James Dean – The TV
Years (Passport)
Picture: C
Sound: C Extras: D Main Programs: B
With James Dean only leaving behind a huge legend and
three feature films, there is always the desire to show anything unseen or
little seen. For the latter, Dean left
behind a greater amount of TV work than many realize. In the Studio One set we reviewed a while back, a live
drama with Dean called Sentence Of Death was included.
Westinghouse sponsored that show.
On this
disc, we get The Bells Of Cockaigne from The Armstrong Theater,
sponsored by “The Armstrong Cork Company” that we now know for all kinds of
housing products. Dean plays a family
man who does not know what he is going to do about his wife and child. The child is ill, making a bad situation
worse. I’m A Fool is from
a rebroadcast copy of the GE Theater hosted by Ronald Reagan, in which Dean
falls in love and is clueless when he goes out on his own. Each runs about a half-hour and since the
sponsors had all the advertising time to themselves, there are no dead
commercial breaks and both include the amusing advertising for both companies.
Finally, there is a Hollywood Remembers segment on
Dean that samples trailers, scenes from the previous programs and has then-new
interviews about the short career he had.
Though he had much more TV work under his belt, this disc on Dean sort
of lives up to its title. Not bad for
90 minutes.
The 1.33 X 1 image on the first two programs is black and
white, muddy and old, a generation or two off of what look like Kinescopes to
begin with. The newer program is
produced on old analog NTSC video and has some letterboxed clips, but it too is
1.33 x 1 otherwise. The Dolby Digital 2.0
Mono is aged and mixed, with the newer program only a bit better than the older
ones. There are no extras, but Dean
fans and film fans will want to catch this at least once.
- Nicholas Sheffo
