Giant

Giant (1956) is for some reason my favorite family epic. I'm no Texan, yet Giant makes me drink the Lone Star State-brand Kool-Aid every time. Based on a novel by Edna Ferber, it's about a wealthy Texas ranch family and spans a quarter-of-a-century, from about 1920 to about 1945. Rock Hudson, as the dashing cattle rancher Bick Benedict, falls in love with a beautiful raven-haired Virginia girl named Leslie (Elizabeth Taylor) when he visits her family's farm to purchase a horse.

He takes both her and the horse back to Texas to his massive ranch, Reata (there's a famous dinner scene full of double entendres about the size of the ranch), and there she becomes part of the Texas cult herself, but never at the cost of her own strong-willed identity. (There's a great scene where the fiery, confident Liz Taylor scolds the men for trying to exclude her from their political discussion.) You'll fall prey to the cult too if you watch Giant, only you won't care by the time it's over.

Giant has its tender and touching and sad moments--the fate of Bick's Tomboy sister Luz (Mercedes McCambridge), the plight of the Mexican villagers that burdens Leslie Benedict's heart, especially when her husband and his people seem unwilling to acknowledge it, the puppy love between the young adult Benedict children and their respective beaus--but never does Giant sink into histrionics. It sinks into pro-Texas propaganda, to be sure, but it also manages to portray the subtle evils of racism, the hollowed-out fruits of the American dream drenched in oil, and the strange, beautiful resilience that some people (like the Benedicts) manage, while others around them self-destruct--like Jett Rink (James Dean, who steals the film, and who died before it was released), the ranch hand who inherits a small piece of land, strikes it rich with oil wells, then falls apart after becoming a zillionaire.

Director George Stevens turns Giant into the anti-Gone With the Wind epic. He doesn't bash you over the head with profundity. He smartly lets the profundity linger in the background. On the surface, Giant is a safe movie, lauding the glories of American life and the progress enabled by fossil fuels. But James Dean's character represents such a descent into desperation because of his wealth, that you can hardly call Giant a cheerleader for oil. (He's also been in love with Leslie from afar for like 25 years. That kind of unfulfilled devotion begins to wear at a body.)

If the movie lets anyone off too easy, it's possibly Bick, except he gets his face smashed by a big burly restaurant owner at the end, and because he's finally standing up to the anti-Mexican sentiment he's ignored for so long. It's both Bick's come-uppance and his redemption: he stands up for his Mexican daughter-in-law and mixed-race grandson, and finally, as Leslie tells it, "becomes her hero." It's not the money or the vast estate or the impressive private jet, but the principles, that are rewarded.

Giant covers a lot of ground, but it's not the grand scope of the film but the breezy, laid-back style that I find mesmerizing: Stevens truly produces a kind of mythic Texas tale. It's hard to think of many movies that are able to embody a specific place with such authenticity. Screenplay by Fred Guiol and Ivan Moffat. With Carroll Baker, Dennis Hopper, Jane Withers, Chill Wills, Fran Bennett, Earl Holliman, Elsa Cardenas, Paul Fix, Judith Evelyn, Rod Taylor, Carolyn Craig, and a young Sal Mineo. 201 minutes. ★★★½

Suddenly, Last Summer

How could you not love a movie like Suddenly, Last Summer (1959)? It's a delightfully over-the-top Southern family drama from the mind of Tennessee Williams, in which Elizabeth Taylor plays a troubled woman whose dotty millionaire aunt (Katharine Hepburn) wants a prominent surgeon (Montgomery Clift) to perform a lobotomy on her. (Tennessee Williams's sister Rose was lobotomized and it was naturally a tragic moment in the life of the playwright, one which he fixates on in Suddenly, Last Summer.)

Aunt Violet (Hepburn) wants to put certain memories of her niece's to rest, particularly those about Violet's late son Sebastian, an eccentric poet with whom his mother had a bizarre, unhealthy, emotionally incestuous relationship. Sebastian's sexuality is the great big not-so-secret here: he used his mother and his cousin to procure young men for him. The film is of course somewhat coy about this, but only enough to avoid the moralistic but naturally insipid eyes of the Production Code that expurgated all of the Tennessee Williams adaptions at the time. (In Violet's house, we see lots of statues and portraits of muscly nude men in the background. And yet she was in complete denial!)

It's a satisfying bit of glossy trash that pushes all the right buttons, and once again proves how wonderful Taylor was at being campy but sympathetic. And of course, Hepburn flits around like an addle-headed butterfly, spouting her self-deceived monologues about her son as though we're supposed to believe she's the sane one. (But she is the one with the money, and she lures Clift's boss with a million-dollar-check, provided he can deliver the unpleasant surgical procedure.) Montgomery Clift gives a wooden performance, but he's not given much of a character here. His surgeon is just a device used to bring out the madness in the film's stronger characters. There's also cannibalism, and family quibbling, and a wonderful example of Hollywood's obsession with insane asylums. Madness never seemed so glamorous then with the raven-haired Elizabeth Taylor. Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. With Mercedes McCambridge, Albert Dekker, and Gary Raymond. 114 min. ★★★

Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Richard Burton as George, a prickly, passive-aggressive history professor and Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, his bitter wife, who's the daughter of the president of the college where her husband teaches. They have a young couple (George Segal and Sandy Dennis) over for drinks, late one night after a faculty gathering at the college. Their little after-party turns out to be an opportunity for spectacle that playwright Edward Albee and sceenwriter Ernest Lehman couldn't resist. A night with George and Martha is pure masochism. Burton and Taylor fight like two cats as they churn out clever insults and fling them at each other with ruthless precision. As "raw" as this movie purports to be, it all feels too much like "acting." But the actors are still very good, even if the screenwriting is obviously trying to be "real" and "edgy." It's overly self-conscious, but first-time director Mike Nichols doesn't seem to worried about concealing it, which may be one of the reasons this canned drama works, as an exercise in frothy unpleasantness, but it's hard to watch this and call it a good time. These are some of the most unpleasant people you could ever spend an evening with, and while there's some humor in it, it feels too much like watching movie stars behind-the-scenes after they've had too much to drink.

There is a bit of style to it (Haskell Wexler won an Oscar for his black-and-white cinematography, and the editing by Sam O'Steen nicely lifts the material off the stage, even though it's still very much a talky film), and in 1966, this was probably a lot more exciting than it is in the era of celebrity meltdowns and the desensitizing spectacle that is reality television. I keep wondering: Were people really enjoying, even reveling in, Elizabeth Taylor as the frumpy drunk with the acid tongue? You really miss the Elizabeth Taylor of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Giant and even Suddenly, Last Summer, the one you could root for, even when she was over-acting. She always looked so ravishing, and exuded such electricity on the screen. She turned each of those roles into a performance. That's what's so enthralling, to this day, about Elizabeth Taylor, the movie star. She certainly gives us a performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, but somehow, seeing her turn into a vulgar lush (still pretty sexy though) is a disappointment. She won her second Oscar for this movie, and it's as if she had to go ugly and mean to get it. (She won her first Oscar for playing a high-class hooker who's killed in a car crash at the end of Butterfield 8, and the Academy was most rewarding as a result of her punishment.) But when an actress like Elizabeth Taylor is awarded for giving the kind of antithetical performance (and yes, it's a damn good one at times) she gives in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, it's a reminder of something that Taylor in her prime always helped us forget: that stars weren't real.

When they're drunk, though, Burton and Taylor have a wonderfully funny chemistry together. And George Segal is enjoyably perplexed as the young new biology professor who, along with his wife, becomes a pawn in George and Martha's matrimonial boxing match. (Sandy Dennis has a bubbly, aloof charm to her, and she gets to have her own mad meltdown as the night winds on and more skeletons tumble recklessly out everybody's closet. This feels like Albee's version of a Tennessee Williams play, full of corny, histrionic lines that are delivered with the right amount of tongue-in-cheek from this cast. They give each bad line a bit of ersatz class. (It would be frightening to see this performed by amateurs.)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) is a Southern-fried family drama, adapted from the Tennessee Williams play and directed by Richard Brooks (James Poe co-wrote the script). It's one of the better films to come from Tennessee Williams, despite the fact that MGM completely removed the play's most controversial subject matter in the adaptation.

Paul Newman and Elizabeth Taylor play a not-so-happily-married couple. Taylor is electric, even when she climbs into histrionics, as the sexually frustrated Maggie. She's stunning in this, and Brooks frames her in doorways to heighten her allure. Newman is intense but vulnerable as Brick, the alcoholic ex-football hero who claims Maggie slept with his now dead BFF, Skipper. Brick's repugnance with his wife is half-hearted at best. In one scene, after he pushes Maggie away, only to be confronted with her nightgown hanging on the bathroom door, he lets down his guard, drinking in her aroma. You know he wishes he could stop playing the offended husband. He's at his best when he's laughing--his sense of humor humanizes him. Newman was always at his most appealing when he was clearly having a good time with his performance, even if he was playing a heel like in Hud (1963).

As with any Tennessee Williams story, the room is always thick with raw emotion, and skeletons are lining up behind the closet door waiting to tumble out. But you can forgive it for being over the top. It's lusciously entertaining, full of self-loathing and big revelations, like nine months of therapy condensed into 100 minutes with a glossy MGM sheen over it and beautiful people on the screen. When I first saw it years ago, I was so stunned that I immediatately rewound the VHS and watched it straight through again. Almost every character has a moment of self-awareness that is actually quite touching. The veneer is lifted even if only momentarily, and a kind of inner-truth is revealed--one that's deeply broken and human.

With Burl Ives as Brick's father, Big Daddy (yes, really), the booming-voiced Southern tycoon who likes controlling everything from his plantation to his sons, and is confronting his own mortality when he learns that he has inoperable cancer. Judith Anderson plays Big Mama, the stereotypical Southern matriarch with a big voice and a short fuse. Jack Carson plays Brick's brother, Gooper, the dutiful firstborn who's doing everything he can to please Big Daddy and assume control of the family fortune when the inevitable happens. He's got an obnoxious, conniving wife (Madeleine Sherwood) and a litter of plump, rude, ruddy-faced little imp-children. ★★★★