Giant

Giant was a 1956 Western film based on the 1952 novel written by Edna Ferber. The movie was praised by critics and audiences, did very well at the box office, was nominated a total of ten times at the Academy Awards (although it only took home a single win), and was famous for being the last movie James Dean would star in before his tragic death eight days after the film’s completion. Helping to inspire shows like Dallas and even becoming its own musical in 2009, Giant proved to be bigger than expected, especially upon looking back at it all these years later and noticing both its strengths and its weaknesses. Considering that the Western genre was one of the most popular film genre within this era of Hollywood (especially during the 1950s, releasing hundreds within the first half of the decade), it’s still impressive that this movie did as strongly as it did. Set within the mid-1920s, young socialite Leslie Lynnton (played by Elizabeth Taylor) gets swept up by Texas Rancher Bick (played by Rock Hudson), marries him after a fast romance and agrees to live with him at his ranch out in the desert Texas landscape. Upon arriving and after meeting Bick’s older sister, Luz (played by Mercedes McCambridge), she discovers that things aren’t as picturesque as she’d hope they’d be with her new married life and the treatment exhibited on the farmhand, Jett (played by James Dean), the Mexican community who are mainly used as servants, and even herself are poor and attributed to the toxic masculine nature of the environment. Wanting to readjust while also fixing what is clearly wrong with this part of Texas, Leslie struggles to work with her husband and his steely ideals and they soon come into conflict with Jett as he acquires land and starts to rack in oil, therefore becoming wealthier than them. Considering its reception, Giant as a movie may have seemed like a milestone for the 1950s, but definitely isn’t a film that has aged very strongly. As a straightforward story, the movie looks like it has a lot of good qualities to it, but as the film keeps going, a lot more wrinkles start to form, and it starts to become a little messy.

The movie has a very fitting title as the runtime is appropriately giant, approximately being three and a half hours long and holds enough plot and characters to have been able to work as two separate films (but that never would have occurred for a film of this type). Clearly the movie and original story written by Ferber feel like they are tackling a very common tropey plot that feels very much like a western epic akin to the films that would have been very popular at the time, but what’s interesting about this narrative is that at first, it seems to be mocking and poking fun of that kind of lifestyle. Whereas films nowadays and even some in the latter half of the 1900s would work at dissecting the pros and cons of the western lifestyle, a film like this made in the 50s does it not only openly but in a mostly mature manner. The first act of this movie is quite engaging and interesting; seeing Elizabeth Taylor’s character go from a progressive environment into one that’s stuck in this backwards way of thinking, coming to grips with her husband’s flawed and fixated ideology, and how she wishes to fit into this area while also remedying its shortcomings, its surprisingly interesting, complex and focuses on relevant topics and actually discusses them for the most part  It’s a great fish-out-of-water narrative, it touches on interesting themes of class, race, and social upbringings, it shows the misogyny and racism of the era and location, especially in regard to Mexican Americans who lost their homes to become slaves to these newer ‘’Texans’’, it’s all very well paced, the direction by George Stevens is solid, and the screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat does good at highlighting these components while still acting as a product within the genre. But things start to fall apart as the movie keeps going and enters its second and third acts, where the plots, characters, themes, and points of attention become different from how they started out, and conflicts resolve themselves as quickly as they are addressed. It makes sense that this movie inspired Dallas as a lot of the atmosphere, dialogue and circumstances even start to feel very soap-opera-esque and lack that needed realistic bite that this narrative requires. You can tell the original source came from a book as it feels like these are all elements that would have had more time to be fleshed out and given time to breath in a written format, letting these real adult issues thrive and feel earned, whereas here they feel briefly touched upon at best and glossed over at worst. Even its ending conclusion feels not only entirely unearned, but also completely dissimilar to what the movie’s conflict started out as, it feels like two separate plots smashed into one package which individually could’ve been interesting but shouldn’t have overtaken one another. Despite the flaws that come with the story and how it eventually pans out, a majority of the technicals and other aspects of the film aren’t done poorly. It feels more like a mistake in properly being able to replicate the book’s structure and content in the runtime it had (despite being almost four hours long), but from a directing and acting standpoint, nothing is that horribly done.

