Wyler maintained his reputation as a brutal taskmaster with actors.....years after the film was completed, many of the lead actors refused to ever discuss their grueling experience making it. But the film's overblown visuals and overheated performances have always captured our imagination.....and we know we're not the only ones....."The Big Country" always seems to tour the cable movie channels year round.
We doubt today's multiplex crowds would have the patience for any film so deliberately paced as this one......no Dolby Surround explosions and shootouts to goose you every 8 minutes. But if you sit back and let "The Big Country" envelop you with its almost mythic clash-of-the-land-barons story and soul stirring music you can't help being sucked in. It makes a great companion piece to producer David O. Selznick's similarly bloated western "Duel In The Sun".......showmen to their core, the legendary hubris and meticulous attention to detail of Selznick and Wyler permeates every frame of their films.
Like many legendary epics, "The Big Country" ended up employing a revolving door of writers to craft its script. But the movie still sounds like it has one clear voice.....and the dialogue is liberally peppered with memorable lines, some deadly serious, some explosively funny. (Burl Ives, playing a grizzled cantankerous leader of a roughshod, dirt-scrabbling clan, delivers a blistering speech that earned him a Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. )
Gregory Peck plays a stoic, Lincoln-esque-to-a-fault New England sea captain who lands way out west in the middle of a raging civil war between two frontier ranching Titans, the upper-crust gentlemanly Major Terrill (Charles Bickford) and the roughshod Mountain Man Rufus Hannassey.(Ives). Terrill lives like an aristocrat, giving fancy balls in his huge mansion while Hannassey and his family live in cabins in the middle of a canyon, like Butch Cassidy's hole-in-the-wall gang. Peck claimed Wyler's intention here was a thinly disguised version of the world's global conflicts......but more than ever today, the film more closely mirrors(to us, anyway) a 'haves versus the have-nots' struggle, the rich and entitled against the angry, resentful, put upon and forgotten. (We'll leave that to you to decide and discuss.....)
Peck strides into this boiling tempest as the fiance of Terrill's spoiled daughter (Carrol Baker). He's wrongly mistaken for a coward by everyone in the Terrill camp, including his rival for Baker's love, the Major's top ranch hand (Charlton Heston, soon to be rewarded by Wyler with the title role in 'Ben Hur') This all takes a lonnnnngg time to play out (remember the film's running time) until Peck finally reveals his unyielding courage and resolve. (Already known to us from an early sequence in which Greg secretly tames the Terrill ranch's wildest horse...)
Aided by the spectacular Moross score, Wyler fills his screen with imposing landscapes and ripe melodrama......the toxic exchanges between Ives' Rufus and his worthless, snivelling son Buck (Chuck Conners) provide the comedy relief.....and in keeping with the Grand Opera vibe, Wyler films the long expected brawl between Peck and Heston from miles away, rendering them tiny figures scrambling around a nightime, arid moonscape. Brilliant stuff.
So Pardner....if you got yourself about a 3 hour chunk 'o time, BQ recommends you sit down a spell with "The Big Country".....cause they sure as shootin' don't make 'em like this anymore. We fast-draw 5 stars (*****) and declare it a FIND OF FINDS.
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