Giant was the Gone With The Wind of the '50s, one of the first in a decade of epics that toured the country as special events, playing only the grandest theaters. The film lingers in the American moviegoing consciousness as such a massive enterprise that it's somewhat surprising to watch the new double-disc DVD edition and find that the picture isn't widescreen. Giant is more of a "tall" movie, framed by director George Stevens so that the characters are boxed in by vast expanses of land and sky. It's also sprawling, covering 25 years in the lives of millionaire Texas rancher Rock Hudson and his debutante wife Elizabeth Taylor. But in spite of the three-and-a-half-hour running time and the stark southwestern landscapes, Giant studies little moments more intently than monumental ones, and dwells in drawing rooms as much as on the range. It's a Western that traces the gradual move from exteriors to interiors, and shows what that transition does to the rowdy cattlemen who wake up after WWII and find themselves domesticated. Like the Edna Ferber novel on which it's based, Giant is also largely about the pride and resourcefulness of Texans, as well as their sensitivity to claims that they stole their land and livelihood from Mexicans. Hudson and Taylor are joined at the top of the bill by James Dean, playing a ranch hand with a grudge against Hudson. In the DVD's second disc of reminiscences (complementing a first-disc commentary track by George Stevens Jr., screenwriter Ivan Moffat, and critic Steven Farber), surviving cast members speak honestly about how difficult Dean could be to work with in what would prove to be his final role. His mumbly method acting–made more magnetic by his unpredictable gesturing–contrasts purposefully with Hudson and Taylor's staid Hollywood classicism. When Dean strikes oil on his small plot of land, his ill-fated attempts to turn money into class provide a tragic counterpoint to his rivals' mild domestic squabbles. Giant sometimes lurches forward awkwardly, and it often makes silly use of foreshadowing, as when Hudson and Taylor's son forgoes horseback riding so he can play with a toy doctor kit, then grows up to be an actual doctor (played by Dennis Hopper). But Stevens pulls the story and the characters together for an extended climactic sequence at a hotel opening that presages Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino in the way it juggles subplots and locations. Most living directors would love to have Stevens' feel for framing and blocking, which has him clustering characters in their own living rooms one minute, then moving outside to show the outlandish man-made magic of an enormous Victorian house rising from an endless field of dirt.