Giant

GIANT (1956)
60th Anniversary Screening
Wednesday, October 5, at 7:15 PM at the Ahrya Fine Arts Theatre

GIANT was nominated for 10 Academy Awards in 1956, and George Stevens won the Oscar as best director of the year. Based on the best-selling novel by Edna Ferber, the epic film spans 25 years in the lives of a Texas family and chronicles major transitions from the 1920s to the postwar era. Rock Hudson, in the best performance of his career, stars as the domineering cattle baron, Bick Benedict. Elizabeth Taylor plays his feisty wife Leslie. And in the final performance of his brief, meteoric career, James Dean plays Jett Rink, the ranch hand turned vulgar oil tycoon.

Stevens captured the contradictions of the Lone Star State in a series of memorable, iconic images. As Bosley Crowther wrote in the New York Times, “Thanks to Mr. Stevens’ brilliant structure and handling of images, every scene and every moment is a pleasure.” And Pauline Kael noted, “Stills of the huge gothic house standing in a vast bare stretch of ground call up the movie as surely as the mention of ‘Rosebud’ calls up Citizen Kane.”.

Along with a perceptive examination of marriage and family, the film’s deeper themes have grown more relevant over the years and resonate once again in this election season. Taylor’s Leslie Benedict emerges as a pre-feminist pioneer who always stands up to her macho husband. In the conformist 50s, she helped to introduce a brand new model of female empowerment.

In addition, the film was one of the very first to highlight prejudice against Mexican-Americans, an issue that is still an issue today. Reviewing the film in 1956, TIME magazine called it “the most effective declaration against racial intolerance ever shown on the screen.”

GIANT was the top-grossing film in Warner Brothers’ history until finally topped by Superman in 1978. The supporting cast includes Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper, Mercedes McCambridge, Earl Holliman, Jane Withers, and Chill Wills.