The cast for the movie does fit within not only the time period but within the roles that they’re given. There are a few recognizable names featured here like Mercedes McCambridge, Jane Withers, Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper, and Rod Taylor, but the stars of the film really are the three leads. At this point, Taylor, Hudson and even Dean were famous names and were clearly picked because of it and each does a good enough job, but the quality of their performances really depend on the roles they are stuck with. Elizabeth Taylor, for example, is really good in the first act of the film; essentially being the main character, she is given a clear goal, conflict, and solution to fix the problem as well as acting as a surrogate for the audience and a fish-out-of-water for the new environment and behaviours of Texas. However, she is given far less screen time as the movie continues, devolving her into a basic old mother figure as opposed to the one of focus. It becomes clear that the movie truly lacks a main character and is instead opting for an ensemble cast, which is not only different from how the film started out as, but it just results in certain characters being sidelined by others as opposed to equally developing together. Hudson and Dean are really unlikable in this film, and this isn’t really a fault with their performances which are perfectly acceptable, but rather their characters themselves. Dean’s method-acting approach to the role makes the performance feel different but sometimes hard to understanding, lacking in personality and not nearly as complex as he thinks it is, and Hudson’s straightforward but bland portrayal makes his openly racist and sexist character even less likeable as there’s no sense of nuance or depth to it at all, despite the movie pretending that he is (standing up for your interracial grandchild doesn’t suddenly make you a good person)

Being something of a Western epic, it would make sense that the film would require the environment to fit in the typical Texan dessert-like environment, as well as show it off in the grandest scale that it could, and the movie does try to do this. There are some shots done by cinematographer William C. Mellor that do a nice job showing the scale and large desolation of the wasteland and somehow manage to make some shots of basically nothing but dirt, look pretty cool. It does get a little less ambiguous and interesting-looking as the film gets going as a lot of the good angles and large-scale shots are thrown away for more basic close up and medium shots (not helped out by the fact that the locations become more samey and traditional) which is another element that makes it feel more akin to a TV-esque project (with framing and a layout that looks like a sit-com or a soap opera) but it isn’t noticeably awful, rather just not as interesting. You can feel how this would very easily transition into a stage play/musical format, as the locations feel incredibly singular and not too expansive and have to rely on their production design and cast to make them feel more lived in, and in that regard, it handles that nice enough. They did try to make the filming feel as authentic as possible from not only actually going to parts of Texas to do a lot of the scenes outdoors, but also in the portrayal and look of the house they live in. The set for the house is a good-looking location that feels nicely designed and lively in that old fashion sense, which comes from the production design from Boris Leven who is able to make this house feel rustic and of a different atmosphere to the fancier lifestyle that Taylor’s character came from before, but still colorful and well-crafted in its own right.

Giant isn’t a bad movie by any stretch of the means, but it does have a lot working against it with the messy story, mostly unlikeable/bland characters, and its extensive length. Westerns were a dime a dozen during this period of Hollywood, but they mostly acted as harmless junk-food that heightened American spirit and resulted in a gun-slinging good time without really diving into the true grittiness of the landscape and what that lifestyle entailed and who was sacrificed in the process. Even movies that eventually did take the genre apart years later had enough of an understanding and maturity to handle it properly, whereas this film (even if it took steps in the right direction) does not and more so plants good seeds that are neglected and left to rot.  It does also feel weird that the movie is strongest at its beginning yet trails away from these elements as it goes on and even completely changes faces as it keeps going (a little hypocritical to mock the Texan culture, but also shower it in reverence). A mixed movie, but one that does still have its merits, check it out for yourself and see whether or not this deserves to be the starting point for a 1978 Prime Time soap opera.