William Wyler (1958)

The opening titles of The Big Country appear against alternating monochrome and colour shots of a moving stagecoach.   The black-and-white images show the coach relatively close up, focusing on the wheels, the horses and their hooves, the motion.   The colour shots place the vehicle in a vast landscape.   Both sets of images combine to establish emphatically what type of film this will be but William Wyler is also using his introduction to juxtapose the texture of early Westerns and the wide-screen possibilities that CinemaScope – or, in the case of this movie, Technirama – had made available to Hollywood film-makers in the 1950s.  The stagecoach’s passengers include a wealthy Easterner called James McKay (Gregory Peck).  His immediate purpose in travelling west is to be reunited with his fiancée Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker), whom he got to know when she was visiting Baltimore.  In the longer term, he’ll settle and they’ll live in her part of the world, or so Pat hopes.  McKay comes from a family of ship owners; having served as a sea captain, he’s familiar with wide open spaces but everyone out West keeps telling him ‘this is a big country’ – so predictably that Jim is soon making a joke of it.  Following the locals’ lead, Wyler and his cinematographer Franz F Planer keep showing off the immense terrain (the film was shot in various California locations, including the Mojave Desert) – they do this to good and varied dramatic effect.

The moment Jim McKay alights from the stagecoach, his smart suit and especially his city slicker’s bowler hat set an audience of kids sniggering.  Later the same day, as he and Pat drive their gig into town, four young local men – the Hannassey brothers – decide to ‘give him a welcome’:  this progresses from snatching and fooling with his bowler hat to yanking McKay out of the gig and lassoing him.  Pat is astonished when McKay dusts himself down, declares no harm done, and to her disappointment, shows no sign of wanting to avenge his humiliation.  This fast-moving, startling scene sows the seeds for much of what’s to follow in The Big Country.  It’s an early indication that Jim and Pat may not be made for each other; and that Buck Hannassey (Chuck Connors) and his younger brothers, foolish and aggressive as they evidently are, aren’t the ‘trash, pure and simple’ of Pat’s description.  At the heart of the story, adapted from a novel by Donald Hamilton, is a long-standing feud between the patriarchs of the Terrill and Hannassey families.  Pat’s father Henry (Charles Bickford), known as ‘the Major’, and Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives) are both cattle ranchers but they and their offspring live in starkly different circumstances – in luxury and squalor respectively.  The feud centres on rights to water on a third ranch, the ‘Big Muddy’, owned by the unmarried schoolteacher Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons).  Julie allows both families to water their cattle and, in an attempt to keep a fragile peace, refuses to sell Big Muddy to Henry Terrill, who wants not just the ranch but to drive his enemies out of business.  This may be a big country but the Major is determined it ain’t big enough for the both of him and Rufus Hannassey.

The spaciousness of the landscape is complemented by William Wyler’s clear, confident storytelling.  The narrative tempo tends to the leisurely but this is often time well spent:  in the uneasy pauses in McKay’s breakfast conversation with his prospective father-in-law, as the younger man thinks out and mentally checks that his words are sufficiently diplomatic before he voices them; in his attempts to master ‘Old Thunder’, a notorious unbroken horse on the Terrill ranch.  When the Major’s jealous foreman Steve Leech (Charlton Heston) offers Old Thunder as his mount, McKay quickly recognises this as another attempt to make him look a fool and declines the invitation.  His apparent cowardice troubles Pat but, when the Major, Leech and others have left to give the Hannassey boys a taste of their own medicine in revenge for what they did to him the previous day, McKay sets about breaking the horse, with the assistance of the Mexican ranch hand Ramón (Alfonso Bedoya).  By cross-cutting between what the Major’s posse does to the Hannasseys and McKay’s dogged efforts with Old Thunder, Wyler not only contrasts the characters’ different imperatives.  He also conveys how long it takes McKay to prevail – and so avoids making his success with the animal a mechanical foregone conclusion.

