Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film by Don Graham (review)

With its runtime of three hours and twenty-one minutes and epic scale, the 1956 film Giant stands out even among the crowded field of 1950s Hollywood Westerns. It chronicles the transition in West Texas from cattle ranching to oil extraction as the dominant regional industry, follows a family dynasty through a feudalistic relationship to Latina/o Texans toward a multicultural embrace of cultural difference, depicts the gradual erosion of patriarchal authority as empowered women assert control over their lives, and chronicles the rise and fall of an ambitious oil tycoon. In its sweeping account of these economic, gender, and racial relations, all figured alongside historical developments from the 1920s to the 1950s such as World War II and the introduction of the Eisenhower-era highway system, Giant is a big film, as so many other writers have punned.

In his book Giant the late Don Graham chronicles the making of the film, from director George Stevens's initial interest in adapting Edna Ferber's novel to the film's reception in 1956 as the last on-screen appearance of James Dean, who died in an automobile accident before the film's release. The bulk of Graham's book concerns Giant's casting and filming. A respected and successful director, Stevens was by the mid-1950s a Hollywood veteran, who had after World War II directed the acclaimed 1951 film A Place in the Sun, an adaptation of Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy starring Montgomery Clift, Elizabeth Taylor, and Shelley Winters, and the 1953 technicolor Western Shane, an adaptation of a novel by Jack Schaefer starring Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, and Alan Ladd. As Graham chronicles, every actor and aspiring actor in Hollywood angled to get cast in Stevens's Giant, with the major roles eventually going to Rock Hudson, who played the ranching patriarch Bick Benedict; Elizabeth Taylor, who played Bick's wife, Leslie Benedict; and the new star James Dean as the aspiring oil tycoon Jett Rink. Dean was fresh from his renowned roles in East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause, while Hudson and Taylor had well-established reputations as marquee names.

Graham chronicles with crystalline detail the ways in which George Stevens and his team of producers and writers adapted Edna Ferber's novel for the big screen and sought to represent as much authentically "Texan" dialect and scenery as possible. Going well over his budget with Warner Brothers, Stevens insisted on shooting the film on location in Virginia and Texas, only shooting interior scenes in California. This is, of course, part of the mythology surrounding the film, shot on location in Marfa, Texas. Vestiges of Giant's presence still remain associated with Marfa, both in the Paisano Hotel, where many of the film's cast and crew lived during the shoot, and in film and television history, as shooting on location in Marfa inevitably connotes Giant, whether in an oil-focused film like There Will Be Blood or a film about Marfa's more recent arts culture in the Amazon television show I Love Dick, based on a novel by Chris Kraus. Giant is perhaps one of the main reasons why many people know that Marfa is a town in West Texas at all.

For fans of Giant, Graham's book compiles anecdotes from the raft of memoirs written by and about the film's stars, as well as detailed accounts of the film's production and Stevens's directorial attention to detail. The book is not academic or scholarly in its approach so much as it is a historically grounded narrative about the production of an iconic American film. Toward the end of the book Graham provides a unique way of thinking about the film. Based on a George Stevens interview where the director differentiates...