THE fiftieth anniversary of James Dean’s death is not until September 30, but already the Dean bandwagon is going full tilt. Rebel on the Road, an exhibition of Dean’s cars and motorcycles including a replica of the car in which he died, recently opened in Los Angeles. A DVD box set of his three feature films is due out in May. A new documentary, James Dean: Cinema’s First Rebel, will have its premiere at Cannes in May, followed by another Dean film, Forever Young, in June, but not before stage versions of Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden open in Tokyo and Osaka.

Of all the rebellious stars who died young, Dean died the least embarrassingly. No drug overdose, no choking or vomit, no belt-throttled suicide. He crashed his silver Porsche Spyder 550 at 75 miles an hour, on what is always described as a “lonely” stretch of highway, into a car driven by the ironically named Donald Turnupspeed. There are photographs of the mangled car, but not of the corpse.

This means his legacy of agonised pretty-boy portraits — and it’s a massive gallery for such a brief period of stardom — can enchant each adolescent generation anew.

On February 8, friends and co-stars gathered in Los Angeles for what would have been his 74th birthday. They praised Dean’s talent and discussed his vulnerability and sullen, childish ways.

Phil Stern, the photographer whose shot of Dean’s face half-covered by a turtleneck sweater graced teenage bedroom walls during the 1970s, said: “Dean was very prescient because he structured his career so that he passed away in a way that precluded people seeing him as a potbellied, bald man.”

Perhaps the only ground not tilled to death is the game of “What he would be like now if he were alive?” Making twitchy cameos in Tarantino movies? Hosting motorbike rallies? Waddling around in distraught reclusedom? The blimpish fate of Marlon Brando is the most obvious option.

While a young actor in New York Dean was obsessed with Brando. When he finally met him, during a visit by the great man to the set of Dean’s first film, East of Eden, he was “so adoring it was painful”.

There is a sunnier alternative in Paul Newman, with whom Dean made a screen test for East of Eden. But the prospect of Dean reaching a similar emotional maturity feels remote. He was a tangle of shy attention-seeking, flinty ambition and push-me-pull-you neediness.

In the screen test with Newman, Dean jokingly said, “Kiss me”, which leads to a more probable incarnation: Montgomery Clift, who died a disfigured, tortured drunk in New York. Dennis Hopper once described Dean’s appeal as being half-way between the “f*** you” of Brando and the “forgive me” of Clift.

Dean’s bisexuality emerged with a spate of frank biographies in the 1990s, but the aggregate evidence suggests that his gay relationships were just another form of attention-seeking and exploration. He was admittedly neurotic and wildly moody, swinging between outrageous play-acting in public and fleeing the first sign of socialising.

Elia Kazan, who directed East of Eden, called him a breathtaking narcissist. “He would stand in front of the mirror taking pictures of himself — picture after picture. And yet he was more vulnerable than anybody I’ve ever seen.”

His problems can be traced to the death of his mother when he was nine. Dean accompanied the coffin back to Fairmount, Indiana, where he was raised by an aunt and uncle, and never reconciled his feelings of loss. He channelled it into his drive to achieve success and outgrew his small town, thanks to acting and the help of the odd bohemian mentor. But he did it without ever becoming a sophisticate. He was a lost boy to the end.

In all his films he is on the outside looking in. In Giant, he is the muddy, oil-covered interloper at Rock Hudson’s ranch.In Rebel without a Cause he is the new kid at school, driven mad by his craven father. The opening of East of Eden could not offer a better summary of Dean’s raging feelings of abandonment: he is found sitting on a sidewalk watching his mother walk past. She doesn’t know him, having fled the family home years before, and now runs a brothel.

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