James Dean night

James Dean starred in only three movies before his untimely death. TCM is showing all three of them tonight:

East of Eden at 9:45 PM;
Rebel Without a Cause at midnight; and
Giant at 2:00 AM.

Now, you'll notice that the movies don't begin at 8:00 PM which is when prime time normally begins. That's because TCM is running a documentary on James Dean at 8:00. Now, as I've mentioned before, I'm not a huge fan of James Dean. I think one of the scenes that best shows my thinking on Dean comes early on in Rebel Without a Cause, when he's at the police station and his parents are more or less lecturing him. The first time I heard Dean's line "You're tearing me apart!", it frankly made me laugh. The delivery made me think of Estelle Harris playing George Costanza's mother on Seinfeld, which I have a feeling is not what was intended by any stretch of the imagination.

Maybe TCM could have shown sausage magnate Jimmy Dean as the bad guy Willard Whyte in Diamonds Are Forever again.