…the 1956 multigenerational epic starring Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor that was based on a book written by an old-maid liberal feminist Jew from New York and brought to the screen by a self-righteous martinet from California who started his career working on Laurel and Hardy short films and then became “the conscience of Hollywood” after photographing the piles of dead bodies at Dachau. It’s something of a miracle that over the past six decades native Texans have embraced this saga as authentic history, given its provenance, especially since there are actually two official state movies, and the other one is based on history, not fiction. (…)
If I have a quarrel with the book, it’s that Don doesn’t really get inside George Stevens’ head. Perhaps no one ever did. Of all the famous directors of Hollywood’s heyday, Stevens is one of the most revered and least loved. His name is on buildings and endowed chairs and library collections, but there is no George Stevens cult. (…)
The rest of the army that descended on tiny Marfa, Texas, in the summer of 1955 is extensively profiled and psychoanalyzed in a delightful fast-paced narrative that doesn’t really break any new ground—people have been fascinated with Giant since the day it was announced in 1953—but Don has done us the favor of mining all the secondary sources that no person in his right mind would try to read.
People who hate James Dean are idiots. Let’s see you do this:
