Before I begin, I’ll be in New York City until Thursday, so there won’t be any new posts until next Friday afternoon.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m picky on my rated R movies, and Fargo (#84) and Platoon (#83) didn’t quite make the cut. So after church and a lovely drive on the George Washington Parkway, we watched Giant.
As I told my friend here in DC, if you added a little more tawdriness to this movie, you’d have a Danielle Steele Movie of the Week. This is the story of the Benedict family and their trials running a Texas ranch in the first half of the 20th century. Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor play the parentals (he sure was tall!) and a VERY YOUNG Dennis Hopper plays their oldest son.
The film was a bit advanced for its time in terms of theme, as there was an undercurrent of racial intolerance. The challenges that accompany marriage were also fleshed out. Elizabeth Taylor in this film smacked of early Katharine Hepburn. And that’s not a put-down.
My favorite line in the film came at the 3 hour, 5 minute mark, when Rock Hudson said, “I’m a failure. Nothing turned out the way I planned.” His comment jarred me, because I could have given him a million reasons why he WASN’T a failure. I suppose that’s one of life’s great challenges: not seeing variations in “our plan” as failures. Everytime I make a five-year plan for my life, I can count on maybe one event actually happening. Things change. People die, jobs shift, friends get married, family moves, and suddenly what we had planned is no longer a sure thing. That doesn’t mean we failed. We fail when we refuse to adapt. We fail when we throw up our hands and cease to try. We succeed when we look at what life has handed us and say, “Well, sure wasn’t what I had in mind, but heck…might as well roll with it.”
And my favorite line is when Jett Rink drives up, all covered with oil, and stalks onto the porch saying, “I’m a rich’en, Bic, I’m a rich’en.” I think about it every time I drive by the ranch where it was filmed.