Awards and Honors

George Stevens won the Directors Guild Award. Giant was also nominated by the Writers Guild.

The film won Italy's David di Donatello Award for Best Foreign Production.

Giant was nominated for ten Oscars®: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Dean and Hudson), Best Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costumes, Best Editing and Best Score. It won for Best Director, bringing Stevens his second Oscar®.

Giant was voted a place on the National Film Registry in 2005.

THE CRITICS' CORNER - GIANT

"...an excellent film which registers strongly on all levels, whether it's in its breathtaking panoramic shots of the dusty Texas plains; the personal, dramatic impact of the story itself, or the resounding message it has to impart."
- Variety

"...it is the late James Dean who makes the malignant role of the surly ranch hand who becomes an oil baron the most tangy and corrosive in the film. Mr. Dean plays this curious villain with a stylized spookiness -- a sly sort of off-beat languor and slur of language -- that concentrates spit. This is a haunting capstone to the brief career of Mr. Dean."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

"A real movie is big, grand, magnificent and regales you with all the power that movies can wield upon a viewer's imagination and spirit. George Stevens' 1956 production, Giant, is a real movie."
- Douglas Pratt, The Hollywood Reporter

"....handsomely designed, big, glossy version of the profoundly second-rate Edna Ferber novel...and James Dean (in a supporting role) ran away with it...His appearance here is particularly startling, because he plays his misfit role in the twitchy, self-conscious, "modern" manner of the 1950s, while the rest of the movie is in the conventional heavy-going style that had always been deemed appropriate for sprawling family sagas...It's an example of commercial filmmaking straining for prestige, and the performers can't blink an eye without announcing that they're acting - and acting, what's more, to live up to the scale of the production. Yet Stevens' craftsmanship is effective at an unsubtle level, and the movie is often entertaining, with the narrative push that Ferber was so skilled at."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"Near-legendary epic...holds up beautifully although still very much of its time. Hudson's best performance, close to Taylor's best, and Dean's last film."
- Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide

"Dean steals the film from Hudson and Taylor...But I can't get a handle on the character. More interesting is Hudson's character, who's basically a nice guy but tries - without complete success - to cover up his gentle, soft qualities so he won't seem weaker than his father...The wide-screen production is patriotic, yet still acknowledges that bigotry is widespread. Film has slow and hackneyed scenes, but it's quite enjoyable."
- Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic

"Manny Farber's white elephant category might have been created for George Stevens' 1956 Lone Star epic. It's the kind of movie Hollywood used to pride itself on making: self-consciously "epic," grandiose, a history lesson rolled into a sweeping love story. And yes, it's full of moments of cringe-worthy obviousness, as when the firstborn son of cattle rancher Jordan "Bick" Benedict (Rock Hudson) bursts into tears when his father puts him on a horse, then plays happily with a toy stethoscope. (To no surprise at all, he grows up to be a doctor, though the fact that he also grows to be Dennis Hopper is a bit of a shock.) Though its condemnation of anti-Mexican racism is laudable, the movie's Mexican characters (most played by white actors covered with a thick coat of shoe polish) are almost embarrassingly noble; by contrast, Sidney Poitier was Sweet Sweetback. But for all his grandiosity, Stevens excelled at small, patient details, and they're what make Giant worth watching, in addition to William Mellor's stunning vistas of a windswept Texas....If ever there was a movie to make you doubt the Method, this is it. James Dean mumbles so badly he ought to come with subtitles; across the screen from Rock Hudson's solid elegance, he looks like he comes from another planet, one you don't really want to visit."
- Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper

"Stevens' sprawling epic of Texan life, taken from Edna Ferber's novel, strives so hard for Serious Statements that it ends up as a long yawn."
- Geoff Andrew, Time Out

"Still the best movie ever made about Texas and the modern West." -- Stephen Farber, Movieline

"Giant defines the word 'interminable,' and watching it just once is guaranteed to lop at least a year off your life."
- Dan Callahan, Slant Magazine

"Giant" offers extensive pleasures - it had better, at 201 minutes - not the least of which is watching James Dean age from a misunderstood, penniless youth into a mean, rich, middle-aged alcoholic. Add Rock Hudson as a landowner and Elizabeth Taylor as the woman both men love, set it all in Texas, and you have some kind of amazing spectacle. Director George Stevens has been knocked for stodginess; Andrew Sarris wrote that his technique "once looked almost like an official style for national epics." But there was clearly another side to Stevens, one that allowed him to depict an ecstatic Dean sopping with oil from a gusher he discovers on his land....Viewers can also enjoy the movie as an attack (although long-winded) on materialism, or simply relish fine supporting work by the likes of Sal Mineo, Dennis Hopper, Mercedes McCambridge and Earl Holliman."
- Walter Addiego, The San Francisco Examiner/I>

Compiled by Frank Miller