The Late Show - The Late Movies Blogathon: Giant (1956)

by Tony Dayoub

This post is a contribution to The Late Show - The Late Movies Blogathon running through December 7th and hosted by David Cairns of Shadowplay.

I'm sure it's been written about, but personally, I'm just speculating when I say that a classicist like George Stevens (Shane) probably had his hands full tamping down the Method-y exuberance of rising star James Dean when they collaborated on what would be the doomed actor's final film, Giant (1956). But why guess, when you can see the lengths Stevens went to in order to keep Dean from running away with Giant in the movie itself? Let's look at some screen grabs (off the new Giant Blu-ray and which can all be enlarged if you click on them) of three key scenes featuring Dean.

Elizabeth Taylor

by Tony Dayoub

"Seems like we always spend the best part of our time just saying goodbye."

-Elizabeth Taylor as Angela Vickers in A Place in the Sun (1951)

One of cinema's most iconic stars is gone. Certainly there has never been an actor who had gained as much attention for her personal life as she had for her work like Elizabeth Taylor. Married eight times, twice to the volatile love of her life, actor Richard Burton, Taylor seemed to weather scandal easily. She had been in the public eye since childhood, when she starred in such movies as Lassie Come Home (1943) and National Velvet (1944). Perhaps it was the casual way she managed the lifelong attention she received from the press that helped her comfort damaged souls like Montgomery Clift and Michael Jackson, close friends of hers, through their own public trials and tribulations. Since many of the countless tributes yet to be seen in the next few days will focus on her personal life, I'd like to talk about several of her roles which have shone brightest for me.

Dennis Hopper

by Tony Dayoub

Just a few months after I started this site, I got the opportunity to meet Dennis Hopper in New York. I had just flown in to cover the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival, and attended a rare screening of a restored version of Curtis Harrington's Night Tide (1961) that evening. Hopper surprised all of us by making an appearance to give an impromptu discussion on the film, his first as a lead. As I recount elsewhere, the screening of this surreal love story between a sailor and a mermaid took a turn for the stranger due to some inadvertent rearranging of the film's second and third reel. Hopper seemed fairly irritated, but as I braced myself for the actor-director to explode in a rant derived from some bizarre melding of his photojournalist character in Apocalypse Now with Blue Velvet's deranged Frank Booth, I was instead pleasantly surprised to see the actor-director take a breath and begin to get us up to speed on the plot points we'd missed from the misplaced second reel.