Giant (1956)
At work I've been doing a series of interviews with people who grew up in families that migrated and did agricultural work for a living, and who then went on to march with great labor leaders like Cesar Chavez and dedicate their lives to fighting for farmworkers' rights.
Two of those people --both of whom grew up in Texas and migrated in the Western migrant stream-- mentioned to me a 1956 movie called "Giant". They said it was a particularly accurate depiction of the kind of racism they encountered when they were young. I rented it and watched it tonight and thought I'd share some thoughts
Giant is clearly intended to be, at least partly, an anti-racist film. It's the story of a young woman (Elizabeth Taylor) who marries a wealthy Texas cattleman (Rock Hudson) and moves from the East out to his sprawling half-million acre ranch. She soon learns of her husband's unattractive views of the Mexicans who work on his ranch. Her do-gooder patronizing ways towards the Mexican workers is a foil to his outright hostility. There's also a young white man working for them (played by James Dean) who falls in love with the lady of the house. When he strikes it rich (via oil) he becomes the family's arch rival. Drama ensues when none of the children of the family do what's expected of them by their parents and one even takes up with the arch rival.
Despite the romance and drama of family and rival lovers, the relationship between the white people and the brown people in the story is at least a major theme It's not just background music. Multiple scenes depict discrimination and outright hatred towards Mexican Americans.
But it goes beyond being simply an accurate portrayal of a particular kind of racism in a particular time and place. Without giving away the ending, I'll just say that the message of the film is clearly that this racist reality is ugly/mistaken/wrong. It sends this message in a somewhat cheezy, crude way but hey, it's the 50s. The fact that it's an anti-racism film at all goes a long way. That's not to say that the film couldn't be better if it weren't so contrived in parts, but maybe you can't have it all.
One odd thing about the movie is the god-awful makeup job on the "brown" people. At first I thought they must be white actors made up to look Mexican (which was common back then but would've led to an interesting question: why would a director making a film about racism, not feel able to use non-white actors?). But they did apparently use Latino actors. Sal Mineo was in the cast (he was a sort of 1950s latin heartthrob so I hear, even though he was actually Sicilian). Sal's character didn't look as bad as the others but the actress who played Juana is an actress named Elsa Cardenas who was born in Tijuana. Why the need for mud-colored makeup then, you think? Maybe they didn't look Mexican enough? Here's a photo of her to the right.
Did they feel they had to uphold white people's stereotypes of what Mexicans should look like by making their skin darker? Maybe they had only white makeup artists on the set who only knew how to do one shade of makeup ("ivory") and were completly flabbergasted when confronted with a larger palette? Who knows? It is interesting though, how a film so clearly conscious of race could still, also be so affected by it. For a contemporary parallel perhaps consider the 2004 film Crash.











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