At 15, Leonardo DiCaprio sat down with a pile of rented VHS tapes and gave himself a crash course in movie history. He’d recently, and miraculously, landed his first major movie role , playing opposite Robert De Niro, and figured he’d better brush up on the classics, fast. He watched film after film, but no performance awed him more than the one James Dean gave in Elia Kazan’s 1955 East of Eden, as Cal Trask, the rebellious son of a disapproving, rigidly principled, Bible-thumping father.