Giant
1956 Directed by George Stevens
Synopsis
Sprawling epic covering the life of a Texas cattle rancher and his family and associates.
Cast
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**Part of the Best Picture Project**
Cracking at the brim with social criticism of Texan society, Giant is a sprawling epic that tells the story of the conflict between a Texas rancher, his family, and his ex ranch hand.
Giant is admittedly a bit too long for its own good, but it is still an enthralling film featuring great performances by leads Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. The rivalry here between Hudson and Dean is so strong that it is hard to pick who is the better of the two, but both equip themselves with graceful acting. Taylor, meanwhile, remains the most sympathetic of the cast,
Gorgeously filmed and well told, Giant is an epic film well worth investing your time in.
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Not even Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson or James Dean can save this 3 hour, 13 minute excuse for a film. I felt like I was watching half a dozen episodes of that awful 80's TV soap drama Dallas.
It's interesting to note that James Dean's character, Jett Rink, goes into the oil business and has the initials JR adorned on the walls and doors of his organisation.
The film was made in an age when America was pretty prudish about the audience seeing a married man and woman in bed together. Taylor and Hudson share the same bedroom but sleep in different beds. They still managed to produce 4 children though. Probably by IVF.
Apparently, censorship laws in the USA…
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I got to the end of the first side of the double sided disc and realised I had watched the second half first. That should have been a very difficult mistake to make (even with a blank double sided disc) but this film was so plodding that I didn't notice, even though I had wondered about Elizabeth Taylor's greying hair. Then I watched the first half, it added nothing to the monotony of the second half of the film.
Jams Dean was pretty good, the rest of the story was tedious - this tale of a Texan rancher, his family, feuds with a neighbour and oil didn't interest me. Perhaps its appeal is better understood in its home country? -
Rambling and overlong... but my God, how good was James Dean? In this movie, damn good; in the larger sense, we'll never know.
Recent reviews
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**Part of the Best Picture Project**
Cracking at the brim with social criticism of Texan society, Giant is a sprawling epic that tells the story of the conflict between a Texas rancher, his family, and his ex ranch hand.
Giant is admittedly a bit too long for its own good, but it is still an enthralling film featuring great performances by leads Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean. The rivalry here between Hudson and Dean is so strong that it is hard to pick who is the better of the two, but both equip themselves with graceful acting. Taylor, meanwhile, remains the most sympathetic of the cast,
Gorgeously filmed and well told, Giant is an epic film well worth investing your time in.
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I actually liked it more than I thought I would -- the story was 'not my taste' and more tedious and rambling than I feared, but there are some great performances here, chief among them James Dean's, which was nothing short of fantastic. Anyone who watched 'Rebel Without A Cause' and wondered what the fuss was about, if he was really a good actor and not just a teen heartthrob, will have their question answered here, making his untimely death and the thought of his unfulfilled potential that much more tragic.
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Not even Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson or James Dean can save this 3 hour, 13 minute excuse for a film. I felt like I was watching half a dozen episodes of that awful 80's TV soap drama Dallas.
It's interesting to note that James Dean's character, Jett Rink, goes into the oil business and has the initials JR adorned on the walls and doors of his organisation.
The film was made in an age when America was pretty prudish about the audience seeing a married man and woman in bed together. Taylor and Hudson share the same bedroom but sleep in different beds. They still managed to produce 4 children though. Probably by IVF.
Apparently, censorship laws in the USA…
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another brilliant elizabeth taylor performance.
pretty much an older 'there will be blood' -
I don't know that there's necessarily a problem with Giant. Maybe that was an overstatement. As a soap opera, it has more than its share of weak subplots. As a precaution, Stevens made the film nearly four hours long. A film like this, that spans three decades in a couple of lives, at nearly four hours, feels strangely mis-pitched. Yes, a long movie should go with a long amount of screen time. Yes, the actors should age in their acting and their personas as well as their hair and skin. What's really powerful about the film is that it has such a bracing stop-start motion to it. You really pay attention when Dean is in misery towards the end of the film. Even the stark, out-of-place anti-racist sentiments in the film seem to reward the viewer in that guilty, melodramatic fashion. Dean is the best part of the film.
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Like most 3-hour movies encompassing several years of someone's life, this sprawls a bit too much for my taste, touching on topics like greed, unrealistic expectations, broken relationships, family pride, chauvinism, before finally being about racism for the last 45 minutes or so. I suppose the thing tying it all together is Rock Hudson's character, who is at the center of nearly all of these themes, but the movie frames Elizabeth Taylor as the one we're supposed to sympathize with, so it wasn't even until the final half hour that I realized Rock Hudson was probably the central character.
The final third of the movie is the most interesting, as it seems the most unified and consistent a narrative, and…
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A great family epic that gave way to "The Godfather"