Pros: Arguably, the first successful Hollywood "film novel." Strong tolerance theme. Tiomkin score.
Cons: Some scenes are overlong.
The Bottom Line: GIANT broke ground in several areas -- racial and social themes, novel form into film -- and contains a classic performance by James Dean.
GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) perhaps was its forebear, but, although there have been many since, no other American film resembles GIANT before 1956. We have to go back to Abel Gance's NAPOLEON (1927) or the early Italian epics to find films like it, and those were operatic in nature. Von Stroheim's GREED (1925) was as ambitious, a better film, but slashed to a ghost of itself in the version we have today. GREED and GIANT are attempts to adapt the form of the epic novel to the Screen.
GIANT, based on Edna Ferber's novel about two generations of Texas oilmen and their families, reverberates to this day. For who were the plutocrats of TV's Dynasty if not soap opera imitating art? And who are the Bush Family but carpet bagging social climbers imitating art? Both are the spawn of GIANT.
The film may be faulted for the self-indulgence which marked Director George Sevens' Post World War II work (a self indulgence now grown into a Hollywood monster), but not for the audacity of its form. Some critics have attacked GIANT's "unnecessary" sub plots, but of course -- if I am correct -- the bigger the novel, the more subplots are needed. For, without sub plots, any novel becomes a long short story.
As many of us know, GIANT tells the story of a cattleman, Jordan "Bick" Benedict (Rock Hudson), who brings his young Virginian bride, Leslie Lynton Benedict (Elizabeth Taylor), to live on one of those legendary Texas spreads like the King Ranch. The story covers the two generations that follow in over three hours of screen time.
In novelistic fashion, we see a plot develop, the simple shape of a triangle, when a poor relative, ranchhand Jett Rink (James Dean), falls secretly in love with Taylor's Leslie. His passion, greed, and jealously drive him to work himself to a frazzle to discover wealth of his own. He strikes oil! His actions give birth to numerous subplots that involve politics, economics, and racial prejudice in America during the first half of the 20th Century.
GIANT is full of memorable set pieces. The air shot coming straight on at the Gate to Bick Jordan's Empire, and beyond, his Victorian Mansion, gabled, gingerbreaded, its mansard roof glinting in the sunlight, on a vast desert plain stretching to the horizon. Dean stamping out the property line of his claim. Later, Dean's joy as saltwater and then oil pour down upon him from the derrick he has erected. Dean's drunken attack on Bick to celebrate his triumph over the older man. Near the end , a corresponding, very realistic knock-down-drag-out, when a coffee shop manager makes disparaging remarks about the elderly Jordan's Latino Grandchildren. All of these sequences are punched home by one of Dimitri Tiomkin's most stirring scores.
George Stevens started as a gagman, then a director for Laurel and Hardy. He moved, in the 1930's, to making a variety of genre films: Fred Astaire Musicals (SWING TIME, 1937), Adventure (GUNGA DIN, 1939), Comedy again (THE MORE THE MERRIER, 1942), but a stint overseas during World War II, including the liberation of Dachau, seems to have slowed him down, darkened his view, given him a need to make "significant" films. (At the end of his life, he referred to GUNGA DIN as "the kind of fascist film you could make before the War.")
Stevens shot GIANT on location in South Texas. He marshaled a large, talented cast, including Carol Baker, Chill Wills, Dennis Hopper, Rod Taylor, Earl Holliman, Jane Withers, Sal Mineo, and Mercedes McCambridge. And he drove cast and crew unmercifully in a production that was indeed epic, some said Biblical. The relationship between Stevens and the young men in the cast was said to have been tyrannical and brutal. It ended tragically with the death of GIANT's rising star, James Dean, in a crash of his new Porshe, three days after the wrap of the production.
Dean never gave a better performance, and many critics say the same is true of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, despite difficulties with make up, which must carry them over a 40 year period.
Orson Welles learned of the undercurrent to the film upon his return to America in 1958, perhaps from Mercedes McCambridge on the set of his TOUCH OF EVIL. Welles, we may speculate, was influenced by the success of the youthful Stevens in GUNGA DIN.
In any case, Welles credits the production of GIANT as an inspiration for his own legendary, unfinished epic THE OTHER SIDE OF THE WIND (1972-). It is the story of an old director attempting to finish a huge film, taunted by a young actor (or director), who calls him "Fatso." The old director encourages the younger man to "have guts enough to buy a really sharp sports car." (When he came to shoot the film, vanity, or the possibility of libel action, prompted Welles to refine the story and cast gaunt John Huston in the role of the old director.)
"Fatso" is said to have been the arrogant James Dean's nickname for George Stevens.
GIANT, then, is rising above legend into the Realm of Myth.
Stevens later made THE GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD (1965).
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