction or focus. In relation to the novel, the film barely managed to show a connection, which was only achieved by loosely portraying major events and the characters themselves. The cast themselves, despite their valiant effort, either underacted or overacted, taking whatever moral or lesson the story might have possibly been connected to, and beating it even more, until it was barely recognizably, if existent at all. Throughout the film, the number of loose ends and spontaneous changes of depth in meaning was overwhelming, to the point of sight nausea. Significant scenes holding any philosophical value were also few and far between. To be fair, the film, when observed independent of its literary counterpart (if that relationship can even be established!) did maintain some level of intrigue, managing to keep me fairly interested and somewhat entertained. The actors also managed to retain some portion of the intensity and urgency ever so abundant in the novel, as well as maintain the personality of their personae.To conclude, the film missed the standard set by the novel so intricately written by Stienbeck. The bulk of my disappointment, which was immense to say the least, was the utter failure of the film to accurately portray the novel it was named after. Though decent as a film itself, it is sure to disappoint those who have rad the novel and enjoyed it in its entirety.