Giant is another film that aptly demonstrates "how to do it." If you ever wanted to look at how to make a Big Film, this is a must. Long, expansive and colorful with a sizable cast of characters and an incredible range of moods, Giant has not always been a favorite of mine, but as I get older, I find the film to be truer and more inspirational in every way.

I tend to like Big Films. Directors and audiences do too. There is an opportunity in these epics to take an audience away to the setting of the film, to make them forget everything and live life with the characters. It doesn't always work. It works a lot better if you have some good source material. Three hours of Oliver Stone going on about the JFK assassination is more interesting than three hours of Oliver Stone going on about professional football.

So it isn't any wonder that when they sent Giant out into the James Dean-less world in late 1956, Warner Bros. had on all the posters right after the title, "From the novel by Edna Ferber." Ferber's 1952 novel was yet another in a string of mega-bestsellers for the woman who had written So Big, Cimarron, Dinner at Eight, Show Boat, Stage Door and Saratoga Trunk. How in the world George Steven's thought he could make a regular 2-hour movie out of Ferber's rambling and somewhat badly focused story is a complete mystery. But by 1955, he didn't have to.

Considering the success of Ferber's earlier novels and plays that had been turned into films, Giant seemed like a safe bet. And George Stevens didn't mind throwing out original source material if he felt like it. In 1951 for example, he had tossed out tons of Theodore Drieser's novel An American Tragedy, to make a picture which became the very latest word in Shocking Hollywood '50s Swank, A Place in the Sun. He did that in two hours, made a huge hit for Paramount and bagged a Best Director award from the Academy to boot.

But A Place in the Sun was also notable in that it was a training ground for making pictures in the '50s: sex, the yearning for upward mobility, and of being misunderstood for desiring both. Stevens certainly had a way with attracting iconic actors to be in his films, and then giving them roles that they, in turn, would make cultural monuments out of.

So James Dean's impact in Giant is a rather interesting thing. Everyone loves Dean's scenes early in the film; the way he awkwardly tries to shake hands when introduced to Elizabeth Taylor's Leslie Benedict, the way he stretches himself out in somebody else's Rolls Royce, and his pacing off the land given to him. Our admiration for this character of Jett Rink is key. It carries you into the latter half of the picture, when there is far less Dean, and Jett turns into a rich, drunken idiot.

Certainly the through line of Jett's tragic infatuation with Leslie Benedict is in Ferber's novel. In some ways, it is more overt (there are scenes of Jett taking Leslie out on the town in the book). But the movie uses this unrequited love for Leslie as the key to Jett Rink, and they reveal it in a very satisfying way toward the end of the picture. Dean's character is a mess, but our hero, Bick Benedict, doesn't vanquish him. It's interesting to have a picture where the "villain" is played by the most charismatic young actor of his generation.

I know that there are those who say that Dean's presence in Giant throws the rest of the cast into sharp relief – that his performance is so much better that those of his co-stars. I disagree. I think that the contrast between actors and acting styles is so much more pronounced in East of Eden (1955); In that film, Dean looks as though he was from another planet next to the likes of Raymond Massey and Burl Ives.

But when they were making Giant, Dean felt like the runt of the litter. With Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and Mercedes McCambridge to work with, Dean apparently felt the complete outsider. Stevens didn't encourage this feeling in Dean because it mirrored the script; he didn't want Dean to become unbalanced. Dean was off balance enough already.

In Giant, each of these actors do their finest work in this film. Taylor's onscreen personality is one you either like or you dislike, and I have to say that I agree with her distaste for many of the roles that she was being asked to play at that time and into the '60s.

But imagine: a woman is the hero of a picture about Texas! That she arrives as an unknown from back east and has to mold herself somehow into the Texas lifestyle and right wrongs and so on, is a fascinating portrayal by Taylor. From the way she finds herself under the only sapling for miles around during her welcome barbecue to the way she stands at the bar while taking a telephone call at the end, Taylor so completely inhabits this role, that I guess I have a hard time accepting her as anybody else. Or to put it better, if I'm watching her in another film, I always think that I would rather be watching her in Giant.

One could say the same for Rock Hudson. Incredible as it seems, Hudson was only thirty years old when he filmed Giant. Hudson had been in over thirty features, but he had never been given a role like this in a film this good. He didn't let them down. His decades-spanning role as Bick Benedict is quite possibly the most credible performance of this type ever put on film. I know that many people have some reservations regarding Hudson and Taylor's hair and so on in the latter parts of the picture (where these thirty-year-olds are supposed to be playing sixty-year-olds), but I never doubt Hudson for one second. The way he tries to justify himself to his son Jordy during their confrontation at the hotel after the fight – the way he sits there in a chair and does all his arguing seated. It's something that an older man would do.

I love everything about Hudson's performance in this film. From the way he talks to his new wife about "those people" to the way he slouches on the big sofa in the last scene, I always marvel at Hudson's performance. It's sharp, intelligent, accutely observed.

But to return to the subject of Big Film and the epic, Giant is a bit of a trailblazer. At three hours and twenty minutes, it quite easily fills up an entire evening. This was what audiences were looking for during the mid-'50s. Something big and colorful. Something that you could take the family to. Giant must have been conceived of as a huge picture right from the beginning.