Jim McKay buys Big Muddy from Julie Maragon.  The purchase is intended as a wedding present but Pat’s reaction to his determination to maintain the Hannasseys’ water rights to the land is the straw that breaks the couple’s engagement.  The moral schema of The Big Country is set out and the picture’s pious point of view, embodied in Gregory Peck’s thoughtful, firm-jawed rectitude, is clarified long before the end of its 165 minutes.  It’s fortunate that, in the extended climax, attention can switch from the protagonist to Rufus Hannassey and Steve Leech, both of whose loyalties are increasingly conflicted.  Wyler gives Burl Ives a splendid entrance, as Rufus gatecrashes a grand party at the Terrill residence to convey some bitter home truths to the Major and his guests.  At times, Ives is at risk of being upstaged by his false eyebrows but he’s powerful and poignant in his later scenes.  (His Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Big Country wasn’t undeserved although it may have helped that Ives’s memorable Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof came in the same year; in fact, the two films were released just a fortnight apart.)  Charlton Heston went straight on from this to make Ben-Hur with Wyler.  As Sam Leech, he’s too deliberate, in both his facial reactions and his line readings, for as long as Leech, who also carries a torch for Pat, considers McKay his rival and arch enemy.  Heston is unexpectedly moving, however, in the closing stages, when Steve Leech has come to see the error of Major Terrill’s ways.

As was often the case, Gregory Peck’s stiff uprightness helps make him effective in his character’s more comical moments; as nearly always, Peck is excellent in his scenes with women.  The Big Country has two decent female roles – or, at least, two good female performances.   When Jim McKay and Julie Maragon first meet, he says she doesn’t look much like a schoolteacher (in response to her remark that he doesn’t look much like a sailor).  This is right enough:  Julie never actually does any teaching in the movie and you know she’s in it principally to become the eventual love of the hero’s life – but Jean Simmons plays her very well.   Her conveying of Julie’s inner thoughts as she weighs up McKay’s offer to buy her ranch may be the best bit of acting in the whole film.  The force of Julie’s contempt, verging on disgust, for the Hannasseys counters her feeling of moral obligation towards them; it’s a welcome, intelligent reminder that doing the right thing by someone isn’t always reinforced by the feelings one shows towards them.  The physical wholeheartedness of Pat’s early embraces of Jim is striking in a film, perhaps especially a Western, of the 1950s.  Carroll Baker gives this girl a convincing appetite and entitlement.  We get a strong sense that Pat’s apparent charms and alienating, selfish narrow-mindedness are two sides of the same coin.

The turning point in the hostility between Jim McKay and Steve Leech comes in a nocturnal, bare-knuckle fist fight between them, which ends in an exhausted draw.  The outcome may be too simply morally instructive; a culminating clash of moralities, expressed in physical combat, is familiar in Western and other film genres; but William Wyler’s shooting of the contest is satisfyingly complex.  Echoing the scheme of the opening titles, he switches repeatedly between long shot and relative close-up.  Again, this seems to contrast ancient and modern approaches to a scene of this kind.  I’m no expert but I’d guess that most directors of Wyler’s and previous generations would have focused on the combatants; later film-makers would have stressed the smallness of the two figures in the landscape, the absurd insignificance of the human squabble.  Wyler does make the latter point but without detracting from interest in McKay and Leech as individuals.  In the mid-1920s, William Wyler was exclusively a maker of Western shorts (two-reelers lasting twenty-odd minutes and, less often, hour-long six-reelers [1] ).  Over the course of his whole directing career, he built a body of work that’s second to none in satisfying genre expectations and delivering human dramas at the same time:  Jezebel, The Best Years of Our Lives, Detective Story, Roman Holiday, The Collector and Funny Girl are among the examples.  The fist fight in The Big Country epitomises the extent of Wyler’s success in doing the trick with a Western too.  Jerome Moross’s famous, full-bodied score supports the enterprise admirably.

22 January 2017

[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wyler#Filmography for details.