70th Anniversary screening!
It’s Cain and Abel on the California coast in Elia Kazan’s intensely emotional CinemaScope period drama adapted from John Steinbeck’s 1952 epic of the same name.
In the Salinas Valley, Cal Trask (James Dean) feels he must compete against overwhelming odds with his brother Aron (Richard Davalos) for the love of their pious father Adam (Raymond Massey). Carl is frustrated at every turn, from his reaction to the war, to how to get ahead in business and in life, to how to relate to his estranged mother (Jo Van Fleet), who presides over a Monterey brothel.
Set at a time when America was about to enter World War I, the familial conflicts foreshadow a world in crisis. Dean’s performance earned one of the film’s four Academy Award nominations, and East of Eden has the notoriety of being the only film Dean appears in that was released before he died, the only one he got to see in its entirety.
