Giant (Two-Disc Special Edition) (Keepcase)
|
List Price: Our Price: $10.99 You Save: $15.99 (59%) Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours Category: DVD See more DVD releases |
|---|
Buy this DVD movie at online store in your country
Canada
Canada
Movie Reviews of Giant (Two-Disc Special Edition) (Keepcase)
Movie Review: A Giant Movie!
Summary: 4 Stars
I liked this movie. I liked the span of it and the scope. It has a great cast with some major league star power. The story is really good and the social implications and the racism issues that are thrown in are really interesting and make it more than just a fluff piece. It is the story of a young girl (Elizabeth Taylor) who is from a wealthy family who falls in love with a guest (Rock Hudson) who is from old rich Texas money. She decides to go off with him and get married and move to Texas and to his sprawling ranch. She is completely out of her element at first because this is a real working ranch and she is being pampered but she eventually wants to be out working and being part of things much to the dismay of the old hardass woman who "runs things" around the ranch. She eventually fits right in and starts befriending and helping some of the local indians and Mexicans much to the dismay of eveybody because of the class distinctions that were still in place. She also meets and befriends a young man whose family owned a little patch of dirt adjacent to Rocks ranch. The young guy is James Dean. Dean falls hard for her but is backward and shy. There is a lot of friction between Dean and Rock over Taylor and over the fact that Dean is poor white trash. Dean hits it big when his pathetic oil well actually hits black gold. He eventually becomes even more rich and powerfull than Rock.
The movie spans many years and the characters all age into their sixties. Rock and Taylor pull it off much better than a very young James Dean in make up trying to be 60. Dennis Hopper has a great roll as the son of Rocks character who never lived up to the macho image but goes his own way and becomes a doctor. He also marries a Mexican girl which stirs up a lot of trouble with him 'mixing races' which was a no no back then especially but not exclusively to the upper class in that some of the towns people even are biggoted toward the marraige. This causes changes even in hard nosed Rock as Dean also morphs and changes after he has everything he has ever wanted. Its a great movie and I encourage anybody to see it.
Movie Review: James Dean 's last Opus!
Summary: 5 Stars
Maybe this was the most lucid and great saga that portraits as anyone else the ferocious competence 's spirit between two men fighting one each other in all fields; they love the same woman, underlining two angry Empires: cattle and the raising Oil enterprise: past and present: two ways of facing the world and life will meet at the sands of the life. Dean takes a glorious advantage respect Hudson and that is the only negative handicap. But George Stevens as a good captain arrives with this Gargantuan movie ( 198 min.) to a secure port.
Movie Review: Dean's Last Grand Dance
Summary: 3 Stars
Here, in this 1956 "epic" directed by George Stevens, based on a "blockbuster" 1950s bestseller by Edna Ferber, you can see, in one package, everything that had been wrong for years in both American historical fiction, and in most films about the American settlement experience. One would like to be kinder to the obviously sincere and genuine effort that went into this by many, including Stevens at the height of his powers, Elizabeth Taylor still in youth's bloom, James Dean and Mercedes McCambridge. But if you are going to put out a movie this long, much less something "big as Texas," it better cohere.
Instead, we are left here with a truly "giant" hulking piece of Hollywood junk, including a stereotypical "all star" cast whose hair actually turns blue as they "age" from youth to senility in four hours. No scene is too big for Stevens' cinemascope lens, as it drifts from Kentucky bluegrass to Texas flatlands with yawning, boring monotony. The empty lunkhead characters go through all their tedious and predictable paces, to the accompaniment of a typically grandiose soundtrack. Finally, a "politically correct" lesson is tagged on at the end to give you a very heavy-handed 1950s style lesson in "racial tolerance"-- the only problem being that Hudson's character has to instantaneously, magically, and entirely change for this to happen, without a blink, despite the true mountain of evidence already stacked up against such a transformation. Praiseworthy as the sentiment is, this is propaganda, not art. Perhaps they figured you were already so asleep you would not notice.
From a Hoosier and a Yankee to boot: Texas deserves better. Someday hopefully somebody will be up to it.
Yet despite all this and worse, the film is saved -- even for repeated viewing -- by the inspired performance of James Dean, who works against Stevens and the putative "star" Rock Hudson and the other "stars," in every scene in which he appears. This is a performance like very little else in movie history, and through it Hoosier-born Dean leaves his own teaching on the sort of idiosyncratic oddballs and dream-seekers who had a lot to do with starting this country, their often tragic central flaws and doom. In one scene after the next Dean pulls this Hollywood trash heap together and electrifies it, makes it something grandly ominous and terribly formidable. And if you grew up in the heartland or west of here, you will especially enjoy just watching him: his performance is a boy's dance to the joy of owning land, a man's forcing it, by hard exploitation, into an extension of a lunatic self.
The five minute scene of Dean solo, covered by black gold he has just struck on his little dogpatch, ecstatic against the bare horizon, is in itself one of the greatest films in American history. If possible, this film should be seen on as big a screen as possible to get this moment's awesome power, which is as good as Hollywood ever got. It says as much or more than Huckleberry Finn or all the Frank Norris novels about the old theme of the corrupting possibilities of "the American dream," and Dean does it with physicality alone. The rest of this clunker thus hardly matters. Dean's dance makes up for all of it.
