ABSTRACT
All three of the films James Dean starred in before his death in 1955 at age 24 feature highly prominent musical scores. In East of Eden (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), the actor’s radically stylised performances are aided in their communication with the audience by Leonard Rosenman’s scores, which draw equally from modernist concert music and traditional Hollywood film scoring practices, helping to negotiate the gap between Dean’s characters on the screen and his audience in the cinema. In Giant (1956), on the other hand, Dean’s performance as the inarticulate oil man Jett Rink is betrayed by Dimitri Tiomkin’s traditional ‘Western’ score, the lumbering cowboy theme given to Rink so at odds with the performance on screen that the music acts as a barrier between audience and character. An analysis of these three performances and scores will attempt to further open a space for analysing music’s role in creating character, scoring the actor and his/her role.
