Kritiken

It's ambitious, daring and weird in ways that do not call to mind the mid-50s. Based on a 1952 novel by Edna Ferber, the film recounts the life and times of a Texas cattle ranch tycoon and his wife, but in so doing, it looks ahead to the auteur epoch of the 1970s.

Sixty years later, George Stevens's intimate epic Giant still seems like a wondrous anomaly: sweeping saga of American prosperity that reveals its racist underbelly; glorious star vehicle that upends rigid gender roles; modern western that questions the validity of frontier land ownership.

There are many long, slow dialogue scenes filmed in rather functional, static two-shots or medium shots, suggesting a hard parting from the prose of Edna Ferber's source novel. But the film is not without its electrifying interludes, most notably a scene with Mercedes McCambridge (playing Bick's sister Luz who is deeply jealous of Leslie) digging her spurs violently into the side of a horse in a bid to tame it.

The little moments matter in Giant, a film that despite its title, running time, and girth, values a return to a smaller worldview, especially in its scathing indictment of modern day capitalism. "Big stuff is old stuff," one character says. Yet, when it comes to emotional expression, the inverse is true. Giant firmly understands the need to destroy those social limitations put upon by bigotry, hate, and class division.

...It's a rare movie fistfight that functions as character development, and this one plays like gangbusters. The metronome of that Mitch Miller march is bouncy enough to take the edge off the brutality, but martial enough to underline the epic nature of this battle.

One of my many disappointments in recently reseeing Giant, George Stevens' blunderbuss effort to preach tolerance to some of the more biased Republicans, is that the once-memorable and semi-audacious use of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" over the final credits... is no longer part of the movie on the DVD, presumably because the owners of the song rights demanded too much money. So one of the few facets of this overblown blockbuster that seemed slightly progressive in the mid-50s has been deleted.

The last and least of James Dean's three movies, an outrageously lengthy, earnest, arbitrary Texas soap opera familiar to many viewers in its even longer two-part showings on afternoon TV with commercials. "Big" though it is, it belongs on the small screen. Sitting through it is like cramming a decade's worth of daily television-watching into a single sitting.

The pace is so plodding, and the general effect so stultifyingly unsubtle, that one is left impressed only by the fine landscape photography and Dean's surprisingly convincing portrayal of a middle-aged man. To see the overblown, soft-centred nature of the film, one need only compare it with Sirk's vitriolic account of Texan family life in 'Written on the Wind'.

Much of it is awful, but it's almost impossible not to be taken in by the narrative sprawl: like many big, bad movies, Giant is an enveloping experience, with a crazy life and logic of its own. George Stevens directed, at the height of his bloated epic period (1956), but unlike his A Place in the Sun, this one isn't entirely sober and sanctimonious; it takes some pleasure in melodrama for its own sake.