East of Eden

In the Salinas Valley, in and around World War I, Cal Trask feels he must compete against overwhelming..

• Director:Elia Kazan
• Genre:Drama
• Runtime:114 minutes

Cast

Julie Harris : Abra
James Dean : Cal Trask
Raymond Massey : Adam Trask
Burl Ives : Sam the Sheriff
Richard Davalos : Aron Trask

The story is set in 1917, during World War I, in the central California coastal towns of Monterey and Salinas. Cal (Caleb) (James Dean) and Aron (Richard Davalos) are the young adult sons of a modestly successful farmer and wartime draft board chairman named Adam Trask (Raymond Massey). Adam is a deeply religious man. Cal is moody and embittered by his belief that his father loves only Aron.

The Trask family has a farm in the fertile Salinas valley. Although both Cal and Aron had long been led to believe that their mother had died “and gone to heaven”, the opening scene reveals that Cal has apparently come to realize that his mother is still alive, owning and running a successful brothel in nearby Monterey.

After the father’s idealistic plans for a long-haul vegetable shipping business venture end in a loss of thousands of dollars, Cal decides to enter the bean-growing business, as a way of recouping the money his father lost in the vegetable shipping venture. He knows that if the United States enters the war, the price of beans will skyrocket. Cal hopes this will finally earn him the love and respect of his father. He goes to his mother Kate (Jo Van Fleet) to ask to borrow the capital he needs. She reluctantly lends him the five thousand dollars (approximately $85,000 in 2008′s currency) . Read more