And it doesn't even have a beanstalk!

Gone With The Wind. Duel in the Sun. The Big Country. Giant.

Surely you recognize all those titles. They're the big, colossal white elephants none of us are supposed to like but most of us probably do. They don't get discussed much on the movie blogs because they're big, bloated, melodramas and everyone knows that when discussing melodrama on a movie blog it should be in black and white (but color is allowed for those made in the fifties and anything directed by Douglas Sirk), come in under two hours, and have nothing whatsoever to do with wide-open swaths of land. Think Stella Dallas, The Bad and the Beautiful, and Imitation of Life. If you happen to love melodrama (I do) then you probably already know that it is a sometimes denigrated genre. At the same time everyone still agrees there are some great ones in the mix, like those mentioned two sentences before. But the epic melodramas? Those are the ones we're supposed to make fun of, right? Well... Thing is, I like a lot of them and all this started swirling around in my head thanks to this photo in my possession from 1951:

That's George Stevens, Elizabeth Taylor (duh) and Ivan Moffat, the director, star and associate producer for A Place in the Sun. Later, in 1955, they would work together on Giant, released in 1956. And all of this is simply to say, I like Giant. Yeah, that's pretty much it. There won't be any big write-up on the rules of melodrama and white elephant melodrama and epic weepies. Nope. It's just that when I looked at the photo I remembered how much I liked Giant.

I believe the main strength of Giant lies with George Stevens direction which gives the slow meandering action a steady clipped pace so the viewer doesn't notice that, quite honestly, it's all very slow and meandering. Action and plotwise, nothing much happens in this movie but you wouldn't know it from Stevens direction. He's got the editing and photography down like no other, knowing to keep everything in medium shot 80 percent of the time, pull out to wideshot for isolation metaphors and emotional distance and use the closeup sparingly for menacing impact. And there's not a lot of empty quiet space between shots either. It may be dialogue free for many of those spots but it's not empty because Stevens is focusing on a look, or a leer, from Mercedes McCambridge or James Dean. And Stevens holds all those actors, and their differing styles, together through all of it, achieving a consistency in performance that keeps the viewer from noticing the jarring contrast between the high energy acting of Dean and the laid back delivery of Hudson.

And that takes us to the second strength, the acting. Not only does everyone acquit themselves quite admirably in this (and yes, I do think Rock Hudson is good in it - you got a problem with that?), especially Dean and McCambridge who are both superb, but they do so under the most ridiculous make-up conditions ever imposed on a big budget Hollywood movie. Latex, wigs and putty? Ha! You're joking right? No, no none of that here. Dean, Taylor and Hudson all age by having gray paint sprayed on their heads and someone in the makeup department grabbing a mascara pencil and drawing age lines under their eyes. Yes, fifteen years prior, Orson Welles went through hours of make-up application as he portrayed the aging Charles Foster Kane and somehow, almost two decades later, movie makeup had devolved into browsing the Benjamin Moore aisle at the hardware store and raiding the script girl's makeup bag.

Also, and this is not to be underestimated, Liz and Rock play characters named Leslie and Jordan Benedict, Jr (his nickname is Bick) and Jimmy's character is named Jett Rink. Just try and forget that character name. Go ahead, try. If you never see this movie again for fifty years and someone asks, "Hey, what was James Dean's character's name in Giant?" without breaking your stride you'll confidently reply, "Jett Rink." And then possibly you'll pull up the collar on your leather jacket, comb your hair back and say to your companion, "Let's blow this Popsicle stand." You will do this because just uttering the name "Jett Rink" will make you feel almost unnervingly cool.

And then there's that scene. You know... that scene. The one where Jett shows up covered in oil and starts spouting off to Bick and Leslie that he done struck it big and now he's a gonna be a rich'un, just like they are. And then Leslie tries to act happy for him but he so completely creeps her out that she just wants to run and Bick just wants to smash his face in. Yeah, that scene. Man, that scene rocks.

Finally, there's the finale, and as the first word in this sentence is "finally" I suppose it is only fitting that the last word is "finale." The finale of Jett Rink, drunken and bitter, as he mumbles a bunch of crap by himself in a big conference room that no one could understand anyway even if they had been listening. The lines spoken by Dean were unintelligible since his head was down for most of it and had to be redubbed by Nick Adams after Dean's death.

And lest I forget, Dennis Hopper plays the son of Rock and Liz and his character is named Jordan Benedict III. Seriously, Dennis Hopper plays someone named Jordan Benedict the Third.

