Everything you’ve always wanted to know about ‘Giant’
Don Graham ends “Giant,” his booklength study of George Stevens’ 1956 film, with a singularly illuminating factoid. Stevens, who netted his second best-director Oscar for his efforts, enjoyed a running debate with cinematographer Bill Mellor over which was tougher on them: World War II or “Giant.”
By his last page, Graham has expended the previous 259 making a decent case in the film’s favor.
“Giant’s” synthesis of Hollywood star power and Texassize ambition with themes that anticipated the looming seismic change in U.S. society seems nearly impossible on paper, despite its novelistic origins. But onscreen, it really pops. Even today, “Giant” is arguably the most “Texas” of all the Texas-themed motion pictures.
Graham’s book, one of several the University of Texas at Austin professor has written about the intersection of pop culture and Texana, is a compelling behind-the-camera look at one of the 1950s’ most unusual — and successful — mainstream Hollywood productions, a film that celebrates Texas’ most enduring virtues even as it criticizes some of its most tragic shortcomings.
“Giant” was a curious choice for Stevens to follow 1953’s Oscar-winning Western/ Cold War allegory “Shane.” Although Edna Ferber’s 1952 novel was a blockbuster, selling 25 million books by 1956, it was so critical of the state that a Beaumont man commented that his fellow Texans might well shoot up the screen when “Giant” hit theaters. One Houston columnist called for Ferber’s public hanging. He was being satirical, but his point was made. (Phillip Meyer made great sport of a Ferber-esque writer in his 2013 novel “The Son,” calling her book “one long exaggeration” that “made everybody look like clowns.”)
Ferber, whose previous screen successes included “Show Boat” and “Cimarron,” helped Stevens and screenwriter Ivan Moffat draft the script but bristled mightily when the film began to deviate from her book, such as the scene in which ranch hand/ roughneck Jett Rink serves tea to Leslie, the blueblooded rancher’s wife, or the climactic brawl when cattleman Bick stands up for his mixed-race grandson.
But those changes, and the casting, made a considerable difference.
Starring three of the most iconic movie stars of their era in Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean, the film depicts Texas on the cusp of two crucial mid-20th-century transitions. Oil is rapidly usurping cattle as the state’s primary economic engine, and an era of expanded civil rights for women and racial minorities is dawning much more quickly than those invested in the status quo would like.
No plot device could better address such themes than a marriage, here the union of Bick Benedict, the stoic and bullheaded cattle baron, traditional to a fault; and Leslie, his outspoken wife from back east. Leslie criticizes the way Bick treats his family’s Mexican-American household staff before he can carry her over the threshold, and before long she’s standing up to him and his friends for excluding women while they “talk bidness.”
Meanwhile, looming like a shadow is Jett Rink, the resentful ranch hand who eventually strikes oil on land bequeathed him by Bick’s late sister.
Coming in at nearly threeand-a-half hours, a full hour longer than Stevens’ Warner Bros. bosses were expecting, “Giant” ran weeks behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget. Stevens shot more than 850,000 feet of film, which took a solid year to edit. His crew of nearly 300 actors and technicians filmed for more than 100 days, 38 of those near Marfa in a part of the state the Mexicans called “desplobado,” or “uninhabitable.” Yet vacation-minded Texans flocked to Stevens’ open set, not to mention the press; the Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Big Bend Sentinel all covered the filming extensively.
Graham doesn’t skimp on the small-town West Texas weirdness, movie-biz trickery (fake tumbleweeds, fake cattle) or on-set shenanigans. Dean and the film’s dialogue coach enjoyed terrorizing Presidio County’s jackrabbit population; another time Dean psyched himself up for a scene by urinating in front of the assembled co-stars, crew members and scandalized onlookers. It was an extreme manifestation of the then-newfangled technique known as “method acting.”
Some of the details Graham digs up about the leading actors’ personal lives are juicy enough for Confidential magazine, the Hollywood scandal sheet that had Hudson’s agent cutting deals to keep his client out of its pages. Hudson’s homosexuality was an open secret in Hollywood but hardly to the moviegoing public and, Graham notes, gays in the 1950s were about as welcome in public life as communists. Also thanks in part to Confidential, Taylor began the film with one husband and had already met her next one by the time “Giant” premiered in October 1956.
But ultimately the film belongs to Dean, which even his harshest critics — namely Stevens and Hudson — would eventually acknowledge. So does Graham’s book; “Lone Star,” the chapter recounting Dean’s background, is twice as long as any of the others. Dean, who was 24 during filming, was obsessed with racing and forever trying to fill the void in his life left by his mother, who died when he was 9. His ambiguous sexuality has proved a source of endless public fascination.
Elia Kazan’s 1955 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s “East of Eden” made Dean a star; “Rebel Without a Cause,” released that fall, made him even hotter. And if “Rebel” fixed him in the public’s imagination as a brooding, magnetic teen idol — immediately establishing a new archetype in American movies — “Giant” suggested the kind of actor he might have become had he not died in a car crash just days before the movie wrapped.
Dean’s death was only the beginning of his legend; many fans at the “Rebel” premiere couldn’t even acknowledge that he had died. His final film has found a similar fate.
Graham’s book combs through hundreds of books, articles, TV and radio reports, films and other sources to outline “Giant’s” hefty footprint. The filming alone inspired two 1980s feature films — Robert Altman’s “Come Back to the Five and Dime,” “Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean,” an adaptation of Ed Graczyk’s play; and “Fandango,” Kevin Costner’s movie debut — plus two documentaries, 1996’s “Return to Giant” and 2015’s “Children of Giant,” which focuses on the Marfa area’s Hispanic population.
Texas remains far and away the nation’s leading producer of both cattle and crude oil, and “Giant” remains one of the few Hollywood films to accurately capture the sense of vastness, tradition and being special that practically comes as a birthright. Some might also call that entitlement, and the prejudices and stereotypes that modern Texans still can’t seem to shake have also, unfortunately, helped extend “Giant’s” relevance.
Condensing all of that into just three-and-a-half hours, Stevens earned that Academy Award twice over. Graham’s account of “Giant’s” journey from novel to film to legend is so thorough it should have come with its own stage directions.
‘Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber and the Making of a Legendary American Film’ By Don Graham St. Martin’s Press 312 pages, $14.99