Coming to PBS’s Latino/a focused Voces series tomorrow, Friday, April 17: CHILDREN OF GIANT
Hector Galán’s look at the impact on Latinos of the 1956 epic GIANT had its world premiere at San Antonio’s CineFestival earlier this year. Since then, the doc has screened in Marfa TX and at a number of community screenings in advance of its PBS debut tomorrow.
Sixty years ago, the small West Texas town of Marfa played host to some of the biggest stars in Hollywood, as George Stevens filmed his adaptation of GIANT. Based on Edna Ferber’s contentious novel, the film embraced its themes of gender inequality and racial and class divisions between Mexican- and Anglo-Americans, heady topics for a studio picture starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. Galán returns to Marfa, speaking to residents who were cast as extras and surviving actors like Earl Holliman and Elsa Cardenas, to reveal behind-the-scenes details of the production’s takeover of the town, and how its controversial themes affected not only Marfa’s residents, but Latino/a audiences around the world. While the film errs too much on the side of the former, indulging in far too many anecdotal reminiscences about run-ins with celebrities and the like, rather than keeping focused on the more interesting focus on race and class, this ostensible focus nevertheless elevates it beyond a simple “making of” featurette.
what (not) to doc 