About an hour into Giant, a ranch hand named Jett Rink stands under a gusher on his little scrap of West Texas land and lets the oil pour over him. Then he drives to the Benedict house, black from hat to boots, and announces to the family that he is going to be richer than all of them. Seventy years on, that scene still does exactly what it was built to do.
George Stevens made the film for Warner Bros. from Edna Ferber‘s 1952 novel, and he did not rush it. Giant runs three hours and 21 minutes. It follows one Texas ranching family across two generations, from the cattle era into the oil money that changed the state for good.
The story opens in Maryland. Jordan “Bick” Benedict, a rancher with more land than he can ride across in a day, has come east to buy a prize stallion. He leaves with the horse and with Leslie Lynnton, the doctor’s daughter, whom he marries almost on the spot and carries home to Reata, the family spread.
Elizabeth Taylor plays Leslie, and she is the reason the movie still matters. She arrives in Texas with East Coast manners and no intention of keeping quiet. Within days she is asking why the Mexican families who work Reata live in shacks without a doctor, and she keeps asking for the next three hours. Taylor was in her early twenties when she made it, and by the end she is playing a grandmother without a false note.
Rock Hudson has the harder job. Bick is stubborn and proud and a little thick about the world changing around him, and Hudson lets him stay that way for most of the picture. The payoff comes late, in a roadside diner, when the owner refuses to serve a Mexican family and Bick ends up on the floor trading punches with him while “The Yellow Rose of Texas” plays on the jukebox. Hudson earned a Best Actor nomination for the role.
Mercedes McCambridge is Luz, Bick’s older sister, who has run the house her whole life and has no use for a new bride. She is not on screen long. What she leaves behind in her will, a small piece of land for Jett, is what sets the rest of the movie in motion. McCambridge picked up a Supporting Actress nomination for it.
And then there is James Dean. Jett Rink was his third and final starring role. He died in a car crash in California on September 30, 1955, before the film was finished, and Giant reached theaters a year later. He was nominated for Best Actor after his death.
Dean is wonderful as the young Jett, slouched against a fence or pacing off his land with a length of rope. He is less convincing as the older Jett, a drunken oil baron with gray at his temples, and the banquet scene near the end goes on longer than it should. The whole back half drags in places. Stevens loved his long takes and his wide skies, and he rarely cut anything he liked.
Those skies are the real thing. The production set up in Marfa in the summer of 1955, and the Hotel Paisano downtown served as headquarters for the cast and crew. The stars stayed there for about two weeks before moving into rented houses in town. The hotel still keeps a room of Giant memorabilia off the lobby, and people still make the drive out to see it.
Fort Worth has its own tie to the picture. Reata, the downtown restaurant now at 530 Throckmorton Street, took its name from the Benedict ranch. It started in Alpine in 1995, about 20 miles from where the movie was shot, and opened in Fort Worth a year later.
What keeps Giant from feeling like a museum piece is how directly it deals with race in Texas. Ferber wrote it that way, and Stevens did not soften it. Bick’s son marries a Mexican American woman, and the film makes his father’s slow, grudging acceptance the true arc of the movie. That was a bold thing for a studio picture to put on screen in 1956.
The Academy gave Giant 10 nominations, including Best Picture. Stevens took home the only win, for Best Director.
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