AllMovie

An impressive cast drives this early episode of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre. Dennis Christopher -- best known from the 1979 sleeper hit Breaking Away -- is Jack, a boy who acquires a handful of magic beans in exchange for his poor family's cow. His mother, Soap's Katherine Helmond, is furious and throws the beans into garden beside the house. However, the beans grow overnight into a magnificent beanstalk that reaches into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk only to find that it leads directly to the castle of a fierce yet wealthy giant. Elliot Gould and Jean Stapleton star as the giant and his equally gigantic wife.