by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Afterwards Charles and I watched two intriguing episodes of
the General Electric Theater TV show,
which ran from 1951 through 1962 and was a key element in the political
evolution of its host, Ronald Reagan. It put him in touch with General Electric
and in particular its fanatically Right-wing CEO, Harold Boulware, who hired
Reagan not only to host the TV show but to tour GE’s plants and give suitably
“inspirational” talks to its workforce. Later, after Boulware retired, his
successors let Reagan go because they thought his talks were getting too openly political and towing too much of a Right-wing
line that wasn’t exactly what they wanted their workers to hear from their
bosses. These both came from late 1954 and we were watching them as part of the
three-DVD boxed set of James Dean’s television appearances, and though they
came from the same program the two shows were dramatically different in their
levels of inspiration and accomplishment. Both came from Los Angeles, where
Dean was living following the completion of his first featured film role, East
of Eden, but before the movie had been
released. The first was an adaptation of Sherwood Anderson’s 1924 short story
“I’m a Fool,” about a young man from a farm (so once again Dean was playing the
farm kid he was for real) who heads for the (relatively) big city of Sandusky,
Ohio to try to get a job as a “swipe,” basically the kid who cleans the
horseshit out of the stables at a racetrack. He meets a philosophical old Black
man named Burt (Roy Glenn, who actually turns in the best job of acting in the
film!) who agrees to hire him, and Dean’s character (he’s just referred to in
the cast list as “The Boy” and we never learn his real name) applies himself
and works his way up enough to the point where, though he’s far from affluent,
he can pose as at least a semi-rich kid enough to impress the guests of a fancy
hotel. There he meets the genuinely affluent Wilbur (Leon Tyler), his
girlfriend Elinor (Gloria Castillo) and their friend Lucy (Natalie Wood — so
she worked with Dean before they
made Rebel Without a Cause
together!). “The Boy” is instantly smitten with Lucy — and she with him — but
to impress her he makes up a phony story about being a rich kid from Marietta,
Ohio. The two spend a day together before Lucy’s train is scheduled to leave at
10 p.m., and as “The Boy” realizes that Lucy is literally the girl of his
dreams, the girl he’s always wanted to marry and settle down with, he
desperately tries to get the chance to tell her he’s been lying about who he is
and reveal his real identity — but he runs out of time, her train arrives, and
she promises to write him — but of course the only address she has for him is
the one for the phony identity he’s given her.
I haven’t read the original
Anderson story since I was in high school, but as I remember it took place just
a short time after the events its narrator is recounting, and I believe the
central character did have a
name. Arnold Schulman, who adapted the story for TV, decided not only never to
tell us the James Dean character’s real name but to have the framing sequences
take place about 20 years after the main events and be narrated, on
screen, by Eddie Albert as James Dean’s
older self. (Since Dean died so young we don’t have a genuine older version to
compare him to, the way we have the genuinely old Orson Welles to compare to
how he was made up in the later scenes of Citizen Kane, but I sincerely doubt James Dean would have grown
up to look anything like Eddie Albert.) Director Don Medford and production
designer John Robert Lloyd worked out a quite creative design for the film that
allowed the actors to walk between the story’s main locales — the rural
community where Albert-as-Dean is living and from which he reminisces the
events of the story, the farmhouse Dean leaves to seek his fortunes in the big
city, the racetrack where he works, the hotel lobby where he meets Lucy and the
fairgrounds where they spend most of their day together à la Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy in Maytime — which are represented by sets of such Spartan
stylization one is reminded of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. More recent live telecasts of major musicals have
adopted this simple strategy of telling a story with multiple locales in live
TV by allowing the actors to walk from one set to another so they can all be standing
at once, but in 1954 it was a rare and unusual gimmick that adds to the
poignancy of this story. It also includes at least two scenes in which the
flashback scenes are shown on a process screen while Albert stands in front of
it narrating his memories: one of the rare times a process screen has been shown on film, especially in a movie that is not itself
about filmmaking.
This film stands out among most of the items in the Dean TV
box not only because it’s based on a story by a recognized major author (and
its tale of bittersweet romantic tragedy with elements of comic absurdity is
very typical of Anderson’s work) but because in a way it prefigures Dean’s role
in his very last film, Giant.
Though Dean’s character in Giant
would become genuinely rich, not merely posing as rich as he is here, in the later stages of “I’m a
Fool” his character grows a moustache because he thinks it lends him dignity
(as Jett Rink grew one in the later scenes of Giant), and the point of the story is that he remains the
same bitterly alienated person he always was no matter how much wealth and
status, real or imagined, he pretends to, and in particular he blows his one
chance at happiness and a normal family life. Dean’s performance is excellent —
what imdb.com reviewer Martin Hafer heard as Dean “tend[ing] to mumble and
occasionally flub[bing] lines” I heard as Dean playing a poseur whose mumbles and stumbles are those of the character sustaining an imposture and not sure how long he can
keep it up. “I’m a Fool” was one of the few Dean TV shows that was shown again
as a memorial after his death, and the soundtracks from it and Dean’s final TV
performance, The Unlighted Road
(a Schlitz Theatre presentation
oddly not included in the box,
though it’s available on YouTube; Dean made it between Rebel Without
a Cause and Giant and it was therefore the last Dean performance
actually seen by a public audience during his lifetime), were taped off the air
by someone who released a bootleg LP of them which Dean’s 1970’s biographer
David Dalton was able to obtain a copy of and therefore fill in accounts of
these entries in Dean’s otherwise then-lost body of TV work. It seems
incredible that no one realized shortly after Dean’s death that his corpus of live TV constituted an important part of his
legacy and therefore it was not only artistically but commercially a good idea to make a conscious effort to save it
all. Instead it was considered just more of the flotsam and jetsam of the live
TV world, and what survived did so pretty much by accident.