Movie Review: An epic celebration of Texas life from George Stevens
Summary: 5 Stars
This weekend marks the 50th anniversary of actor James Dean's tragic auto accident-September 30, 1955. He had no less than three masterpieces made when he died-EAST OF EDEN in release, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE about to be released (or vice-versa), and GIANT in post-production. Impressively, he netted two Best Actor Oscar nominations in consecutive years (1955-1956). To mark Dean's death, the opulent Castro Theater in San Francisco is having a James Dean mini-film festival over the weekend.
I believe all three of these movies are on letterboxed DVD, though most people erroneously think George Stevens' GIANT (1956) is in wide-screen; it is not, just a mere 1.66:1 ratio. I recommend it to you this weekend on double disk DVD or videocassette for its 50th birthday. It is a modern western from Edna Ferber's episodic novel, set in 1940's and 1950's Texas. It is a Texas of oil wells and land, not big cities, with location work in the little Panhandle town of Marfa. A big mansion sits like an anachronism in the middle of prairie. Cattleman Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson at his best) marries the beautiful city girl Leslie (luscious Elizabeth Taylor). Watching them, often with grease and dirt on his jeans, is drifter Jett Rink (James Dean).
As the 1940's blend into the 1950's, this huge and sprawling 201 minute masterpiece turns Bick and Leslie into parents: sons cattleman Earl Holliman and doctor Dennis Hopper. Bick warms to Holliman, but wants nothing to do with a son who wants to be a doctor, especially one who treats nearby Mexicans, whom Bick has contempt for. ("Leslie, those people have their own doctor." "THOSE people, THEIR doctor, OUR doctor, what does that mean?" says Leslie with disgust at her racist husband.) Independent Leslie sides with Hopper and even goes with him when an Obregon baby gets sick on Mexican land. Meanwhile, Jett Rink has been given a small piece of land on the large Rietta ranch, an inheritance when a close friend dies. The land sprouts oil gushers and Jett eventually becomes rich.
After an intermission around the 110 minute mark of this very engrossing movie that won Strevens a Directing Oscar (and a whopping NINE other nominations!), we are one generation further. Doctor Hopper has married a Mexican wife, and they have a cute Mexican baby; even the little baby earns Bick's contempt. But so does rancher son Holliman's daughter (Carroll Baker). She is getting romantic with an aging millionaire Jett Rink, who bears an uncanny resemblence to Howard Hughes. Jett is rotting before our eyes; it is a stunning James Dean performance that probably should have won a Best Actor Oscar. We are following a Texas family over several generations, as Bick slowly grows to admire and even like Mexicans, particularly his little grandson in a memorable diner scene.
With glorious music by Dimitri Tiomkin, and a screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat, GIANT is a stupendous filmmaking achievement if you can do its 3 hours and 21 minutes in one long night. But two nights is still workable for such an episodic and sprawling family saga. You may need a THIRD night for all the DVD extras on this valentine to Texas--B&W TV programs on location in Marfa for filming exteriors; an audio commentary by no less than critic Stephen Farber, writer Moffat, and George Stevens, Jr; a documentary appreciation for George Stevens by directors who knew him; Hollywood and New York premieres on kinescope; original and reissue theatrical trailers; publicity material and poster art; and reflections on the film's enduring legacy after half a century.
Whether you watch it to honor George Stevens' directorial artistry, maybe Rock Hudson's best performance, a Texas-style birthday party, or as a remembrance of James Dean's untimely death and staggering talent, GIANT is one heck of a western epic and family saga. In fact, it is probably worth owning on DVD because you will watch it often, especially with so many marvelous bonuses. Here is to GIANT's 50th birthday!
Movie Review: "The legendary epic that's as big as Texas!"
Summary: 5 Stars
The plot: Texas ranch owner Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) travels to purchase a prize horse, but falls in love at first sight with the owner's pampered daughter Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor). He woos and wins her quickly, they marry, then travel back to his isolated ranch.
Leslie, after a rough start, proves herself quite the force of nature. Ranch hand Jett Rink (James Dean) falls into unrequited love with Leslie, uttering, in one scene, one of my favorite lines in the film, something like, "Mrs. Benedict, you sure do look right good enough to eat, yeah, good enough to eat...." (voice trails off and he looks like he's going to lick his lips) - and then when he strikes it rich with oil, he takes his bitterness out in several ways.
With a stellar supporting cast including Mercedes McCambridge, Sal Mineo, Carroll Baker, and Dennis Hopper, "Giant" is the original miniseries before anyone knew what a miniseries even was...except this is of course a classic film of the big screen, not a TV movie.
Directed by George Stevens, the sprawling epic (201 minutes, but it goes fast, believe me) beautifully covers two generations of family and a variety of issues, including marriage, family, childraising, social snobbery and racism, the latter two being covered especially well. When in the mood for a well-paced, involved, alternately funny, sad, heartwarming, and emotionally fulfilling epic, "Giant" always fits the bill for me.
My favorite bit of trivia - Liz Taylor and Rock Hudson became fast friends on the set, and indulging together in partying/drinking binges most every night, after filming stopped. In the scene where the two are watching a marriage, the two actors had to stop during the filming several times to take turns going outside to throw up, as both were terribly hungover from the previous night's revelries.