Small Giant, and 34 years to James Dean completism

James Dean made only three movies before he died in a 1955 car accident, and two of them were released posthumously. But you wouldn't know it from how long it took me to watch them.

Seeing East of Eden (1955), his first film, in my Art of The Film class my senior year in high school coincided with starting to think of myself as a cinephile. I can't say for sure if we watched it before Christmas (which would have been 1990) or after (which would have been 1991), but let's just round up and say it was 34 years ago.

Continuing in chronological order of their release with Dean's first posthumous film, I don't know exactly when I saw Rebel Without a Cause (1955) because it predates when I started keeping track of that stuff in 2002. But I have a feeling it was just before that, because I think I remember watching it in the apartment I moved into in May of 2001, the beginning of more than a dozen years living in Los Angeles. The viewing might have been sort of a cinematic rite of initiation to my new home, since the film is set in LA and I would have been geeked by the famous scene filmed at Griffith Park Observatory.

More than 20 years later, I have finally finished Dean's filmography with a viewing of Giant (1956), and it took being a captive audience on a plane to Singapore to do it.

Oh I considered watching it before now. But if I ever got close, I quickly veered away when I saw its daunting running time: 3 hours and 19 minutes.

Which happens to be a perfect way to kill nearly half of a seven and a half four flight.

Normally I watch new releases on international flights as it is a good way to goose my numbers before closing my rankings in January, and I did start the flight with Minhal Baig's We Grown Now. But my 2024 numbers are actually ahead of last year's pace (or at least were before I started watching all the Halloween movies this month), and the other options weren't really doing it for me (sorry Tarot).

So I was going through the A-Z listing of all movies (and have a second post I might write inspired by that perusal) and there was Giant, daring me to take this opportunity to watch it.

My Art of the Film teacher, Mr. Brown, would likely be horrified to hear that I watched a film of such expansive Texas vistas on a screen the size of a paperback novel, but at least I didn't watch it on a phone. And at least it wasn't shot in 70 mm, which would have made the crime all the more perverse. 

The thinking was, though, that I didn't know when else in my normal life I'd say "Okay, I am devoting the next 199 minutes of my life to this movie," especially since when you're watching such a long movie at home, you'll need to take breaks and will be lucky to finish the whole thing inside four hours. So if the options were watching Giant on a plane or never watching it, I think I made the right choice.

Especially considering how much I ended up liking it.

I have to admit I was a bit impatient in the first hour. The knowledge of the length of time that lay ahead of me felt onerous, even without many other alternatives to distract me, and at that point, I thought I had this movie worked out. Elizabeth Taylor is in a bad marriage with Rock Hudson and feels isolated on his Texas cattle ranch. Lo and behold, there is the steamy ranch hand played by James Dean, ready to restore passion to her existence - apparently over the course of three hours and 19 minutes.

This is not what Giant is in the slightest.

Imagine my surprise when Dean is not her savior, but rather, an eventual miserable oil tycoon who is a racist and all around bastard.

In fact, it would actually be a decades spanning story of perseverance and change between the 1920s and 1950s, where Taylor's character soldiers through what is a bad marriage for most of the time - until Hudson's character finally finds a form of redemption at the end, all the more realistic for the fact that he is essentially the same old world curmudgeon he's been all along.

Suffice it to say that the movie entirely reframed what I thought I knew about James Dean, starting with the fact that he's not even actually in all that much of this movie.

Knowing as I do that Dean became one of the most iconic movie stars of the 20th century, seen posing in Rebel Without a Cause on posters in the poster racks in department stores even when I was a kid in the 1980s, I imagined this was the 1950s version of a modern pop star, his every movie dictated by a publicist and calculated to make teenage girls swoon. Giant returns the opposite verdict entirely.

If I remembered East of Eden or Rebel Without a Cause a little better, I'd probably already know Dean wasn't as superficial as that. I do know that he certainly was not a paean to machismo in those films, at least not the way the posters would have you believe. I seem to remember a fair bit of anguished crying in both movies.

But at least in both of those films he was the hero, or at least heroic. There is absolutely no way to characterize what he's doing here in those terms.

In that first hour, even though you could barely see his eyes under the brim of his ten-gallon hat, I figured this movie was prepping for us an image of the kind, studly hunk who is going to save Taylor's Leslie Benedict from her prematurely old husband. But then I started to notice that his attentions towards her are at least a little bit lewd. And then he disparagingly refers to the Mexicans working on the ranch as "wetbacks." And then before long he is revealing a dastardly vindictive and gloating side that is essentially his default condition for the remainder of the film. When he turns his romantic attentions to Leslie's daughter - her younger daughter at that - any idea of him as a man choosing roles in order to cultivate a particular public image is long gone.

So while I have had, to this point in my life, a sort of snide response to the ongoing cultural cache of James Dean, now I find myself wondering in how many fabulous ways he would have continued to challenge himself in a career that might have lasted another 50 years. Heck, if he led a healthy life, which was probably never in the cards for him, he might even be alive today. He'd be 93, and in theory might still be working.

George Stevens' film impressed me in other ways. The way it fully takes on white racism against Mexicans seems almost transgressive for 1956. That was surely in the source novel, but they could have sidelined it a lot more than they did.

In the end this feels like an essential American document of epic scale and importance, capturing a defining period of American history through gimlet eyes rather than rose-colored glasses.

And watching it on a screen the size of a paperback novel didn't make it any less so.