Can someone please explain James Dean

James Dean................Tom Green.........It's all hype.

 

This thread is ''TEARING ME APART'' Well he lived fast and died young! Pretty new & hip to the scene when he died, which I think helped make him a legend. I grew up in Anderson and use to go to Fairmount and check out his mom & dad`s farm and his grave site when we where young. Vandals use to steal the gold letters out of his tombstone, which wasn`t what you would expect for a star, pretty common little slab. That`s been 30 years ago. Fat Hack, The Blue Max is one of my favorites! Now that`s acting!

 

I gotta go with McQueen as well- a car guy, stoner, hipster, all around bad-*** didn't compromise for ****.

 

"Can someone please explain James Dean"

Sure, he's the cardboard dude in the corner of my shop

 

I've always dug James Stewart.

 

31A and Mutt....Im with you guys on this one.

Rat

 

Did someone say Wayne Newton??? Oh hell no.......I could go the rest of my life without ever hearing that over the hill ********er sing "Donkey Shine" again!!........and yet ...he still packs em in out in Vegas....go figure.

 

James Dean? Dead.
Dennis Hopper? Alive

 

Marvin was a marine and wounded at Saipan in 1944.

 

I heard that Captain Kangaroo was a Medal of Honor Winner and a Marine in WWII . that's a cool tough guy.

Dean was a whiney *** , although I watched a really cool show about reconstructing the crash that he died in , it covered a bunch of rumors about it , turns out he wasn't driving fast and the other guy wasn't his gay lover.

 

Bob Keeshan (Captain Kangaroo) was indeed a decorated WWII vet. I think he served with Lee Marvin as well.

 

Jimmy Stewart flew 20 combat missions heavy bombers during WWII and retired from the Air Force Reserve in 1968 as a Brigadier General.

 

Do you honestly think Cagney was cooler than Dean? If you really do, you need to back away from your fuel mix! It's doing a bogus number on your head! James Cagney was to acting what Military Music is to Music! Almost there. Dean was a great method actor. You need to read about James Dean. His notoriety was not a fluke. It's just a damn shame the man who could act, play various musical instruments, paint, and drive extremely fast race cars quite well, died at the age of 24! I'd like to see Cagney match any of those traits! I digress. My diatribe has ended!


"Top be or not to be".....Shakespeare. "Do be Do be Do"..Sinatra.

 

It's simple...Drive fast...Die young...End of story.

 

Dean better than Cagney? Why I oughta...

We are wasting valuble HAMB-BAND-WIDTH here but seriously they are not a good comparison. Different eras had different demands which produced different acting styles.

Cagney grew up when vaudville was still alive. He was in entertainment before movies became big entertainment. He was very much the complete entertainer, a cl***ic triple-threat, sing, dance, and act. He could do drama and comedy. He was there during the transition from silent to sound, when primative recording gear required loud and distint articualtion for suitable playback quality. It was bulky and needed to be close to the subject but sheilded from the noisy cameras of the era. Early sound movies needed controlled environments therefore the Camera were big and bulky and didn't move a lot. Film speed was slow and lights were hot. Early film directors often had theater backgrounds. There wasn't any film past to draw on. Writers came from many differnt backgrounds. Scripts were often dirrect adaptations of stage plays. They were learning and creating the art form as they went. Audience expections were different. They wanted entertainment first. It was all new. And method acting was only then emerging in Russia and Europe through the work of Stanislovsky and the writing of people like Checkov.
It would be a while before it came to America, to the Actors workshop in the 40's where it changed acting from the inside out.

The 2 men aren't really comparable but could Dean dance? No. Could he sing? Not much. Entertain? His friends described lots of weird horsing around.
Marlon Brando is often acknowledged as the "best" method actor. If you don't like Brando there is Paul Newman. No? Okay Robert DeNiro. No? Okay, Robert Duvall. All students of the same Actors Workshop in NYC. Many more to choose from.

Dean, a nice kid from the midwest, made 3 movies all released after he died. John Steinbeck's "East of Eden" which is Dean's best work in my opinion, "Rebel" and "Giant" which was in production when JD died forcing the editors to use the footage they had instead of going back for some reshooting that was needed. The result being that "Giant" is something of a mess. That's it. Three movies and out.
The publicist's dream. The James Dean Hype and lurid fixation started after his death and release of his pictures. It was very much a product of the Hollywood PR machine. Perfect. Here is a movie star that you can invent and sell as is forever and the product will never change. He's no longer alive to contradict or refute what you say he is. Perfect, uniform, consistant, we can guarantee it.
What the hell was Hollywood going to do with some dead kid? Bring him back from the dead, that's what and sell him by the ounce, pound and ton as long as the people are buying. If he were still alive he might very well be akin to Johnny Depp or some other sensitive type. We would have probably have grown to hate him if he had lived. There is no denying the strength of his legacy. When I was in Film School in the 1970's (go ahead and laugh) he was
still an influence on many students although his appeal was usually to total flaming queens. They were positively worked up about him.
All of that brooding sensitivty or something.

Meanwhile Jimmy Cagney worked in movies right up until the end of his lfe at age 87. He was terrific in 1981s "Ragtime" playing police chief Rhienlander Waldo. Like Mae West, he was "somebody" before Hollywood "found" him. James Dean has Jimmy Cagney to thank for the opportunity to be James Dean and he would probably be the first to admit that. If ony he could. But he can't because he's dead. They're all dead. All dead. Okay? Happy now?