So there you have it. Giant is a great big sprawling piece of entertainment with sharp direction, fine performances and a melodramatic script. If you've got the time, it's an enrich'un experience.

Deep Background: Building the Career-Long Character

Alan Ladd was no Marlon Brando, Spencer Tracy or Fredric March. Nor was he a Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino or Dustin Hoffman before his time. He was Alan Ladd. He was serviceable. For the most part, he got the job done and didn't ask anyone to give him an Oscar, or even a nomination, for his troubles. And no one would have anyway. It's not that he was bad because he wasn't. It's just that no one ever left an Alan Ladd movie and thought, "Wow! What a performance!" But he created characters based on his own persona that allowed for an exploration of those characters over the course of his career. Allow me to explain.

Whenever I hear someone say, "Oh (insert name of underrated actor here) just plays himself all the time" or "she's just being (insert name again) in all of her movies" I get a little annoyed. I think most people with acting experience reading this would agree that the best actors always infuse a character with their own personality, the better to establish the character as a real human being that the actor can inhabit. And more importantly, playing yourself isn't easy. When I was living at home all those years ago my mother would read through plays with me when I was memorizing lines for a part. She tried to act while doing so. She was awful (sorry Mom). She e-nun-see-ay-ted ev-vuh-ree word in some bizarre Stratford-on-Avon mock British construct. It was unnerving. She was under the false impression so many have, that anyone can act if they're just playing themselves. They can't. Reading lines and making them sound like words that you just happen to be saying doesn't come naturally to a lot of people. Alan Ladd may not be Edwin Booth but he was good at his craft and knew his limitations. Like his frequent co-star Veronica Lake, he never attempted to go outside of his established low-key persona. And as I said in the opening paragraph, that allowed him to develop one character over the course of his career.

Alad Ladd became a star with his portrayal of cold and calculating Philip Raven, the hired assassin of This Gun for Hire in 1942. Eleven years later he had his biggest success with Shane and every time I see either of those movies I think of the other. To me, Shane the character is Philip Raven, older and worn down. I don't mean literally since they obviously take place in different times and Raven dies at the end of his outing but inside the psyche where the character resides. Shane is Raven, older. I can imagine Shane spending his earlier days shooting people for money and as much is implied in the film. Shane understands Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) because Shane was Jack Wilson when he was Philip Raven but now he's fighting the good fight and doing it free of charge. And the only reason I can get that character lineage from Raven to Shane is because Alan Ladd played himself in both.

When an actor creates a wholly new character for each performance, like a Marlon Brando, Paul Muni or Meryl Streep, you can't follow a character over the course of their career. But when they play themselves, you can. Take John Wayne, who excelled at placing his personality at the center of the character he was playing. Doing that makes it easy to imagine that Ethan Edwards of The Searchers is the older version of the Ringo Kid from Stagecoach. The Ringo Kid has none of the bitterness or rage of Ethan but he's young and inexperienced. Because of John Wayne's persona I can easily see him becoming Ethan over the long haul and it allows me, when watching The Searchers, to "remember" what Ethan was like when he was younger.

Another great example, this time over the course of three movies, is Paul Le Mat's characters from American Graffiti, Handle With Care and Melvin and Howard. That's the same guy at three different stages in his life. Can't you see the hot rod drag racer of American Graffiti becoming the trucker later in life before settling down to an empty, low-income existence in the Las Vegas desert? Those three movies are a way of seeing what the Graffiti character of John Milner would have become had he lived on.

Sometimes I imagine the character fell into a downward spiral somewhere along the way. Think about the Elizabeth Taylor of A Place in the Sun or Father of the Bride becoming the raging drunk of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Or what if Vivien Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara finally snaps under the pressure of constantly having to fight for everything and becomes the hollowed-out shell that is Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire? James Bond of Goldfinger is given up by the agency as a scapegoat and the CIA locks him away for decades until he's the silver-haired incarcerated secret agent of The Rock. Joan Crawford's musical star of the stage in Dancing Lady becomes the wheelchair-bound has-been dependent upon her sister in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?

It's fun to imagine these character connections but also surprisingly useful in fleshing out a character beyond what the film provides (in fact, I couldn't even have made it through The Rock if I hadn't actively imagined that was James Bond after 35 years of imprisonment). Shane doesn't overtly provide background details for the title character though it is implied throughout. Fortunately, Alan Ladd made it possible to see what Shane was like before the 1953 movie came along by playing the character in an earlier incarnation in This Gun for Hire. And that was possible because Alan Ladd played himself, which may make him appear limited to some but it also made it possible for him to do what Paul Muni never could: Create a character and spend the rest of his career building a history for him.