I always thought Giant was a big, pretentious, overly-long bore. I watched it not so long ago. Aside that people seem to like those long epics in the 1950s, as shallow as they were, many still do! What always amazed me was the scene in the diner, where the owner, a bigot (Sarge), refused to serve some customers who weren’t white (Mexicans)! What else was new in Texas in those days? Rock (I am always amazed at that name) Hudson (Bick) gets in a brawl with this huge guy! They must hit each other enough to either break their hands (I have been in a few fist fights and did some boxing) or kill each other with hits to the head. The next scene has the lovers at home with Rock/Bick’s head in Liz’s lap. There isn’t a bruise on his face. Wow another miracle of modern medicine.
Personally, I never bought into the brilliance of Dean, who had too short of a career to really judge, and Hudson was never much of an actor. He may have been worse than Robert Taylor, but not as pretty. As for Elizabeth Taylor, very attractive, short and I always thought her life was summed up in the film Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf? It seems Burton was perfect for her, a drunk, who pissed away his life. Liz, with all her frailties survived Burton to find more men.
Speaking of other opinions, less complimentary was director and critic Francois Truffaut, who in an early review called Giant a “silly, solemn, sly, paternalistic, demagogic movie without any boldness, rich in all sorts of concessions, pettiness, and contemptible actions.”
A stinker. Seriously. The Hollywood studio icons (Taylor, Hudson) don’t mesh well here with the new methodistas (Dean, Hopper)—and there is film evidence that they can work well together (see anything with Taylor and Clift). The script is a mess; there is no plot to speak of; the bigotry is rampant and unrepentant. Texas looks kind of pretty, but mostly this is an overlong mess. Stevens directed better films. The only real interest here is watching James Dean steal scene after scene with the studio stars he shared screen time with, through slouching, mumbling and general assholery.
Surprisingly avoids any real lulls for a 3 1/2 hour film but lacks cohesion and thematic resonance because of its sloppy and unfocused script. An overarching motif to tie all the threads together would have helped give the film power and emphasis. Instead, I am left wondering what exactly I witnessed.
Given that the film leaves on a note of defying prejudices, one would think this was a social commentary film a la Gentleman’s Agreement or To Kill a Mockingbird, however, it is shoehorned and unwarranted. Rather than sprinkling in such distracting notions, the film perhaps would have been better off focusing on and developing more, the interesting aspects it superficially delved into.
There are other facets to the film as well, such as those involving supporting characters, but they are also lacking in execution. For instance we see an interesting set up with James Dean’s character Jett, who is exemplified as a frustrated failure, exhibiting a sort of pathetic jealousy of the success of his employer Mr. Benedict, yet the payoff is less than satisfactory. Rather than a subplot showcasing the Texas-way of grit and determination in one-upmanship, Jett, after schlubbing away on his newly acquired land, ends up having “success find him” when he inadvertently strikes riches in lottery-like fashion. This, in addition to the Benedicts inheriting their wealth, shows us success as being more a matter of privilege than perseverance, struggle, and hard work. There is nothing on par here with say the O’Hara’s of Gone With the Wind overcoming the pillaging of their beloved Tara or the tragic gas blowout and insanity inducing oil fire experienced by Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood. Here, success comes rather easy, despite earlier scenes of a blue-collar work ethic giving us a brief glimpse at the contrary.
We are also given other notions which are hinted at: corruption of power or dehumanization from vain materialism and corporatism? This is perhaps shown by Jett’s embarrassing meltdown of misery and preceding fisticuffs with the eldest Benedict son. The scene certainly seemed unmerited and lacked genuine escalation to that point however.
Big soap. Biiiiiiig soap. It’s the kind of movie you’ll be glad you watched once and will nevertheless cringe at the prospect of watching ever again. Interesting that this movie was released the same year as The Searchers, since both films clearly want to empathize with and simultaneously dwarf the struggles of Texas families among the staggering landscapes surrounding them. The film is incredibly handsome, not even so much for the landscapes but for the interiors that are emphasized against the grand landscapes. In retrospect, this must’ve been a pretty easy movie to shoot considering the money that was probably thrown at it: just build a huge opulent mansion in the middle of nowhere and shoot with wide lenses. It’s hard to screw that natural beauty up. And yet it’s also interesting how the characters seem dwarfed inside the house(s), too: they’re swallowed or smothered in shadow (contrasted by the fact that everything’s bright outside, even fire or the kicked-up dust or the dining on what looks like tuliped liver). For a while the movie seems like it’s not even particularly interested in people at all, not that there’s anything wrong with that. (The courtship setup in the first 20 minutes is handles so quickly, eager to get the preliminaries out of the way, that it’s hard to catch your bearings for a while.)
Giant is basically two movies. There’s the interesting movie that involves the upstart oil baron played by Dean and the overwrought melodrama involving Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. When Dean is on screen, the film cooks. When we’re left with just Taylor and Hudson, the picture is stuffy and long in the tooth. George Stevens gives us a lot of interesting things to look at, particularly the massive house belonging to Taylor and Hudson. It sits alone on the land, a monument to an ideal that Hudson’s character believes in, an ideal that drives a wedge between him and his wife. It serves a similar role as Kane’s Xanadu in Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, the interesting visual aspects aren’t enough to meld the two disparate story lines into a cohesive whole.
Personally speaking, I could take the original, 1931 film Cimarron with Richard Dix and Irene Dunne any day of the week over Giant!. It’s about the west, almost the same time period, about oil, but with a much more interesting story of the State of Oklahoma, hypocrisy, money and justice.
More:
Like the title says, it’s a whopper: 201 minutes of a Texas family’s rise to fame and fortune, based on an Edna Ferber novel. Much of it is awful, but it’s almost impossible not to be taken in by the narrative sprawl: like many big, bad movies, Giant is an enveloping experience, with a crazy life and logic of its own. George Stevens directed, at the height of his bloated epic period (1956), but unlike his A Place in the Sun, this one isn’t entirely sober and sanctimonious; it takes some pleasure in melodrama for its own sake. The mansion on the plain, designed by art director Boris Levin, remains one of the most memorable graphic images of the 50s. With Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean—in his last and strangest role. David Kehr, The Reader
But at least a very top-notch critic like Richard Schickel liked it!
I found myself — all twitchy intellectualism aside — liking it enormously. There’s more to Stevens’s exteriors than those great shots of the looming ranch house. He had learned John Ford’s trick of keeping the horizon low in the frame, and there are literally dozens of long, wide shots that are more than merely awesome. They suggest an emptiness that stumbling, ill-educated, materialistic people will somehow fill with something — oil derricks, bragging Texas talk, reactionary politics. [Reprinted in the NY Times