GIANT: 4K Blu-ray (Warner Bros., 1956) Warner Home Video
The sense of community Stevens was
able to foster and represent both on the set, and, within Giant began
with a decision to pack up the entire company and make the pilgrimage
from Los Angeles to Marfa, Texas for an extensive location shoot. Elizabeth
Taylor and co-star, Jane Withers became exceptionally good friends during their
trek, surviving 8mm home movies illustrating their camaraderie, with Taylor at
her playful best, posing next to life-size yucca and favoring Wither’s candid camera
with a poised and haughty ‘oh darling!’ Jane had met Elizabeth decades
earlier while the two were child stars under contract at MGM. By the time Giant
was put into pre-production, Taylor had become a superstar while
Withers had somewhat withered from view. Even so, Stevens was not at all
convinced Taylor could handle the role. Undaunted, Taylor campaigned heavily for
the female lead, while Withers participation happened almost by accident. Stevens
considered Withers something of a ‘good luck’ charm, especially for her genuineness
and habitual need to play ‘mother, friend and confidante to all. Although
Withers’ role in Giant is small, her role behind the scenes proved
integral to the general morale of cast and crew. Withers also managed the minor
coup of befriending co-star, James Dean who pretty much kept to himself
otherwise. Dean is, of course, one of the all-time great, yet deeply troubled –
and in hindsight - largely romanticized figures from American cinema; qualities
almost immediately pared down to accommodate his status as a ‘rebel’ with – or
without – a cause, and amplified all out of proportion after Dean’s untimely
death, age 24, in a horrific automobile accident in 1955.
Throughout Elizabeth Taylor’s
campaign to play the lead, Stevens continued to harbor a strong prejudice
against her, predicated mostly on his impressions of her MGM tenure, regarded
as wafer-thin and playing to the strengths of an overweening princess with
little acting ability. Stevens was to have a significant change of heart after
Taylor appeared for him in A Place in the Sun (1951) where the actress
underneath the beauty distinguished herself, eschewing the trappings he
disliked, inculcated from that MGM tutelage. Still, Giant required
something more of Taylor. Meanwhile, James Dean, who struggled to overcome
inner demons and triumphed for the briefest of moments as the undisputed ‘new
face to watch’ in the movies, used that impossibly nomadic experience from
a troubled/isolated childhood to trademark himself as the embodiment of his
generation. Yet, in retrospect Dean is arguably Giant’s weakest link. In
point of fact, Dean never felt comfortable in his aged make-up, advancing his
years from mid-20's into his late 50's. He also harbored something of a quiet
competitive resentment toward Rock Hudson, everyone’s favorite hunk de jour
(although no one knew then, Hudson was gay). The conventional wisdom in
Hollywood had always been to take established actors in their mid-30's and age
them backwards to play the part of a teenager. For Giant, Stevens adopted
the opposite approach. The effects are not altogether convincing, particularly
in close-up, where the obvious streaks of gray and added wrinkles to Rock Hudson
and Elizabeth Taylor’s porcelain smooth skin never look anything less than
obvious. Ironically, Dean’s receding skull cap and Gable-esque pencil-thin
moustache strike a more convincing chord.
But Dean’s performance lacks conviction as an elder statesman, even
one as uncouth as the nouveau riche, Jett Rink.
Giant became a
project of compromises for Stevens who had initially pursued Grace Kelly, then
Audrey Hepburn for the part of Leslie Benedict and William Holden to play
Jordan ‘Bick’ Benedict. Stevens also struggled with the girth of Ferber’s novel,
determined screenwriters, Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat should condense - but also
squeeze - virtually every character in Ferber’s book into the movie in some
sort of meaningful way. In retrospect, Guiol and Moffat’s telescoping is not
entirely successful and, in fact, becomes fragmented and episodic during the
movie’s last act. Characters like Jane Withers’ Vashti Snythe and Earl
Holliman’s Bob Dace become cardboard cutouts at best, while Sal Mineo’s Angel Obregón
II – an important secondary character in Ferber’s novel - is now reduced to a
cameo that makes Angel’s death and return to Riata as a pine-boxed veteran unremarkable. Where Giant excels is in its initial setup of
the fiery and conflicted central figures. Regrettably, these increasingly get
lost in the shuffle after the intermission. Jordan ‘Bick’ Benedict’s (Rock
Hudson) arrival in Maryland to look over a mare at the stud farm owned by Dr.
Horace Lynnton (Paul Fix) leads to a cute meet between Jordan and the Lynnton’s
rather headstrong daughter, Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) who is sort of engaged to
Sir David Karfrey (Rod Taylor – thoroughly wasted in a thankless part). Leslie
is immediately smitten with ‘Bick’ but rubs him the wrong way after she suggests
that America ‘stole’ Texas from Mexico. Nevertheless, a romance stirs
and Bick woos Leslie into a proposal of marriage. Alas, and despite her puppy
love, she has no idea what she is getting into, as upon her arrival in Texas,
Leslie is appalled by the starkness – the Benedict ranch a sprawling farmhouse
in the middle of nowhere and presided over by Bick’s spinster (and rather
mannish) sister, Luz (Mercedes McCambridge).
