Giant (1956)

Written by Fred Guiol & Ivan Moffat

Directed by George Stevens 

1998 List Ranking: 82

2007 List Ranking: NA - Removed

Giant is so long that I feel like I need to cut to the chase: it’s awful.

Maybe awful is a harsh word. Unpleasant. Dull. A waste of three-plus hours of my life that I will never get back. I tried to go in with an open mind. I don’t mind long movies (see: Titanic), but I do mind BAD three-hour movies. Even when I saw that Giant was a western (fortunately, it only feels like a western for its first half), I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt. But, alas, there’s no two ways about it: there is very little good in this turgid mess of a film.

Giant spends three hours setting up a bunch of different ideas and plots and not doing anything with a single one. Spanning about three to four decades, it tells the story of the Benedict family, headed by Bick (played by Rock Hudson) and his wife Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). Owners of a huge ranch in Texas, they bicker and quarrel as they get married, have kids, and deal with former ranch hand Jett Rink (James Dean) who discovers oil on his small piece of land on their property. That’s…it. THAT is three hours. Add in some good old fashioned southern racism, mix it all together, and serve over and over again. That’s Giant.

Rock Hudson in an early scene in the film

The problems with this film are evident nearly from the outset, as each character basically gets one defining characteristic and that’s all they’ve got. Hudson, in the first role I recall ever seeing him in, is the belligerent ranch owner who gets upset when anyone disagrees with his high-and-mighty opinion. Taylor fares the best in the film by having TWO characteristics: she’s a feminist (as much as one can be for the time) and she cares a bit about racism (but, like everyone else, not enough to really do anything about it).

Taylor and Dean

The worst, unfortunately, is Dean. After a pretty great performance in Rebel Without a Cause, here he goes the Brando route and just mumbles the bulk of his limited dialogue, forever squinting and possessing none of the irresistibility he displayed in Rebel. If you were to tell me that he was drunk throughout the making of this film, I wouldn’t bat an eye, because that is genuinely how he comes across.

The biggest issue in the film is how it sets up plot points and then doesn’t go anywhere with them. Leslie, originally from Maryland, is shown (or rather, we’re told) to have dumped her fiancé in order to marry Bick; once they arrive at the ranch, she meets Jett and the two very clearly show some sort of attraction towards one another. Okay, I thought, this film is gonna be about her infidelity and the triangle that forms. Fine. They flirt for a couple scenes, and then…nothing. They basically never share the same scene ever again! Leslie is also shown to care deeply about the Mexican workers of the ranch (who basically live in their own separate squalid town), so she goes there for a couple scenes…and that’s it. The whole film feels like a series of set-up’s with no payoffs.

Bick (Hudson) stands up against racism for probably the first time in his life

Perhaps the most glaring instance of this is the film’s treatment of racism. Nearly everyone in the film is racist to some degree, some more blatant than others. To be quite honest, this film feels like it could be a precursor to the “white savior” idea, that only White people can solve racism. From the beginning of the film, Hudson gets angry at Taylor for going to visit the Mexican living areas, and the racism just keeps going from there. However, the film DOES try to say SOMETHING about it (the climax of the film is Hudson getting into a fist-fight with a diner owner over the owner’s treatment of a Mexican family), but I don’t think the film really knows what it wants to say (almost as if it’s afraid of alienating the actual racists who’d be seeing it). Their son (played by a young Dennis Hopper) has married a Mexican woman, Juana; in that diner, it feels as if the family is uncomfortable with the racism being displayed towards her, but there is also a feeling that it would be a relief to them if she just wasn’t there. I suppose I can give the film some credit for at least trying (it’s still the 1950’s, so take that into account), but it still makes for some problematic moments.

What even is this??

There is one last thing I want to briefly touch on: the makeup. While most of the characters appear to age naturally, whoever was in charge of Dean’s old-age makeup should be fired, because that was so unbelievable. It’s hard to put my finger on exactly what is so bad about it, but it looks absolutely ridiculous.

Allegedly, this film was the inspiration for the show Dallas (which I’ve also never seen). If it is anything like this boring dumpster-fire of a film, I’m fine with leaving it that way.

FINAL GRADE: D+