A giant by nature and Giant by name, based on a bestselling novel by Edna Ferber (a prolific writer, virtually forgotten today).

Giant (1956), directed by George Stevens, was a wonderful, widescreen, colour, three-hour family saga set over 30 years and had two of the most popular and glamorous stars of the era: Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson. And there was a handsome newcomer that showed much promise. His name was James Dean. All three stars were still in their twenties. Dean was to die at the age of only 24 – before the film was released – when his Porsche 550 Spyder (nicknamed ‘Little Bastard’) was involved in a head-on collision with a Ford saloon on a country road.

Dean was moody and mesmerising in Giant, he was posthumously nominated for an Academy Award (Stevens won Best Director).

A new book on the bestselling book and film Giant Love (Pantheon), by Julie Gilbert (Ferber’s great niece), tells the story of the writer and how the film came into being. George Stevens famously made a slew of light comedies in the 1930s. The Rogers and Astaire musical Swing Time (1936) is a prime example. During World War II Stevens was in the US army and captured amazing colour footage of the D Day liberation of France and the horrors of Dachau concentration camp.

Stevens’s Dachau experience had a profound effect on him; going on to direct and edit a powerful documentary on the war, he never truly got over it.

When he returned to Hollywood his work was darker, more serious but no less popular. His A Place in the Sun (1951) had Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor as star-crossed lovers divided by class. His psychological Western Shane (1953) pitted saintly Alan Ladd against evil Jack Palance in an allegory of the anti-communist witch-hunts of the time.

Set mostly in Texas, Giant tells the story of cattleman Bick Benedict (Hudson) who marries high-spirited Yankee, Leslie Lynnton (Taylor). She’s brought up amid the green meadows of Maryland and arrives at the dry desert wastes of the West, an educated liberal in a rough-hewn, conservative farming community. She has to battle old-fashioned ways, snarky locals and Bick’s disapproving sister (Mercedes McCambridge).

Added to the mix is the surly ranch hand Jett Rink (Dean) who holds a candle for Leslie. He falls heir to a parcel of land on which he discovers oil, becomes a millionaire and founds his own oil company. The old West is changing. Over the next few years Jett Rink’s wealth and power eclipse Bick’s. Jett is no longer the lowly nobody but all his money doesn’t buy him happiness. Meanwhile Bick and Leslie watch the farm boy’s astounding rise as they bring up their own family. Jordan, their adult son, is played by Dennis Hopper, Easy Rider himself.

We see the characters age and adapt. When Jordan brings home his Mexican wife-to-be there’s a Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner moment. But the Benedicts have mellowed and are strongly at ease with the changes they’ve seen in Texas during their lifetime even if the rift with Jett (increasingly erratic and prone to alcohol-fuelled benders) never heals.

Then in a memorable scene at a roadside diner there’s a scuffle between the proprietor and Bick when the former refuses to serve a Mexican family. All the while ‘The Yello f Texas’ plays jarringly on the jukebox. Texans hated the book which they found overly critical of stereotypical vulgar and money-grubbing Texas. But they took the film (softened in many places) to their hearts.

‘The movie was an unqualified smash,’ writes Julie Gilbert. Elizabeth Taylor’s performance was one of her best. It embodied ‘a subtle but no less powerful form of feminism’. Taylor was tired of being the ‘violet-eyed Aphrodite on the screen [that she’d been] since girlhood’.

Giant had a long legacy. The 1980s soap Dallas owed much to the Stevens’s melodrama. Come Back to the Five-and-Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean was originally a play, filmed in 1982 by Robert Altman and 2009 saw a stage musical version. The movie holds a special place for the gay community, several personnel were gay or gay adjacent.

Dean was rumoured to be bisexual; Hudson was outed in 1985 when he was dying of Aids, Taylor became an advocate for HIV research, McCambridge hoovered up roles as gun-toting butch women and Sal Mineo was the first out gay Hollywood actor.

But it was Dean’s performance and his tragic early death that gave Giant a special and long-lasting resonance. For years afterwards James Dean became a symbol of doomed youth.

Giant Love by Julie Gilbert
(Pantheon £30)

@kenwilson84.bsky.social