Rent Giant (1956)

Great film - not the best transfer - Giant review by KW

I will admit to starting this film with a certain amount of dread. It seemed to me to be one of those films that you want to have seen but never quite feel like watching, a drama that plays out over several generations, but with a length that suggests it might be in real time. The first few minutes were not encouraging, not helped by a bluray transfer that maddeningly alternates between being in pristine focus and blurry all the way through. The ratio might be correct, but I'm not sure that George Stevens' son is entirely correct when he introduces the film on the disc by promising that this is the movie as it was meant to be seen.

Nevertheless, I stuck with this tale of a Texan rancher overly tied to traditional values of the past, and was pleasantly surprised to find a 1956 movie that tackles racism, sexism and poverty in what surely must have been groundbreaking for the time. True, if you were making it now, you would develop the Mexican characters, but this is brave stuff and the altercation in a diner that won't serve non-whites was very on-the-nose for the era.

Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean are all splendid and the decision to hire young actors and then age them (rather than have older characters play young, which was the normal convention of the time) really works. The movie has some really modern flourishes, including a memorable scene of drunken despair in which James Dean is shown in longshot muttering into a microphone that happens to have fallen in front of him, his depression bouncing off the walls to shame him.

You couldn't get a movie like this anymore because television has taken over this kind of epic storytelling. The running time is challenging but well-filled; after the first forty minutes or so it never drags, though I wouldn't want to sit through the whole thing without a break. I did wonder how a couple of scenes of small children crying (in one case comically) were pulled off, but perhaps it's best that this remains a movie-making secret.

It took me decades to get around to watching Giant, but it was worth the wait. If a better bluray transfer became available, I would not wait so long to watch it again.