Giant: 1956, dir. George Stevens. Seen at Paramount (July 18).
I don’t generally like Fifties drama films, and I saw entirely too many in a grad school class on melodrama in film and TV. I had the sneaking suspicion Giant fell into that category of film. But my boyfriend wanted to see it, and I figured it would be Good For Me, so I went along.
My boyfriend did not realize how long the film would be, long enough for an intermission. At the intermission, I turned to him and said, “You wanted to see this movie, but you refuse to see Gone with the Wind? Because …” and he shrugged, understanding me. Both movies have that same kind of epic storytelling tone. He doesn’t mind watching epics, he just doesn’t want to see a movie glamorizing the antebellum South, and I can’t blame him for that. (I’m rather burned out on GWTW myself.)
The first half of Giant was entertaining and nicely paced and kept me absorbed and interested. Rock Hudson hooks up with Elizabeth Taylor, and the newlywed couple returns to his huge Texas ranch to deal with his sister and James Dean and good-old-boy sexism and racism and cattle-a-go-go. I particularly liked Mercedes McCambridge as his sister, although I had to look away when she dug her spurs in the horse because, yes, I know it’s all makeup effects and she didn’t really hurt the horse that way, but still.
The second half, though, was disappointing. The movie slid into full-scale Melodrama Mode, with multiple generations fussing and fighting and spreading angst and declaring independence and avoiding tragedy and blah blah blah. Characters did things not because it was in character for them to do it, but because the plot required it. For example, Dennis Hopper (as Rock Hudson’s son, which is just plain weird) meets Juana, a Mexican woman who is helping his doctor friend, and they supposedly fall in love immediately after a humorous shock-filled handshake. You don’t see any chemistry between the two, or any romance, and in fact Juana has no personality whatsoever. She’s not a character, she’s a catalytic force designed to make Rock Hudson’s character come to terms with racism and his love for his son and later his grandson.
(IMDb alleges that Elsa Cardenas, the actress playing Juana, is also in The Wild Bunch … a movie I would have enjoyed seeing much, much more. This is why I like IMDb.)
Once characters become nothing but plot devices, without even the pretense of personality, a movie becomes pretty dull to me.
Also, I think the movie could have ended a good half-hour or so earlier and still made its points. Once James Dean’s character passes out on the radio microphone, the movie has little else to offer us. I found the scene in the diner to be tedious and predictable and pointless, and Elizabeth Taylor’s final speech was unnecessary.
I’m told the book (by Edna Ferber) is better and doesn’t end in such a silly way. Y’all said that about Seabiscuit, too. Someday I’ll have to find and read this stuff.
Another problem I had with the movie was that until a radio mentioned Pearl Harbor, I had no idea exactly when the movie was set. I couldn’t tell what year it was when the two main characters met and fell in love. I also couldn’t tell where they were, and I was confused by all the Texans referring to Elizabeth Taylor’s character as “that girl from the East” and “that Yankee girl” when she had a Southern accent. Turned out she was from Maryland near Washington DC, which Texans considered part of the South the last time I looked. Apart from that, and an excessive tendency to yell “yee-haw!” spontaneously, the movie did a pretty good job of representing Texans and Texas.
I couldn’t understand James Dean’s character half the time, though. I don’t know if that was intentional or if the sound quality on the print we saw was poor. I tend to blame the print (or the theater) and not my ability to decipher Texas accents because I can understand Boomhauer on King of the Hill most of the time.
Incidentally, if you didn’t know, Dean’s character is named Jett Rink. It tempts me to change my pseudonymous last name (except then I couldn’t be pseudonymous-journal-sisters with Sheila).
The older generation of the movie—Hudson, Taylor, and Dean—are much better portrayed than the younger generation, even with all the heavy aging makeup they have to wear as the film progresses. The younger characters are fairly one-dimensional and less interesting than the older ones, and all seem to have a certain petulance about them. It’s difficult to take them seriously.
So my reaction to Giant is very similar to my reaction to Kill Bill: the first half is great, the second half drags and lags and descends into predictable melodrama. I never thought I’d compare those particular films against each other, myself. I am glad I saw Giant in a theater, though, because it would have seemed even more like a typical Fifties melodrama on my little TV set.