Big country

Giant is still a whale of a movie

by Steve Vineberg

GIANT. Directed by George Stevens. Screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat, based on the novel by Edna Ferber. With Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Mercedes McCambridge, Carroll Baker, Sal Mineo, Chill Wills, and Dennis Hopper. At the Harvard Square.

Giant, which is receiving a 40th-anniversary re-release, is a very famous picture, but my guess is that, though it's available on video, hardly anyone has seen it in years -- that it's better known now through the lore surrounding it. It was James Dean's third and final movie; he completed it just before his fatal car crash. (Its place in the Dean legend is covered pretty thoroughly in Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.) And as a romantic vision of Texas, where horseback ranchers survey their 600,000 acres and scruffy lowlifes strike black gold and turn rich overnight, it has an assured place in Texas mythology, too. Lyle Lovett's "This Old Porch," for example, an elegy for the grand old Texas the film represents, mentions a deserted downtown movie palace: "a screen without a picture since Giant came to town."

Giant is a lot more fun to see in a theater than on TV because though God knows it isn't profound, the way it looks -- cinematographer's William Mellor's enormous vistas -- tells you what it means. And the big screen makes sense of the three-hour-and-18-minute running time, which, of course, goes along with the exuberant outsize feel of the picture. In a lot of ways, Giant isn't a very good movie (and the second half is mostly terrible), but it's a compulsively watchable one. The director, George Stevens, had passed his prime -- he'd made his last really fine movie, A Place in the Sun, half a decade earlier -- but he hadn't forgotten what he knew about how to keep moviegoers in their seats. Giant is drenched in '50s Hollywood glamor, and it has one of those Edna Ferber plots cranking it up like the sturdy mechanism propping up a shiny old merry-go-round. (The adaptation is by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat.) Ferber, who also wrote Show Boat and So Big, is shamelessly hoky; she defines "epic" by the way the second-generation characters reprise the conflicts of their parents. But her storytelling, and Stevens's, engages; with all its faults (including the bombastic score by Dimitri Tiomkin and some of the cheesiest age make-up in movie history), this is a movie you can look back on fondly.

Rock Hudson plays Jordan "Bick" Benedict, a wealthy rancher who brings his equestrian Maryland bride, Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), home to Texas. At Reata, his homestead, she learns to cope with a number of obstacles. Bick's possessive sister Luz (played by that uncategorizable actress Mercedes McCambridge), who sports riding clothes identical to her brother's, dislikes her on sight; she even tries to put the bride and groom in separate bedrooms. And an uppity hand named Jett Rink (James Dean) doesn't take long to make a pass at Leslie. Bick and Jett detest each other, but Jett is Luz's favorite. When she dies after a fall from a horse (Leslie's), he finds himself acknowledged in her will: she leaves him a parcel of land that he insists, to Bick's annoyance, on calling "Little Reata." He strikes oil and becomes ostentatiously, obnoxiously rich. By now the Benedicts have three grown-up kids; Jett romances the youngest (Carroll Baker), who's named for her Aunt Luz and shows some of her renegade spunk. That's not the only tension in the family. Jordan Jr. (a very young, very sweet Dennis Hopper), known as Jordy, challenges his father's old-fashioned ideas by choosing to become a doctor rather than a rancher and by marrying a young Mexican woman, Juana (Elsa Cardenas). (The ideas he embraces are Leslie's: she's in favor of education and compassionate toward her husband's Mexican workers, who live in squalid conditions.)

It's sometimes been conjectured that if James Dean had lived, his affecting but small talent would have been used up by the time he'd outgrown rebel-teen roles. Giant proves, I think, just the opposite. His foxy, imaginative performance, which is different from his work in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, is the movie's wild card -- even though Stevens and the writers don't like Jett Rink very much. (Evidently Stevens disliked Dean, who behaved badly on the set, but I think it's the Ferber source and not his bias that directs what happens to the character.) Part of what's wrong with the second-generation material is that when Jett turns into a racist villain, you feel let down, though Dean manages to bring enormous energy to his late scenes while making them psychologically viable. Dean fans like to recall the scene where, after refusing Bick's offer to buy back the land Luz left him, he kicks a bucket aside with merry abandon and walks over his new property with schoolboy pride. I also love the scene that precedes it, when he sits hunkered down in the best chair in Bick's study, playing with a lasso, a great shit-eating grin on his face, as he turns his adversary down flat.

Rock Hudson is stolid, as usual, but ironically, his is the role that resonates -- the movie reaches out to him in a way that it never does to Rink. He plays a man whose bigotry is as much a part of his legacy as Reata, but who grows beyond it -- of necessity -- when his son marries Juana. The movie's treatment of racial issues is preachy and obvious; there's a silly montage, for instance, of Leslie and Bick watching over their grandchildren, smiling happily at Judy and Bob's and looking anxiously at Jordy and Juana's, as if they never did anything but anticipate the trouble the kid's mixed blood is bound to bring. But the film's sincerity is rather touching, perhaps because it's daring enough to make its hero have to learn tolerance rather than being born with it.

While still relatively new to Reata, Leslie saves the life of a Mexican baby who grows up into Angel (Sal Mineo). He goes to war and comes home in a casket, and his funeral sequence is sensationally moving; it's the best thing in the picture -- especially the first shot, of the coffin being removed from the train. There's also a memorable party scene that's a tribute to Texan robustness, which is inseparable here from a kind of cheerful vulgarity you can't help being tickled by. Chill Wills -- always a welcome sight in a movie -- is the embodiment of that life-embracing raucousness. (At one point he rounds up all the Benedicts' family and friends as if they were steers.) The cast also includes Jane Withers as a neighbor, Earl Holliman as the war hero who's married to the elder Benedict daughter (Fran Bennett), Judith Evelyn as Leslie's mother, and a very young Rod Taylor (going under the moniker "Rodney") as the Englishman who marries Leslie's kid sister (Carolyn Craig) when he can't have Leslie.

Mellor shoots Elizabeth Taylor like a man in love (just as he did in A Place in the Sun). There's one breathtaking shot, early on, of her back as she runs across the lawn in the moonlight -- a shimmering summer-night dream of an image. Taylor's very good as Leslie in the first half, shrill and fussy in the second, but her presence holds it together -- she's the ethereal touch of glamor that justifies this old-style way of making big Hollywood movies. Seeing Giant makes you feel nostalgic for an era when a bulky picture like this one could still hold you. Our most longwinded movies still win the big awards (Dances with Wolves, Braveheart), in a Hollywood desperate to believe it's keeping faith with the old moguls. But these films are so monotonous that their length is a brutal punishment; they haven't been thought out in entertainment terms -- they don't give the audience anything. Giant gives us Taylor and Dean and Chill Wills and a glossy, involving narrative. It's the equivalent of a big, flavorful meal at a family-style restaurant; you walk away a little glassy-eyed, but happily sated.