Cagney and Dean? There is no comparison.

As far as cars and rodding, Dean seemed to have normal male instincts regardng wheels. He didn't embar*** himself on the track but you should ask Donald Turnipseed (if he is stil alive) what he thought of Dean's driving.

I don't know if Jmmy Cagney ever ran at Laguna Seca but if he did it would have been in an Auburn Boattail Speedster or a 2 1/2 ton Mack beer delivey truck with a Thompson .45.

I'd pay to see that.

 

I had it wrong, but that's still bad *** and cool.Do you think Dean would've done the same?

 

Pfffsh... Never understood the Dean thing either. In the moveie Clueless (Alicia Silverstone) the James Dean lookalike was a gay character, I laughed. Now, Don Knotts... let's photoshop HIM into some of our Hot Rod Rebel movie posters. RIP Don!

 

I've seen just about everything James Cagney did as well as everything James Dean did...

It's kinda apples and oranges...

James Cagne came from the work-horse era of film. You churned them out as fast as possible and made them as entertaining as possible. He was always a Vaudeville style performer. That meant he was about rapid gratification. He would have never understood the way James Dean worked.

James Dean was an Art for Arts sake actor. He strove to make every character as beleiveable as possible.

Was he the greatest actor ever? Probably not...

Go rent Hud, Long Hot Summer, or even Road to Perdition from Paul Newman...

Or On the Waterfront, or The Fugitive Kind by Brando...

Could James Dean have been better had he a chance to grow older and mature? It all depends on what camp you are in...

Was he gay? Who the **** cares... You probably can't wait to hear what's going on next with "Brangelina" either.

You're never going to have James Dean "explained" to you...

You either get him or you don't. Neither way is wrong.

Now if someone could just explain Henry Rollins to me...

 

The big deal back then for guys like JD, Brando, etc. The gave **** to their parents, authority, whatever, at least in the movies. Stuff real teens in the early 50's couldn't do.
(Now everyone can jump in and say what a bad*** they were) If I had given my old man serious lip, I'd be a distant memory on a marker somewhere.
Same deal with Elvis.......In real life he was a gospel loving, mamas boy, and I hear an all around good guy. we copied him cause they hyped him as a truck driving bad***.

 

I have to agree that Steve McQueen tops the list of all-time bad***es.

But James Dean, , Brando, even Connery make the list for reasons of their own. Gotta love those early Bond movies!

As far as the gay issue...who cares? Dean, Hudson, Cary Grant. Did that affect their talent as actors or worth as human beings? I can't even begin to understand a mind that will negate a person's achievements--even a person's life as a whole--because he or she is gay.

 

WTF? I dont care what anyone says, James Dean is as cool as they come. (and so is everyone else mentioned in this post-McQueen, Stewart etc...). He's become more of a representaion of the era in recent years and was a very good actor for the time. And as far as the gay **** goes, there's people out there who knew him alot better than anyone on here who swear he was not at all (Dennis Hopper, his girlfriend, etc...) Lets not loose track of what kind'a people are writin' this ****. Probably some ***s who like to think he was. Either way he was a good actor, played the part and drove cool cars.
-Dean

 

funny you mentioned that,,actually it was the other way around, Dean was actually a huge fan of Brandos ...Dean showed up one night at a Hollywood social party knowing that Brando was going to be there ..Dean was dressed up from head to toe in "the Wild One " type biker outfit. haha

i was a huge james dean fan in my teen years(although i was born 20 years after his death,.,still are a big fan too!) as funny as it seems i related a whole lot to Rebel without a cause,,my mom was constantly changing my schools,,always having to prove myself etc..blah blah blah..

'Rebel without a cause' was a movie so many teens related to back then,,for the fact that the **** that the kids in that movie were going through actually never had been portrayed in films prior to that,,i.e. teenage social issues,, did 'teenagers' even exist prior to 1950?

the Mutant King is an awesome book on Dean,,pick it up if your a James Dean fan...

 

So you think your cool, here is a test to see if you are cool. Good Luck http://www.sailinganarchy.com/general/2002/cool_test.htm

 

i dont know about james dean or cagney,but i know that robert mitchum was/is THE MAN...
creepy

 

two things, 1 was it von dutch who did the lil ******* on deans car? and two he wasent gay ........he was bi

 

James Dean........hard to explain..........but will any of us have threads devoted to how great we were or were not when we are gone?? Thats the real question isnt it ,or maybe the answer.....

Years ago i managed Movie World Cars of Stars{in california} for the Bruckers, we had the Merc from "Rebel without a Cause" in the museum. Used to sit in it sometimes and ponder about the man.

 

Thanks guys, I really didnt expect to get this many responses. I will check out his other movies, maybe it will come to me.

Wow, alot of cool other guys i've forgotton over the years...lol

 

I agree with McQueen.

 

I don't think it's appropriate to put modern definitions on what J.D. was. You are right, he wasn't gay, because then, in his day, the word meant "a fun-loving person", with no ***ual orientation implied. In the terms of the day, there were no words to be put in print or broadcast for not being hetro***ual. In social acceptance terms, being both was more derogitory than being one or the other. The words were whispered with implied shame; (queer, ***, homo, pervert, etc.). J.D.s talents as an actor were developing, he displayed potential, promise, a rising star, but I don't think he can be cl***ified as peer with the greats; Mitchum, Cagney, McQueen, Marvin, Brando, Connery, Newman...............

 

Whatever man.......he's still not as cool as Teen Wolf.