CALAB TRASK (CAL) - James Dean
ARON TRASK - Richard Davalos
ABRA - Julie Harris
ADAM TRASK - Raymond Massey
KATE - Jo Van Fleet
SAM - Burl Ives
WILL HAMILTON - Albert Dekker

PLOT

This is the story of two 17-year-old brothers growing up in Salinas, California. The year is 1917, and the Great World War has just started. Cal and Aron Trask are twin brothers, but are anything but identical. Aron is the favored one, most loved by his father, and girlfriend Abra. He has blonde hair, and an "angelic" look. Cal is darker, more mysterious. He is the "bad" son, always sneaking out at night and not coming home until morning, or even after school has been let out the next day. The opening scene of the movie find Cal following a strange woman around town. He follows her to a "house" in a bad part of town. We later find out the this mysterious woman is Cal & Aron's mother, Kate. She is the madame of Kate's Place. The boys had been told that their mother died when they were babies, trying to hide the great secret. Cal decides not to tell Aron about their mother, thinking that it would hurt the more fragile Aron. He does, however, tell his father that he know the truth about his mother.

One day, while walking home from school, Cal, Aron, and Abra go to an ice plant that Adam had just bought. He plans to take advantage of the newly-discovered miracle of refrigeration, and try to pack lettuce in ice to ship is across the country to New York, where fresh vegetables are hard to find this time of year. Adam invests almost all of his available money into the endevour. Cal gets very interested, and helps out a lot in the project. While loading the lettuce into a railcar, he uses a shute to move the lettuce from the wagon into the railcar. Just then, some workers drive by and tell Adam that someone has stolen a coal shute from them. Adam is still very proud of his son's ingenious, but asks Aron to make a wooden shute. During a lunch break, Abra comes looking for Aron because she's made him lunch, but she only finds Cal. Cal takes the lunch and tells Abra that he'll give it to Aron, but then walks off and eats it himself. Abra is curious, and follows Cal into the fields. She tells him that when she was a little girl, she threw a very expensive diamond ring into the river, just to spite her father and new mother. Cal finds this very amusing, and the two find themselves very drawn to each other...they can understand each other, despite their many differences.