The relationship between Leslie and
Luz is strained from the outset with Luz misperceiving Leslie as a threat to
her authority on the ranch. This includes managing the infrequently flaring
tempers between Bick and his hired hand, Jett Rink (James Dean) who is
backward, awkward and motivated by pent-up frustrations that have remained
subservient to the Benedicts. This balance of power will eventually shift. Luz
decides to throw a picnic in honor of Bick’s new bride, the decision hardly
altruistic but rather predicated on Luz’s desire to see Leslie fail to make new
friends. Sure enough, the mood between Leslie and the neighbors is frosty,
particularly between Leslie and Vashti Snythe (Jane Withers) who had once hoped
to marry Bick herself but has since settled on his cowhand, Bob Dace (Earl
Holliman). Worse, unaccustomed to the
stifling heat, Leslie succumbs and is carried back into the house by Bick. None of this seems to bode well for Leslie’s
longevity as the mistress of Riata. However, only a day later, she has
reconfigured her outlook on this new world, having risen at dawn before the
rest of the household to show the servants how to prepare ‘a proper breakfast’.
“I can’t be just a guest in my husband’s home,” Leslie tells Luz, a move
that causes Luz to go on a tear with the stallion Bick bought from Leslie’s father
not yet properly broken in. The horse bolts and Luz is thrown to her death.
During Luz’s wake, Jett learns that
Luz has left him her patch of Riata – a small, unremarkable stretch of land
with a single derrick that has yet to produce any oil. Bick offers to buy back
the property for a fair price. But Jett is genuinely touched by Luz’s gift and
refuses to sell. It is a fortuitous decision. For after toiling day and night
for weeks on end the well does indeed produce a gusher, one that will
ultimately establish Jett’s supremacy on the Texas landscape but also serve as
the basis for his undoing much later on. Charging up the steps of the ranch to
confront Bick, Jett makes a spectacle of himself – accosting Leslie and
assaulting Bick before tearing off to cap and register his claim. “You
should have taken care of him when you had the chance,” Uncle Bawley (Chill
Wills) tells Bick, “Now he’s too rich to kill!” From this moment, even
the vast expanses of Texas will prove rather limiting for Bick and Jett’s
adversarial relationship. However, just as this narrative begins to gain
momentum, Stevens and his screenwriters inexplicably choose to fast track
through the rest of Ferber’s story. We all but skip through the birth of Bick
and Leslie’s two children: Luz II (Carroll Baker) and Jordan III (Dennis
Hopper). A rift between Bick and Leslie over the way he regards his Mexican
servants leads to Leslie briefly retreating to her family home in Maryland
where she learns her younger sister, Judy (Fran Bennett) has since become
engaged to David. Bick pursues Leslie
and the two reconcile at Judy and David’s reception with Leslie returning to
Riata a short while later.
After the intermission, the movie’s
timeline advances by some twenty-years. Luz and Jordan are grown. Texas has
morphed into an enterprising state of vast and diversified business
opportunities with Jett at its forefront. Luz is attracted to Jett – a school
girl’s fascination to infuriate Bick. Leslie encourages her husband to be
tolerant. But Bick’s anger overwhelms after Jordon announces he will not take
over the operations of the ranch, but go on to become a doctor instead. Later,
Jordon weds Juana Guerra (Elsa Cardenas). Struggling to reexamine his own racial
prejudice, Bick makes ready the family to attend the opening of Jett’s new
super hotel and casino in Dallas. Luz is girlishly excited at the prospect of
seeing Jett again. But the event is marred by Jett’s surly drunkenness. After
passing out at the head table, Jett is confronted by Bick in the hotel’s wine
cellar, collapsing under his self-indulgences and shattering Luz’s fantasies
about what a great man she thought he was. On the trip back to Riata, the
Benedicts are denied service at a roadside diner after the pompous proprietor,
Sarge (Mickey Simpson) refuses to wait on an aged Mexican couple. The
realization he has been just as willfully prejudice suddenly sinks in for Bick,
who decides to stand up to Sarge. Alas, age has withered his resolve. Bick gets
beaten to a pulp by the much younger and brutish Sarge – losing the battle,
perhaps, though arguably having won the war.
Leslie’s pride and faith in her husband is restored. As they share their
moment together, the couple quietly observes Jordan and Juana’s offspring, one
white, one decidedly tanned – representative of the future multicultural
diversity to overtake Texas and, indeed, the nation.
Giant makes its
points with a heavy brand. George Stevens, a director known primarily for his
incredible finesse and visual style elsewhere seems to be struggling with Ferber’s
thematic tome. The momentum of the piece just seems off. The first third,
roughly concluding with Luz’s death, is expertly paced, the early evolution of
Bick and Leslie’s problematic maturing, wonderfully sustained and nuanced.