During this period of movie making, when the new worlds of television and wide-screen were battling it out for supremacy, the feature film was getting longer and longer. The Robe (1953) was two hours and fifteen minutes. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) was two and a half-hours. This was what was selling, so Giant was planned as a huge cinematic experience.

One thing that must have posed a problem was the depiction of Texas itself. One of the biggest laughs in the film comes from a bit where, after the leafy green landscapes of her native Maryland, Leslie lifts the shade of a window to see the parched horizon of Texas. What were we going to do about this? Get yourself a look.

Enter the brilliant production designer Boris Levin. Levin's story hasn't really been chronicled, but it sure should be. Born in Moscow in 1908, Levin had been trained as an architect, but somehow drifted into art directing films. Nothing in Levin's credits prior to Giant would suggest what he would do with this assignment, but Giant put Levin on the map in Hollywood finally. He would design Anatomy of a Murder (1959) for Otto Preminger, do astounding work in West Side Story (1961) for Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins and he would do three art-direction heavy pictures for Robert Wise again, The Sound of Music (1965), The Sand Pebbles (1966), and The Andromeda Strain (1971), as well as stunning work for other directors until his death in 1986.

Levin cooked up a device for the atmospheres in the settings of this film. The famous black Italianate Benedict mansion sitting out on the flat earth - probably is one of the most famous images in film history. The dark and heavy feel of the inside of the mansion with its woods and red-flocked wallpaper is a relief after all that sun (notice how this set of the main room closely resembles the main hall of the von Trapp haus in The Sound of Music).

I have always been nuts for the sets in this film. The device is to show how Leslie has been able, slowly, to impress her personality on the Texas hardpan. The changes she brings to the Benedict mansion signal not only the passage of time, but also the changes in Texas itself. Slowly, there are a couple of trees out there in the front yard. Then, there is a lawn. Then a swimming pool. One doesn't always appreciate these changes – the white washing of all that masculine wood inside the house and the horrifying '50s modern furniture, but these changes mirror one of the unstated themes of the film: change is inevitable. Get used to it.

One of my favorite bits in the settings for this film is the way that Bick's study (where a great deal of action takes place), is one room in the house which steadfastly does not change (well, maybe in little ways). Just as the character of Bick is reluctant to change – but does, dammit – there are only small changes in Bick's study. These mostly have to do with the bar there. Another incredibly realistic depiction that helps us identify with the action on the screen.

Giant remains for me, an intimate epic. The story of Bick and Leslie. In the novel, Ferber will occasionally break her narrative to give the reader an update on what Bick and Leslie look like as they age. In the movie, Stevens wastes no time on such things. He doesn't need to. There is the meeting at the beginning of the film between Bick and Leslie. They think that they are in love. We have a wordless scene out on the front lawn of Leslie's home where the deal is sealed: a huge close-up of Bick, a huge close-up of Leslie, and then the camera sweeps up into the trees and on with the story.

It's Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. You can SEE that they belong together. You don't have to go into a big song and dance. You just look at them, and there they are.

I can't recall whether Ferber was so interested in the romantic story of Bick and Leslie. But Stevens had a great penchant for lifelike scenes of the ups and downs of marriage. His Penny Serenade (1941) is a bit of a sit, but it deals quite candidly with the forces that pull marriages apart.

Giant is filled with wonderful scenes of Bick and Leslie and their life together as a couple. There are too many to go into here, but listen to the writing and the construction of all of these scenes. They are blown-up, Hollywood style, but still, they have something about them that makes it easy to relate to them. It's not all fiery flash either. Sometimes, it's as simple as having the two of them lying in bed with the lights out and Leslie observing,

And Bick saying,

Fade out and on to the next thing.

There are so many fantastic things in this film that I can hardly choose which ones to put in here. Some that I find especially well done tend to be the quieter moments: Bick and Leslie when they first encounter Luz in the main hall of the mansion; the horse Warwind limping back to the mansion and the servants panic; the shot of the flags with all the hats parked on the sofa underneath at Luz' funeral; trying to pay Jett money for the Buffalo Wallow land; that great scene of Leslie and the kids back east and reading Bick's letter and everybody breaking down, including the family servant Jefferson(!); Dennis Hopper nervously backing into a corner as he tells his mother Leslie that he wants to go to medical school; a drunken Bick trying to pass his legacy onto a younger generation who don't want it (sort of a King Lear done differently); the return of Angel Obregon (my favorite scene in the entire film – it never fails to tear me in half); the kid playing ball outside of the sphere of Angel's funeral; the entire buildup to the scene where Jordy retaliates for his wife Juana's treatment in Rink's hotel; "you're not worth hitting"; and of course, the fight with Sarge.

But I think Stevens' primary interest was in the Bick/Leslie storyline, and this is one reason I find myself returning to this wonderful movie. Everybody thrills over the big fight at the end where Bick works out his old demons by trying to beat up that nasty Sarge. But I rather like the subsequent scene better, where Leslie tells him that at last, he has become the hero to her that he always wanted to be. Leslie comes to realize that she truly loves and admires Bick and Bick realizes that she does, and that she loves her life in Texas. That everything fits even though he was considering himself a total failure only moments before.

A fitting end to an incredible movie.