George Stevens (director) GIANT (1956) Photo archive

Np: Globe Photos, Warner Brothers, 1956. Collection of 54 vintage original mostly 8 x 10″ (20 x 25 cm) photos, comprising 16 black-and-white and one color still. Also included is a collection of 37 contact sheets, each containing from 10-36 distinct images for a total of approximately 795, many with stamp of Globe Photos on verso, in the original Globe Photos printed envelope. Envelope has various tears on right, a few contact sheets have red printing notations. Overall near fine.

Giant is a sprawling epic of a film and may well be regarded as the single most significant film to deal with Texas in the 20th century. The film deals forthrightly with issues of patriarchy and racism, and also with two of the predominant Texas industries: cattle and oil. The film has three lead actors: Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean.

Hudson plays Jordan “Bick” Benedict, a wealthy rancher with an utterly massive ranch (Edna Ferber, who wrote the novel from which the film was adapted, modeled Benedict’s estate after the King Ranch in Kingsville, Texas). And Taylor plays Leslie Lynnton Benedict, his young wife, a Maryland socialite who gradually becomes aware of the deeply rooted patriarchal norms and severe racism in Texas society — both of them norms against which she increasingly rebels. Dean plays the critical third starring role — that of Jett Rink, a ranch hand who winds up inheriting a small parcel of land, land which turns out to have massive petroleum reserves beneath it. Jett becomes massively wealthy and urges Bick to allow drilling on his cattle ranch, which Bick for a long time resists because he wants to uphold his legacy as a rancher. As Jett becomes an oligarch and constructs a massive new hotel, the once-decent young man has been transformed into an unrepentant racist. (Wikipedia)

The 17 scene stills contain a good range of representative images from the movie. The contact sheets focus on James Dean as Jett who, almost certainly, is the film’s most interesting character. They include many behind-the-scenes images showing how Dean, working with director George Stevens, slowly shaped his performance.