Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 7-December-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium

The Big Country (1958)

It is interesting that The Big Country arrived in my mailbox so soon after I had watched Australia. Both movies take almost three hours to deal with cattle, courage, and unexpected love in a dramatic landscape. But whereas "Australia" is laborious from start to end, The Big Country shows just how the job should be done. It unfolds layer after layer of meaty emotional quandaries that make for a bona fide epic.

Gregory Peck headlines The Big Country doing what he does best: giving human weight to a character who stands for an ideal nobility. The story begins as he relocates to the Wild West, having made a small fortune in shipping, to marry a local girl. The bride-to-be (Carroll Baker) is a spitfire and true daughter of the land that raised her. She worships her imperious cattleman father (Charles Bickford) and supports his virulent contest with a neighbor (Burl Ives) over watering rights on the Big Muddy river. Peck learns within minutes of his arrival that while his fiancée's family strives to appear refined, their enemies make no attempt to hide their roughneck ways. They are like the Doones in R.D. Blackmore's classic, a clan of villainous bastards whose compound is protected by a canyon which few dare enter.

Peck's education about the majestic swath of Earth to which he has come proceeds rapidly. The swagger evident in his future father-in-law is also evident in the ranch foreman (Charlton Heston), who is intimidated by Peck's presence and jealous of his engagement to a woman he has long desired for himself. Heston seems to represent all the men on the ranch (save one unassuming Mexican) when he tries to goad the newcomer into proving his masculinity. When Peck refuses, lacking not courage but a respect for macho hazing, he offends both his intended and her father. The situation becomes complicated on a personal level (and paves the way for a delicious, sweaty clash between Peck and Heston, two very different legends of cinema representing a telling polarity).

It snowballs from there. Thinking to do well by everyone, Peck rides off to see the owner of the land on which the Big Muddy watering holes actually reside. This is the local schoolteacher, and a friend of his fiancée, who inherited the land but lacks the wherewithal to manage it (Jean Simmons). She is the only person around who shares his level head and agrees to sell him the land if he will keep it open to all herds of stock. This was his goal in seeking the purchase, to put an end to the feud absorbing his soon-to-be family, in addition to making a handsome wedding present for his wife and giving him focus for a new phase of life.

Like more traditional westerns that pit lawmen against rowdies to illustrate the taming of the West, The Big Country pits Peck's philosophical self-possession against the trigger-happy arrogance of the culture into which he has ventured. But his ways cannot take hold without first yielding to the bloodlust all around him, without a purge of the old to make way for the new. His purchase of the Big Muddy does not assuage the feud but brings it to a head, and has major consequences for his love life as well. The final scenes get a bit overwrought, but this suits the tempers of the leaders of the rival clans. (Ives won an Oscar for his turn as the gentleman barbarian.) The Big Country has the novel-like flavor of the stuff of life, polished to a sheen by the romance and grandeur of the Old West.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.