The two East of Eden films are the sort you more or less like depending on how well you love the novel. If you're devoted to the book, the best and most famous of the video productions may probably disappoint you as it picks up only a small part of the novel and changes it radically.

The other, lengthier treatment will please book-lovers but risks exhausting those who aren't familiar with the whole sweep of Steinbeck's long novel.

The story of Cal

The 1955 East of Eden is of course famous for the mesmerizing method acting of James Dean, as Cal Trask, in his first movie role. Which tickied off the actor playing his father, Raymond Massey, an old-school thespian who felt Dean was self-indulgent and difficult, purposely setting about to rile him—which Dean was. But it worked well for the film, director Elia Kazan recognized, making the scripted misunderstanding of father and son all the more palpable.  

The trouble for a devotee of the book is that this relationship, especially focused upon from Cal's tortured point of view, comes to overpower everything else.

This movie is based on only part of the novel, which covered two complete generations. It picks up the narrative about two-thirds of the way through, starting with Cal as an older teenager tracking his middle-aged, brothel-running mother. The stories of how she got to that stage, her relationship with his father up to his birth, after which she went missing, and his father's own tumultuous early life are never told, scarcely hinted at.

No wonder Massey seems a grouch. He's given nothing in the film to show how he got to be what he is, what he had gone through. The rationale behind his strictness with Cal, his favouring of son Aron (Richard Davalos also in his film debut) and his estrangement form his wife, according to this movie, seems to be just that he's an old-fashioned, Bible-reading stick-in-the-mud. He just doesn't get modern young people like Dean—I mean Cal—and prefers straight arrows like Aron, old before their time.

Also missing from the film is Sam Hamilton, the book's folksy inventive dreamer who became Adam Trask's friend and helped humanize him. An even worse deletion form the film is the character of Lee, the Trask family servant who's educated and wise beyond appearances. It is Lee in the novel who comes up with the key to understanding good and evil, and who helps bring about the concluding reconciliation. In the movie, part of this role falls to Aron's girlfriend Abra, played winningly by Julie Harris.

John Steinbeck apparently appreciated Kazan's adaptation of his novel as well as Dean's powerful performance, accepting that a film does not belong to the book's author. And we can agree, East of Eden is a great film in its own right—a modern classic. Wonderful scenes are forever etched in film history.

But for a book lover who wants to relive the experience of the novel on screen, well, you have another option. With its own pitfalls.

The story of the Trasks

It played once on television in 1981 and was shown again for years, although it was released on videotape a decade later and finally on DVD just recently.

The spotty history of the East of Eden mini-series might make you think it was something embarrassing. But in reality it was well received originally and still holds up well after three decades. Plus, it provided the break-out serious role for—not the actor playing Cal, as you might expect—but for Jane Seymour as Cathy, biological mother to Cal and Aron, and Madame Kate to the town. Relishing the role of the scheming, sociopathic woman—Steinbeck's incarnation of evil—Seymour practically hijacks the film after her entrance about a quarter of the way in.

The mini-series starts, like the novel, before the birth of the sensitive Adam and his younger, tougher brother Charles, and the first of its three instalments focuses on their growth and evolving relationship. Of course, even in a six-hour production, much of the novel has to be telescoped, so we don't get quite as much detail about the life and "military" career of their blustering father (depicted perfectly by Warren Oates). And we don't get all the ups and downs of the agonies of Charles' life as the unloved son, played with an edge by Bruce Boxleitner. And we get only a sampling of favoured son Adam's miserable life in the army, trying to live up to his father's image until he rejects that way of life entirely and sets off on his own adventures. And in later sections, we get only a few scenes of the family of Sam Hamilton, played with gusto by Lloyd Bridges.

But it's enough. TV writer Richard Shapiro (best known for creating the Dynasty series) has brilliantly condensed the essentials of the novel to tell the basic story, allowing acting and cinematography to flesh out the rest.

The major failing however is in the character of Adam, tasked with holding together by force of personality all the threads of Steinbeck's sprawling saga. Sadly, Timothy Bottoms is not up to it. His Adam Trask is wistful, looking off at nothing most of the time, pulling his lips in slightly to register great happiness or sadness. He's hardly there at all. Small wonder Cathy is drawn to hop into the arms of fellow bad seed Charles on her and Adam's wedding night.

Bottoms is supposed to age something like thirty years from his youth to his fatherhood of nearly grown sons Cal (Sam Bottoms, Timothy's real-life brother) and Aron (Canadian actor Hart Bochner), but there is still something callow and too laidback about him even as he's turning grey.

The younger actors, Bottoms and Bochner are up to the job of filling out the brothers' roles more completely than in the earlier movie, making us forget for a time Dean and Davalos. They are ably supported by Karen Allen as Abra, though she is not as strong as Julie Harris had been earlier.

And, most fortunately, we have Lee in this version to hold the latter half of the series together. Initially, Korean-born actor Soon-Tek Oh seems a little weak as the wise servant but he grows into the part strongly as time progresses to play a pivotal role in the drama. His personal story too is somewhat curtailed in the film and by the end we wish he had more screen time.

All in all, East of Eden the mini-series is quite an achievement, perhaps too long and drawn out for the average film buff but a necessary watch for readers who want to relive the literary experience in only slightly condensed form.

— Eric

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