James Dean: 50 years after his death.

• Author: Gehring, Wes D.
• Position: Entertainment

The actor "was not the aimless angst-ridden youth he played in the movies.... He was not that suffering, rudderless figure in real life. "

IN MANY WAYS, JAMES DEAN is the star who never died. Fifty years after his speeding sports car death, he remains one of the most enduring of Hollywood's iconic legends ... despite starring in just three features: "East of Eden" (1955), "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955), and "Giant" (1956). At the time of the fatal accident, actor Humphrey Bogart made the darkly comic observation that "Dean died at just the fight time. Had he lived, he'd never have been able to live up to his publicity." For all the macabre wisdom in Bogie's remark, there is no easy answer to the "why" of the enduring legend of the Hoosier-born "rebel." Ironically, during the cult hysteria that first followed his passing (which ranged from numerous global teen suicides to 300 fan clubs in Japan alone), many felt Dean's home studio (Warner Bros.) was manufacturing the mass mourning. Paradoxically, the Warner honchos were more concerned that audiences would not turn out to see a dead actor, since Dean died before "Rebel" and "Giant" were released.

"It always takes a while to look back and see on what point the significant lines of history converge--that's why they call it perspective," writes cultural historian Adam Gopnick. So, what now would be an educated guess as to why Dean, with only three major movie roles, remains one of the most celebrated of film stars--replete with a full array of memorabilia and marketing schemes--with "Deaner" fans still making his hometown of Fairmount, Ind., a movie mecca? It begins with talent. As period critic Alfred C. Roller of the New York World-Telegram suggested, Dean, coupled with his heroes Marion Brando and Montgomery Cliff, "helped revolutionize the finely-honed art of film acting by making it less finely honed, ruffling it up with [method's] rough edges."

Second, taking a cue from the equally iconic Bogart, the timing of Dean's death fueled the fame. Yet, this point is contingent upon a third component of the Dean legacy, what London Observer writer C.A. Lejeune called being a "symbol of frustrated youth, of mixed-up kiddery, revolt and loneliness." For instance, shortly before the world saw Dean's screen persona test fate by entering a potentially fatal automobile "chicken run" in "Rebel," the young actor's real life recklessness led to his death. A foolish waste--yes! However, that life-on-the-edge consistency legitimized the poignancy of Dean's screen characters. Like the signature fictional figure of the 1950s, novelist J.D. Salinger's Holden Caulfield, Dean was all about fighting phoniness. Indeed, Holden's central...