Giant (1956) Review

A Maryland woman marries a Texas rancher after two days, arrives at a house standing alone on half a million acres, and is told by his sister how things are done. A ranch hand is left a small parcel of land in a will. Oil is under it.

The 8 is for a film with genuine ambition, a superb first hour, a sagging middle and a last act that says something the industry was not saying in 1956. Stevens won Best Director and the film lost Best Picture to Around the World in 80 Days.

It also runs too long by about thirty minutes and the ageing makeup in the final hour is the weakest technical element in an otherwise handsome production.

It was also an enormous commercial success, took around thirty-five million dollars against a budget near five, and was Warner Brothers’ highest grossing film until Superman came along twenty-two years afterward.

Stevens spent about a year in the edit, which was unusual then and shows in the transitions. The cuts between decades are handled on objects and on weather and not on captions, and that part of the film is entirely assured.

It Starts as a Marriage

The first hour is about a woman who has married into a place she does not understand and will not accept the terms of, and it is the best material in the film.

Elizabeth Taylor’s Leslie is the mechanism. She arrives educated, opinionated and unimpressed, asks why the Mexican workers live in those conditions, and is told at a dinner table that politics is not discussed by women.

Her first scene on the ranch is the whole relationship in miniature. She has opinions about horses, is correct about them, and the film establishes that she knows more than the people telling her what to do before she has unpacked.

What the film does with that is unusual for its period. She is right, she keeps being right, and the film does not humble her or convert her into a Texan. She simply continues objecting for twenty-five years.

Taylor was twenty-three and playing a woman from twenty to forty-five, which is the other ageing problem the film has. She manages the early material completely and the later material is carried almost entirely by the writing instead of by anything the makeup department managed.

Mercedes McCambridge’s Luz is the other half of the first hour and the film loses something when she goes. A sister who runs the ranch, resents the wife, and has no interest in being liked, played with complete conviction in about twenty-five minutes of screen time.

Luz also dies because of the horse, which is the film’s one piece of neat construction. She rides it to prove a point about who controls the household and the animal kills her, and the film does not comment on the symmetry.

Dean

Jett Rink is a ranch hand with nothing, is given a small parcel of land out of spite, finds oil on it, and spends the rest of the film being richer than everybody and no happier.

Dean died before post-production was finished and some of his later dialogue was dubbed by another actor, which is audible in the final act and is part of why that section is weaker.

The performance in the first half is extraordinary and is doing something specific. Jett barely speaks, occupies space awkwardly, and communicates almost entirely through posture and a way of holding his hat. The tea scene with Leslie is the best two minutes in the film. He has invited her into a shack, is trying to be a host, has nothing to offer, and the whole class structure of the film is in how he handles a cup.

The land itself is the other thing Jett is given. Twenty-odd acres out of half a million, handed over as an insult, and the film understands that the insult is what makes what follows inevitable instead of lucky.

The last act asks him to play a man thirty years older, drunk, delivering a speech to an empty banquet hall, and he was twenty-four. It does not work and the attempt is remarkable.

Dean also had the sequence shot before he died and the dubbing was done by Nick Adams, which is the detail that explains why the banquet speech sounds slightly wrong. A performance completed by somebody else is audible however well it is matched.

The Diner

The film’s final sequence is a confrontation in a roadside diner over the refusal to serve a Mexican family, and it is why the film still matters.

Bick Benedict, who has been a bigot for three hours, defends his daughter-in-law and his grandson, gets into a fight with the owner, and loses. The film lets him lose.

That decision is the whole point. A conventional version has him win and the audience leaves satisfied, and this version has a man in his sixties beaten on a diner floor while a jukebox plays, having finally done the right thing too late and inadequately.

The closing image is the two grandchildren, one white and one brown, side by side, which in 1956 in a major studio release was a statement. The film puts it last and says nothing about it.

The Middle Sags

The second hour covers children growing up, a war, a business rivalry and several marriages, and it is where the running time becomes a problem.

The structural issue is that the film has three subjects and the middle hour is servicing all of them. The marriage, the oil, and the racial arrangement each need development, and the film alternates without building any of them.

The children are also thin. Dennis Hopper’s Jordan and Carroll Baker’s Luz are given positions instead of characters, and Jordan’s marriage to a Mexican doctor’s daughter is the plot mechanism for the final act instead of a relationship the film has developed.

Ferber also wrote Show Boat and Cimarron and had a specific method, which was to research a region exhaustively and then build a family across decades inside it. The soft middle is a property of that method and not of this book.

Sal Mineo appears briefly as a ranch worker who dies in the war, and the sequence is the middle hour’s only genuinely affecting material. A funeral with a flag, in a community the family has never treated as part of the ranch.

Angel Obregon’s death is also the one point where the film’s two subjects meet properly. A Mexican American ranch worker killed in American service, buried by a family that has employed his family for thirty years, and nobody in the scene says anything about it.

Rock Hudson is also doing more than he is credited with. Bick has to be a bigot the audience can stay with for three hours and then change, and Hudson plays the whole thing without ever asking to be liked, which is not what the studio was using him for at the time.

1956 and Around the World in 80 Days

Best Picture went to Around the World in 80 Days. The other nominees were this, The King and I, Friendly Persuasion and The Ten Commandments.

Stevens won Best Director, which is the split this page keeps documenting. The Academy recognized the direction and gave the picture to a travelogue with a large number of cameo appearances.

The winner is the least defended Best Picture of the fifties and is usually cited alongside The Greatest Show on Earth from four years earlier, which also appears on this page, and both are DeMille-era spectacle over substance.

What makes this entry different from the others here is that Giant is not a masterpiece. It is a long, ambitious, uneven film that says something difficult, and the argument is that a flawed film with a subject should beat a polished film with none.

Should you watch Giant?

Yes, and be ready for three and a half hours. A woman who arrives in Texas and objects for twenty-five years without ever being humbled, James Dean handling a teacup in a shack, a sagging middle hour, and a final scene in a diner where a bigot finally does the right thing and is beaten on the floor for it.

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