James Dean, teenager — bfi.org.uk

As Cal Trask in Elia Kazan’s East of Eden and as Jim Stark in Rebel without a Cause, James Dean made a double impact, kicking his career off with two lead roles in the year 1955. This was also the year he died, aged only 24 – in a car smash in September, four weeks before Rebel’s release. It was a heady kind of happenstance. Two adolescents; two movies playing to an America that was not in the habit of trying to understand its young people. Like a scapegoat, he took the growing pains of a nation’s youngsters on his back; like a patron saint, he’d die doing it.

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