‘GIANT’ REVIEW
James Dean Week: Day Four
This week, leading up to the 60th anniversary of James Dean’s death, I’ll be posting an article each day on a different facet of Dean’s life and legend. Today’s installment: a review of Jimmy’s final starring role, “Jett Rink” in George Stevens’ epic family saga Giant.
Biographical Background
Jimmy began filming Giant weeks after wrapping production on Rebel Without a Cause, and he died shortly after finishing his part of Giant, even as the movie itself was still shooting.
While filming Giant, Jimmy became very close with Elizabeth Taylor. (There are legends that Liz had a bet with Rock Hudson about which star could get Jimmy Dean to bed first; apparently, Rock Hudson won. But, most reports agree that Rock and James did not get along particularly well. Rock was more of a traditional actor, delivering his lines as they were written, whereas Jimmy was… shall we say… not traditional). Elizabeth Taylor, however, got along fantastically with Jimmy. She would later cause controversy when she included him in a list of gay stars that she was good friends with, along with Monty Clift, Hudson, and Anthony Perkins.
One other interesting note about the filming of the movie. One day, still in costume as Jett Rink, Jimmy filmed a Public Service Announcement for an upcoming episode of Warner Bros. Presents that would plug Giant’s ongoing production. The two discuss the dangers of fast driving, and Jimmy blatantly lies through his teeth as he claims that he never goes fast on highways, just the racetrack, because of how stupid and dangerous it is to speed.
As he’s leaving, at the end of the PSA Jimmy was supposed to recite the safe-driving slogan that’s still in use today — “The life you save may be your own.” Instead, he ad-libbed: “Take it easy. The life you might save… might be mine.”
A month later, he was dead.
The Plot
Giant is a sweeping historical epic, telling the multigenerational tale of the Benedicts, a well-off farming family who own Reata, a ranch in Texas. Bick Benedict (Rock Hudson) is the family patriarch; on a business trip out East, he meets and falls in love with Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor), bringing her back home to the ranch to be his wife.
Leslie forms a friendship with Jett Rink (Dean), their ranch-hand, but after Bick’s sister Luz dies and bequeaths Jett a small plot of land; when Jett refuses to sell it back to the Benedicts and instead starts his own ranch at Little Reata, tension between Jett and Bick disrupts the whole town. Leslie visits Little Reata and when she leaves, Jett notices oil seeping through her footprint; when he drills in the spot, he strikes!
Over the next several decades, Jett quickly becomes more wealthy than the Benedicts, and the feud between the two ranches grows and grows. Leslie and Bick’s children grow, go to college, get married, and have children, and then, one weekend, long-simmering tensions explode into violence at the dedication ceremony for the Jett Rink Airport.
A Glimpse Of What Might Have Been
One of the things everyone knows about James Dean is that he died young. He was only 24 when his Porsche Spyder crashed into an oncoming vehicle and killed him. It’s such a shame that we never got to see the kind of man he would grow into, everyone says. What would James Dean be like if he were still alive today? What would he sound like? What would he look like?
Giant provides us with one possible answer. The film was released more than a year after Dean’s death, in November 1956, and fans lined up around the world to get one final glimpse of their idol, one last chance to see his youth forever immortalized onscreen. And they found more than just immortalized youth.
The film takes place over several decades, and so — thanks to the magic of movie makeup and prosthetics — we get to see James Dean age from his early twenties through his late sixties.
It’s a strangely-fitting end to a too-short career, one that must have seemed dazzling to audiences at the time. Remember, at the time the film came out, he was already dead — and yet, audiences saw, there he was, up on screen, living a long and full life. Yes, the real James Dean never got a chance to grow old. But he got a chance to act old. And for a man who lived his life pretending to be other people, it makes a morbid kind of sense.
It also helps that the movie that surrounds him is grand and epic. Sure, there are some boring bits that haven’t aged well, and may have been boring at the time, having to do with whether Bick can get over himself long enough to let his son go off to college. Dude, he was accepted to Harvard Law. Let him go. You’re a billionaire… hire someone else to run the ranch. But much of the rest of the movie is complex, engaging, and surprisingly progressive. I’m thinking of the subplot that has to do with Leslie’s lifelong quest to help out the Mexican immigrants in the nearby town who have to deal with squalid living conditions, as well as the prejudice faced by young Jordy’s wife Juana in the second half of the film.
