The Big Country

It’s been said that the most impressive feature of the American West is its sky, an all-consuming blue that swallows up the Earth below it.  The Western sky is the main star in The Big Country, a ’50s cowboy epic directed by William Wyler (of Ben-Hur fame). This is in a movie with Charleton Heston, Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, and Burl Ives, whose Academy Award for this one shows how silly that award can appear in retrospect.

Wyler’s strategy in The Big Country was apparently to outdo John Ford by making the all-consuming sky and landscape the film’s prominent feature. Scene after scene we see long shots of that landscape, with characters either walking or riding into the horizon, appearing like little blips of nothing. It’s unclear whether Wyler, with these wide-angle views, wanted to show the insignificance of the human condition in relation to nature or the universe, or whether he just wanted to show off, but this persistent camera viewpoint is inconsistent in terms of the movie’s narrative.

And what a sprawling morality tale the movie presents us with. It begins with Peck’s character, a former sailor, riding into an unknown frontier settlement (somewhere between Wyoming and New Mexico).  Peck runs right into trouble with a bunch of ruffians from Ives’ clan, who play a prank on Peck, leaving him a little dirty and ashamed.  This irks Peck’s host, a rich Southerner who’s a figurehead for the wealthy cattle ranchers in the area.  Eventually a showdown takes place between these wealthy ranchers and the poor segment of the settlement, represented by Ives and his ruffians.  Everyone is to blame for this showdown; the ruffians are ruffians, but the ranchers are infringing on water rights and being pompous jerks to their poor neighbors.

That leaves the noble Peck as the go-between.  He obviously represents the middle-class, civil law, and U.S. state rule (ala Jimmy Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence).  He preaches a doctrine of non-violence throughout the movie, even though he carries around his father’s dueling pistols.  What’s going to happen with these pistols is important, obviously, and we learn about them in the first thirty minutes. In fact, the movie telegraphs most of its problems and resolutions in the first thirty minutes, and since you’re in for a 167-minute epic, you’ve got a long wait in front of you.

Included in this longish tale is a romance plot. Peck has traveled to this frontier settlement to return to his fiancee, the daughter of the rich Southern cattleman. Of course Peck, being virtuous and all, can’t marry into that family. That would mean that the middle-class and upper-class have bonded, leaving the poor behind.  Thus the plot throws us a landowning schoolteacher for Peck to fall in love with, demonstrating that the key values for the middle class are private property and education.

This judgment is easy to make because the movie is not subtle in its political and social statements. Wyler’s clear aim here is to trumpet a quasi-populist agenda–most of which we might agree with but which is also made far too obvious by cardboard cutouts that substitute for characters (Sidenote: expect bad acting, especially from Heston).

But then there’s the landscape, which consumes whole shots. It’s unclear whether the vastness of the frontier, as presented in The Big Country, undermines Peck’s values by visually representing the smallness of human beings (thereby colliding with the messages of the plot), or whether we are shown this vastness because there’s a whole lot of it to be conquered by Peck’s values and, golly, we the U.S. of A. had better get on that. Whichever the case, you have better options. Anything by John Ford makes similar points in half the running time, though Ford’s characters don’t trumpet non-violence. The Big Country is ultimately too plodding and easily forgettable, but if you like the genre of the Western like we do, the movie will keep you somewhat interested even until the end.

Entertainment: 4
Intelligence: 4.5
Morality: 6