I’ve just run across something very strange: a highlight reel from a 1954 episode of an anthology series called General Electric Theater starring — are you ready for this? — Ronald Reagan and James Dean.

That rending sound you just heard may indeed have been the fabric of space and time giving way like cheap nylons that’ve been left in the sun for a year. It’s mind-boggling to think two men who would become such polar-opposite symbols in our popular culture — one, a rock-jawed, law-and-order establishment man, the other the embodiment of youthful restlessness and psychological frailty — could have ever crossed paths either socially or professionally. You just don’t think of them existing in the same world, really. But here they are, in glorious black and white, both playing essentially to type.

The set-up of this episode is that Reagan is a doctor awoken in the middle of the night by a couple of teenage hoodlums, one of whom has been shot. Much angst and some horrible Beat stereotypes ensue.

I find Reagan’s accent interesting here… it’s different than I remember him sounding, less rehearsed to my ear, far more Jimmy Stewart than the character he portrayed while he was in the White House. And Dean… well, I know his raw, Method-style hyper-emoting reads as overwrought, if not downright silly, to many modern viewers, but it’s always worked for me. His performance in this piece seems to be an unpolished shakedown for what he would do in East of Eden, especially when he begs Reagan to hit him, to punish him for being a bad little boy. For a decade that was supposedly all about quiet innocence, the ’50s had a lot of weird psychological stuff roiling just under the surface.

The blog I took this clip from has some more background and commentary that’s worth a minute of your time, if you’re interested.

Me, I’m still shaking my head at the surreality of it all…