Alas, the picture’s middle act comes to a virtual standstill as the characters
struggle to find themselves. The last
act is episodic at best, made up more of broad-brushed vignettes, some more
successfully realized than others. The last act of Giant is meant to
exhibit just how far America had come as a nation, circa 1956 and how far it
still had to go. Yet the tide of racial inequity overpowering the latter half
of the story almost seems to have breezed in as an afterthought, regrettably at
the expense of the other narrative threads, suddenly abandoned in favor of the ‘message’.
The movie is also shockingly weak on maintaining some of the more adversarial
relationships that ought to have been its central and driving strength. Bick
and Jett’s animosity, gradually built over the first hour, is completely sacrificed,
except for their penultimate confrontation during the hotel’s inaugural
celebration. As a result, Giant never seems to attain a level of
finality, rather to end on a distinct note of ambiguity – with the most
obligatory summation of all that has gone before it.
Despite these shortcomings, Giant
remains an important picture. Its Grauman Chinese Theater premiere drew a crowd
of 10,000 spectators and 2000 stars – one of the grand displays of Hollywood
glitterati doing what they did best. Viewed today, Giant remains a queer
clash between an almost Douglas Sirk-asian gloss and Dore Schary-inspired
message picture, and, never the twain shall meet between these two. At times, Giant
has an almost documentarian feel, albeit one with lavishly appointed
production values. But as a fictional narrative, it tends to lag and lumber
along, infrequently rising above mere technical competency and leaving
something to be desired in general. As a rather fascinating postscript the
shoot in Marfa, Texas was ironically book-ended by a pair of auto accidents,
both involving James Dean. In the first incident, Dean came along a wreck
already to have occurred, affording an injured black man, lying by the side of
the road, shade in the stifling heat by standing over him until help arrived.
It was an act of kindness later expounded upon in the chapel of a nearby
church. Tragically, just ten days before the rest of the Giant company
was preparing to wrap, Dean took his ill-fated leave to enter a race with his
Spyder 550. He would never make it to this event. Swerving to avoid another car
jackknifed in front of him on a lonely stretch of highway, Dean lost control
and wrapped his car around a nearby telephone pole. He was instantly killed.
News arrived in Marfa just as Stevens was about to pull up stakes for
Hollywood, the cast and crew in a state of shock and disbelief over the news.
As a rather grotesque postscript, the wreck of Dean’s Spyder was later stolen
presumably by souvenir seekers, as was a bronze bust commissioned to augment his
cemetery tombstone. Neither has ever been recovered.
Earlier this year, when Warner Home
Video announced it would be returning to Giant for a ground-up
restoration in 4K, message boards were lit up, suggesting that somehow the
studio had figured out a way to miraculously reverse all of the ravages of time
sustained on this deep catalog title. I was not so convinced. Giant was
shot in WarnerColor – in hindsight, an inferior color process, resulting in
exaggerated grain. Whole portions of the picture are derived from dupes,
resulting in an inferior shelf life, and, over time, were also prone to severe color
fading. The conventional wisdom of the day was to save a few bucks by
developing a competitive mono-pack color process less expensive and cumbersome
than 3-strip Technicolor. Alas, the disaster for Giant occurred in
post-production where softly focused dupes dominate. The new 4K release sports a
slightly more refined color palette, thanks to the wizards at Warner’s
massaging the depth and density while remaining faithful to Stevens’ original
vision and cinematographer, William C. Mellor’s efforts.
So, does it all add up to a more visually
resolved viewing experience? Not really.
Fine detail is still wanting. While
the overall contrast experiences a marginal uptick, it’s the Eastman color dupes
that are lethal. Daydreamers hoping for a resolved image akin to a vintage
dye-transfer are deluding themselves. Giant will NEVER look any better
than this. It is awful? Let us just say, it is a distinct improvement, though
nevertheless, a letdown. Warner Home Video has done everything possible to
improve upon surviving elements. But there really is only so much that can be
done. Flesh looks more natural this time around. There is more distinction
between greens and blues, browns, black and dark navy blues. Grain is intensified
but still seems indigenous to its source. Age-related artifacts are gone. The
audio is the same DTS 5.1 remix ported over from the previous Blu-ray release
and exhibits all of the virtues and vices of a vintage soundtrack, Dimitri
Tiomkin’s score continuing to sound rather strident. The singular oversight
here is Warner’s decision NOT to include a standard Blu-ray remaster, or, even
the old Blu-ray from 2013. This 4K effort is shorn of all the goodies that once
accompanied the Blu: so, no docs on the making of the film or George Stevens’
career. No outtakes. No deleted scenes. No audio commentary, junkets, PR-pro-mos,
trailers. Nothing. I admit – I was more than a tad disappointed by this marketing
decision. Bottom line: George Stevens astutely told his son on the set of Giant
that the barometer by which the picture’s greatness would eventually be judged
was at least 20-30 years away. Despite its aforementioned narrative
shortcomings, Giant has stood the test of time. It is a great, if
imperfect movie. In 4K it is a must-have disc. The marginal improvements are
more pronounced when viewing in projection. On TV monitors, they are harder to
discern, but still very much there to appreciate. Recommended – with caveats.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
3.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3.5
EXTRAS
0
Comments