by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Later in the evening Charles and I watched the final item in
the boxed set purporting to contain all the surviving TV shows featuring (or
merely including) James Dean. a United
States Steel Hour presentation called “The
Thief.” (Dean actually did one more TV show after this one, a Schlitz
Playhouse presentation called “The
Unlighted Road,” which wasn’t in the box — and neither was his 1953 Tales
of Tomorrow episode with Rod Steiger, a
treasurable item because it features two of the most famous Method actors of
all time.) “The Thief” actually began life in 1915 as a play by French author
Henri Bernstein and it was filmed several times, the last in 1920, before going
into mothballs until the Theatre Guild, which co-produced this program with
United States Steel and ABC, dredged it up for this revival. (imdb.com lists
one other remake, a Spanish-language version from 1973 for an anthology TV
series called Estudio Uno.) It
probably should have stayed there. The film opens with some exciting industrial
footage of molten steel being poured and worked while an unctuous-voiced
narrator explains all the things you can do with steel and its indispensable
importance in modern life. (President Trump would probably have an orgasm
watching the steel porn, especially when the narrator climaxes with the
imposing words of the company’s name: “United … States … STEEL!”) Then we get a montage of actual
newsreel and documentary footage of Paris in the turn of the last century to
establish the time of the story as 1907, after which we meet the principals:
well-to-do Frenchman (his money comes from holdings all over the world,
including plantations in Brazil) Charles Lagarde (Paul Lukas); his son Fernand
(James Dean); Lagarde’s second wife Isabelle (Mary Astor); their friend Philippe
Voyson (Patric Knowles, who in the 1930’s had been handsome enough to play
Errol Flynn’s younger brother in The Charge of the Light Brigade but who had not aged well) and his rather immature wife Marie-Louise (Diana Lynn,
top-billed).
Also on the scene are two supposed servants, D’Arnault-Olivier
(Nehemiah Persoff) and Michel (Jerry Morris), who are really police officers
brought in by Charles to investigate the disappearance of 12,000 francs from
the household account of his wife. The cops suspect Fernand because he’s been
seen living beyond his means, lavishing money on a Moulin-Rouge performer whom
we never see and also losing large sums on horse-race bets. Fernand and
Marie-Louise have also been carrying on a flirtation — non-serious on her part
but deadly serious on his — and Fernand is devastated when he realizes she’s
just been toying with him. He’s even more devastated when he realizes that
Marie-Louise is the thief, and her husband discovered this but set out to frame
Fernand to get his wife off the hook. (I had thought the husband would turn out
to be the thief.) Charles threatens to send Fernand to work on the Brazilian
plantation for two years so he can get him out of the country and settle things
on the q.t. rather than embroil the family in a scandal, but eventually the
truth comes out and it’s the Voysons who leave the country instead. It’s not
much of a plot, and the stilted moral values behind it were probably considered
dated even in 1915 and certainly
were by 1955, but it’s fascinating for James Dean’s actor’s instincts. Though
accounts of the rehearsals indicate that he was cutting up, mumbling his lines,
improvising and basically appalling the old-line Hollywood talents playing the
other parts — there’s even a still in which Dean, rehearsing a scene with Diana
Lynn, pushed his glasses out of place (the extremely near-sighted Dean
rehearsed wearing glasses and only took them off for the actual shooting) to
give himself a four-eyed look and, according to Lynn, said, “Hey! I’m a
Picasso!” In her autobiography, Mary Astor recalled Lukas calling Dean “dat
inconsiderate vhippersnapper!” (I couldn’t help but joke during the show that
the actors playing Dean’s elders were hardly models of moral rectitude in their
previous roles: Lukas had played a Nazi in Confessions of a Nazi Spy and Astor had played a murderess in The
Maltese Falcon.)
The oddest thing about
those stories is that there’s no hint of them in Dean’s actual performance: as
he did in the similarly plotted “Run Like a Thief” for the Philco
Television Playhouse on September 5, 1954
(four months before the original January 5, 1955 air date of The
Thief), he completely gave up the Method
affectations for this role. He speaks his lines clearly and distinctly, showing
that he could fit into an old-line
Hollywood cast and also that he instinctively understood that a French play
from 1915 neither demanded realistic acting nor would be any good if he tried
to provide it. Though Dean’s first feature, East of Eden, is set
in the 1910’s, it’s a much more modern story in its sensibilities and Dean
throws the full armamentarium of Method tricks into his performance (indeed, I
think he overdid it a bit — and so did the critics of the time, who wondered
why the world needed a second Marlon Brando when the first one was still at the
peak of his career), while in The Thief he tones himself down and fits into a much more old-fashioned sort of
story. The biggest revelation in the Dean TV box is that he could be an
effective ensemble actor and he could play other things besides alienation, and
it makes his early death all the more frustrating because on TV Dean showed a
wider range than you’d think if all you know of his work is the three big
features (East of Eden, Rebel Without a Cause and Giant)
and one wonders if Dean could have been able as a movie star to break out of
the alienated-young-man “type” he’d been consigned to and play the wider range
of roles his TV work shows he could have done.
