Giant, indeed

In the latest installment of Maddie's Dress, Maddie talks Gary into ditching their planned date to the fair in favor of the movie Giant at the drive-in.

Giant is a sweeping epic by film director George Stevens. It stars, among others, Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Dennis Hopper, Mercedes McCambridge, Earl Holliman, Chill Wills, Jane Withers, Sal Mineo, and a bunch of cattle. Er, herd of cattle.

The movie was released in 1956, way before my time, but I was first exposed to it as a youngster on Superstation WTBS from Atlanta. Officially, it is 201 minutes long, but it lasts about four and a half hours on TV. It is quite a spectacle. I'd love to see it on the big screen.

I've known for some time that Gary and Maddie would not make it to the fair, but I didn't know what would distract them until the drive-in idea came to me in an unexpected fly-by from my muse. It made perfect sense to me that the changes in Leslie Benedict's world would trigger the desire to escape in Maddie. It is your call as to whether the idea was contrived or hokey. It worked for me, though.

Mr. and Mrs. DePaul introduced me to the movie, though I don't know the story of their attachment to it. Mrs. DePaul had a copy of the novel Giant, by Edna Ferber, that she stored, of all places, on the top shelf of a monstrous bookshelf/toybox contraption Papa Bennett had built in the room I eventually shared with my younger brother. I remember staring at it at night before going to sleep, though I don't remember one time ever picking it up.

I came across a copy at the library Saturday, and I checked it out.

Oh, my.

The book came out in 1952 (again, way before my time), though the prose germinated a generation before that, at least. Read this, the opening paragraph of chapter 2:

Though they had been only an hour on the road the thought of this verdant haven tormented Mrs. Mott Snyth as she and her husband tore with cycloramic speed past miles and miles of Reata fence and field and range. The highway poured into the maw of the big car, the torrid wind seared the purpling face of Vashti Snyth and --now that he had removed his big cream Stetson-- tossed the little white curls that so incongruously crowned the unlined and seemingly guileless face of Pinky, her husband. Vashti Snyth's vast busom heaved, her hands fluttered with the vague almost infantile gestures of the hypothyroid.

Huh?

It'll be a miracle if I make it all the way through this. I'm unused to writing like this. Which brings up some questions:

1. What happened to writing of this sort and the likes of Taylor Caldwell, Ayn Rand, etc.?
2. Did TV kill it, or movies? These ladies were contemporaries of Hemingway, for instance, and he didn't write this way.
3. Or, is writing of this sort still produced, but my "infantile" attention span has steered me away from it?
4. Is it as hard on the "ear" to others as it is to mine? I realize Miss Ferber was a prolific author, not to mention a Pulitzer prize winner, and I am a modest, untrained blogger, but come on.
5. What makes good writing today, as this was considered in its day, and where on that spectrum do my amateur efforts lie?

Unless the remaining chapters prove otherwise, Giant will join The Godfather and Forrest Gump on the DePaul list of movies that are better than the books that inspired them.