Because Italian and Hispanic are “close enough” for Hollywood, Sal Mineo — James’s costar in Rebel — shows up for a scene as Angel Obregon, a local boy Leslie had gotten medical attention for when he was young and sick. Poor Angel Obregon is shipped off to World War II, and when he returns, he’s no longer alive. The scene where his casket is unloaded from a passing train is absolutely heartbreaking, and it’s my favorite instance of the movie’s recurring use of “The Yellow Rose of Texas” to score big moments. Depending on the scene, the song’s sentimental stirring of Texas pride can range from straight-forward sappy sincerity, to mournful misery, to ironic, almost dark sarcasm, and finally, rousing triumph as Bick Benedict finally learns what it means to be a man.
I also can’t say enough good things about Elizabeth Taylor’s performance. Many of James Dean’s female foils are sadly underdeveloped, like Abra in East of Eden, but in many ways, Giant is Leslie’s film and everyone else is just living in it. Abra is distraught because she can’t decide which hunky Trask brother to get it on with, and Judy in Rebel is a tad difficult to really root for because her main source of conflict is that she just really, really wants to make out with her dad, but Leslie… Leslie is a strong female character in all the right ways. Leslie is a woman trying to navigate the social world she lives in without sacrificing one single solitary ounce of her dignity, while also trying to elevate those around her as much as she can. For example, check out this fierce scene where she stands up to Bick and his business-talkin’ good ol’ boys.
“You ought to be wearing leopard skins and carrying clubs! Politics? Business? What is so masculine about a conversation that a woman can’t enter into it?”
Bick cruelly suggests that she must be tired — because why else would she concern herself with such lofty matters as business and politics — and her reply is a withering, “Perhaps I am.” I mean…!!
Aside from the ending — which I’ll get to in a moment — my favorite scene in the film is the one just before Jett strikes oil, where Leslie visits him at Little Reata and the two speak for the first time in a while. Everything about the scene feels iconic — Jett’s coat and half-open shirt, Liz Taylor’s head scarf, and the way he slings his gun across his shoulders — and the tension between the two is off the charts.
It’s clear by this point that Jett is carrying a torch for Leslie, but of course she’s married to Bick and it would never work. Decades pass, and Jett remains a bachelor. It’s not explicitly said that he’s never married because he was still in love with Leslie… until that final, climactic scene at the opening of the airport. The whole sequence, which takes up a big chunk of the end of the movie, is phenomenal — there’s an astoundingly tense sense of growing dread, made literal by the film as an approaching storm that causes near-constant rumbling thunder as the tension between Jett and the Benedicts grows unbearably strong.
After brawling with Jordy and Bick, Jett sits alone and gets table-topplingly drunk.
But just before this, he delivers a devastating monologue while alone at the table, his guests having left the ceremony because he was a mess, in which he confesses to himself and to the world that he’s been in love with Leslie his entire life. (The below video cuts off just before the above gif).
This is the last we see of Jett Rink, and consequently, of James Dean... ever. While Jett Rink isn’t as developed or as important of a character as Cal Trask and Jim Stark — in fact, he’s only on-screen for a little more than forty of the film’s 201 minutes — I think it’s a bold performance that would not have been nearly as effective in the hands of a less capable actor. Delivering this monologue, he could be an apostle in The Last Supper, the despondent way he stares up in supplication at an absent savior, a Leslie who he was never able to serve the way he wanted to.
At the Fairmount Historical Museum this weekend, I was able to see James Dean’s own shooting script used during the filming of Giant. It was absolutely covered with notes in the actor’s own hand, changing words and inflections, sometimes adding entire lines in the Jett’s distinctive voice. On Giant, James Dean feuded with director George Stevens, co-star Rock Hudson, the studio, and pretty much everyone else (except Liz Taylor) about his method of working, which required him to have a hand in creating the character. For example, he had to fight to convince Stevens to let him count off land in this manner, which Stevens found too showy but which Jimmy had heard was how real ranchers would walk the property. He won, and in doing so provided Giant with another of many iconic moments.
If he’d just delivered the lines as written on the page, if he’d just walked in a straight line as Stevens wanted him to, he wouldn’t have given us nearly as memorable of a performance. We wouldn’t have such a full, complete life packaged into one film to remember him by. At this point, by the release of Giant in 1956 the cult of James Dean was in full swing, but this last performance had the power to make or break it. Thankfully, James Dean delivered, in spades, one last time.
Next: Come Back To The 5 & Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean(coming soon)→
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