Soon after its 1956 release, the ranches-to-oil-riches-epic Giant assumed its place in the Texas film canon, but it might have just as easily fallen flat with local audiences. Though the 1952 novel of the same name was a best-seller, it raised the hackles of Lone Star Staters who felt that New York author Edna Ferber had disrespected their culture, especially in sections of the book critical of Anglo Texans’ contemporaneous discrimination against their Mexican American neighbors. When director George Stevens, from California, took on the film adaptation, he worried that he would be run out of the state on a rail. As he joked during preproduction, “The story’s so hot and Texans object so hotly, we’ll have to shoot it with a telephoto lens across the border from Oklahoma.”

That quote, along with many that are equally memorable, was unearthed by University of Texas at Austin English professor (and Texas Monthly contributing editor) Don Graham, author of the new, comprehensive history Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film (St. Martin’s Press, April 10). Graham is the first to collect all of the film’s larger-than-life tales in one place: the lore of James Dean’s iconic final performance, the relationship push-pull between the three lead actors, the impact of the star-studded production on the tiny desert town of Marfa. But the most compelling narrative in Graham’s book, which comprises three years of writing and poring through archives and stacks of Hollywood memoirs, follows how a film so hostile to old-fashioned Texas values managed to impress itself so deeply upon a state that doesn’t take kindly to lectures from outsiders.

That aspect of the story begins with Stevens. One of Graham’s favorite parts of researching the book was learning about the accomplished director, whose 1951 film A Place in the Sun won six Academy Awards. Stevens joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II, shooting footage of D-day and Nazi concentration camps. When he returned to the U.S., Stevens became interested in the civil rights struggle, particularly the bigotry and inequity suffered by Mexican Americans. “[Stevens] wanted to rub Texans’ nose in this kind of prejudice,” Graham says in an interview. “What he’d seen in the camps, what he’d seen in Europe, he didn’t want to happen over here. He didn’t want this kind of second- or third-class citizenship.”

Stevens’s mission is most clearly manifested in the moral trajectory of Bick Benedict (Hudson), a wealthy Texas rancher. Thanks to the influence of his East Coast–born wife, Leslie (Taylor), Benedict’s attitudes toward his state’s caste politics shift as the film progresses. In Giant’s penultimate scene, Benedict displays his growth by standing up for a Mexican family after they’re refused service at a roadside diner; the film ends with a shot of two Benedict grandchildren side by side, one Anglo and one half-Hispanic, seemingly divining a future Texas.

Giant’s rare-for-the-time depiction of racism had a real effect on the state. “Mexican Americans had a rough time of it in Texas in that period. There were Texans during that time that didn’t know that,” Graham says. “They didn’t realize, because they didn’t live in San Antonio, South Texas, or West Texas.” As Graham sees it, there’s a Texas-size parallel between Benedict’s unlikely evolution into a civil rights defender and the real-life story of Lyndon Johnson, a conservative senator who went on to sign key civil rights legislation, in the sixties. The arc of Hudson’s character and of U.S. history both bend toward justice, one just a few years after the other.