Stark contrast ... Marlon Brando auditions for the Rebel Without a Cause role eventually played by James Dean. Photograph: AP
What would Rebel Without a Cause have looked like with Marlon Brando and not James Dean in the leading role? A tantalising clue is provided by the discovery of a hitherto lost, believed non-existent screen test filmed back in 1947 when the actor was just 23. It transpires that Brando was the original choice for the part of tortured teen Jim Stark, only to eventually turn the job down. Eight years later the role fell to 23-year-old Dean, and that multi-billion-dollar industry known as American youth culture was born.
By all accounts, Brando is mighty fine in the test. Certainly he possessed the right anguished, animal intensity for the part and had already proved himself a compelling stage presence with an acclaimed Broadway run in A Streetcar Named Desire. For my money, Brando at 23 was a more technically gifted, weighty and multi-layered actor than Dean. And yet I can't help feeling that Brando's Rebel would have been an inferior film.
Make no mistake: James Dean self-consciously modelled himself on Brando and idolised him to an extent the older actor sometimes found embarrassing. But the two men came from different places and represented different qualities. In short, Brando was New York, and Dean was Los Angeles. Where Brando was a product of the 1940s stage, Dean was an icon of 50s pop culture. Even in his youth, Brando excelled at playing agonised, raging adults (his first film cast him as a disabled war veteran). By contrast, Dean's speciality was mixed-up, misunderstood kids.
Try as I might, I can't imagine Brando as Jim Stark, squabbling with his folks, snickering in his seat at the planetarium and wailing "You're tearing me apart!" at the world in general. He could be vulnerable, confused, pig-headed and lost. But he could never, quite, be juvenile. He was just too big, too powerful, too obviously a force of nature. He was the full-blooded hurricane to Dean's mercurial hormonal storm. Rebel Without a Cause was better off without him.
These days Brando and Dean are usually lumped alongside dear, doomed Montgomery Clift as the three magi of Method acting - the supergroup of stars that turned American cinema on its head and influenced the generation that followed. But, as with any supergroup, each member embodied a different set of strengths. Put glibly, you might say that Clift was the brains, Brando the soul and Dean the heart of the operation. In the case of Rebel Without a Cause, the heart was what was required. For the film to work, it needed the ultimate American boy, not the ultimate American man. It needed James Dean and not Marlon Brando.
