James Dean: 50 years after his death

A final puzzle piece to the deification of Dean could be the pity factor--bemoaning what might have been. Would he have maintained the youthful diversity of his old New York stage and television rival, Paul Newman, or would he have gone the riveting-in-ruin route of his hero, Marlon Brando? I could not resist asking Winslow where his cousin might be today had he avoided that sports car death. He answered with one word, "Director." It is a good and knowing answer.

So, should we mourn what might have been? As a biographer currently writing on the life of Dean, my answer is drawn from a profile of the inspired French director Jean Vigo, whose iconoclastic "Zero for Conduct" (1933)--about a boarding school where the authorities cannot regiment the most spontaneous of children--reminds me of Dean. Vigo also died in his 20s, after only four films. P.E. Salles Gomes observed in a 1957 biography of the director, "To dwell on the brevity of Vigo's career, and to speculate on what might have been if he had lived, is to dismiss the scale of his achievement." I would advise the same concerning Dean.

Wes D. Gehring, Associate Mass Media Editor of USA Today, is professor of film, Ball State University, Muncie, Ind., and author of several books. Among his latest is Film Classics Reclassified: A Shocking Spoof of Cinema.

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