The Big Country

When I was a boy, everyone listened to WCCO, "your good neighbor in the Northwest."  A St. Paul bank sponsored commercials claiming that it was a "good tree to come to" -- this poetic assertion was supported by a heroic musical theme:  a vortex of arpeggios supporting a surging, forward-driving melody.  At the time, I had no idea as to the source of this music, but it was operatic and stirring and made a deep impression on me and, even today, whenever I hear this melody, I think of great tree, as Yeats said "great-rooted blossomer", a cottonwood, perhaps, lit as if from within, golden and immense, a world of a tree standing in noble isolation.  The music that inspires these thoughts is Jeremy Moross' theme from the 1958 film, The Big Country. 

The Big Country is an epic Western, almost three-hours long directed by William Wyler with an A-list cast -- Gregory Peck plays the hero, Mr. McKay, a former sea-captain from the East Coast who has come West to marry his girl and make his fortune; the girl is played by Carroll Baker and her rival, a schoolmarm, is acted by Jean Simmons.  Charlton Heston appears in a supporting role and Burl Ives won an Oscar for his portrayal of a savage patriarch -- the man has four vicious sons, foremost a loutish brute played by Chuck Connors.  (Connors character attempts to rape Jean Simmons, who he mistakenly perceives to be his girlfriend, not once but twice on-screen.)  The film's premise is that two ranching families are competing for water, a bend of river at a ranch called the Big Muddy.  This ranch has devolved into the hands of the schoolmarm, Julie Maragon, the last member of the family surviving.  She is unable to manage the ranch on her own and the property, which offers the sole water for livestock owned by the neighboring ranches, becomes the subject contention between those ranchmen.  Major Terrell, a genteel fellow, operates a huge ranch with a large ante-bellum style mansion, lavishly furnished, at its center.  From the elegant whitewashed porches of his mansion, Terrell can look out upon vast empty rangelands where he grazes 10,000 cattle.  Terrell's counterpart is Burl Ives.  Ives is imagined as a cruel and relentless old man, an Old Testament patriarch, somewhat like a slightly less version of Old Man Clanton, the cruel father in John Ford's My Darlling Clementine (in that film Clanton was played by Walter Brennan in his sinister mode).  Ives' ranch is symbolically the opposite of Terrell's spread in every respect -- Terrell has a single blonde daughter; Hannasay (Ive's character) has four good-for-nothing and rambunctious sons.  Terrell's mansion is beautiful and refined; Hannasay lives in a squalid compound of huts and log cabins in an arid desert canyon, a place called Blanca Canyon that can be accessed only by a winding path through chalk-colored badlands crouching beneath a high ridge of mountains.  By contrast, Terrell's place, with its neat outbuildings, stands on a knoll surrounded by hundred-mile views of completely treeless chaparral.  Intermediary to these two warring compounds is a tiny town, incongruously strewn across the prairie a bit like the village in George Stevens' Shane and the beautiful, lush bend of water in the rolling prairie, shadowed by cottonwoods at "The Big Muddy." 

The first hour of the film is majestic and stirring.  Wyler sets up the archetypal landscapes where the action will take place -- lets us leisurely tour Terrell's place and shows us the Hannasay Ranch under a savage attack by Terrell's cowboys led by Charlton Heston.  The soundtrack roars and whispers, variations on Moross' indelible theme and the landscapes are vibrant as lensed in extreme wide-ratio aspect, that is Cinemascope -- the wide-screen compositions are often very beautiful and precisely designed and Wyler uses long takes to establish his characters.  The film is an "adult" Western -- everyone is morally compromised and, indeed, Gregory Peck's sea captain, the almost insufferably virtuous McKay, has stumbled into a  hothouse of Freudian passions.  His inamorata is in love with her father, a man whose example McKay can't seem to match.  Charlton Heston, playing Terrell's adopted son, is pathetically eager to win the old man's love -- he's willing to die for Terrell, his father-figure, although, in turn, Terrell is insensitive to the young man and regards him as little more than a hired hand.  The sexual perversity of the Hannasay's is obvious -- they seem to be a variation on Freud's hypothesized "primal horde", a group of feral soldier males raised without female influence and kept in line by the brutality of the castrating father played by the huge and menacing Burl Ives.  Peck's character is neurotically introverted -- he refuses tests and hazing aimed at him and refused to fight because he is too proud to display his heroism and courage for others.  His motto seems to be that if has to earn your respect or love, he doesn't want it.  As a result, McKay performs his heroics in the dark -- he breaks a dangerous bucking bronco called "Ole Thunder" with no witnesses to observe his courageous acts and, then, engages in an epic fistfight with Charlton Heston, his rival for the hand of the Terrell princess, in the dark with no one to witness the battle.  As a result, the rough and tumble cowhands and Terrell, himself, who almost as monstrous as Hannasay, regard McKay as a coward unsuited for the rigors of life on the frontier.  (The effect is a little like Clark Kent, continuously disrespected by Lois Lane in favor of  his alter-ego Superman -- in The Big Country, people are continuously casting aspersions on McKay's manliness, athough he turns out to be the toughest hombre on the ranch.)  This type of plot requires a moment when the worm turns and the courage of the hero is satisfyingly displayed for all to see and admire.  But, perversely, Wyler doesn't really give the audience what it desires -- we don't really ever see McKay vindicated in the eyes of Terrell and his fiancée.  A good example of the film's perverse approach to this material is McKay's heroics in breaking the bucking bronco.  After McKay has achieved this feat, we expect some kind of pay-off -- McKay riding up to his fiancée or her father on the horse.  But nothing of the kind occurs -- instead, Wyler simply stages the revelation as a rather embarrassing scene involving the contrived (and seemingly racist) colloquy between the two women and the Mexican ranchhand whom McKay has sworn to secrecy.  Although the end of the film involves some big gun battles and spectacular scenes of fighting in Blanco Canyon, somehow, it seems, that the inspiration has gone out of the film -- the movie feels a little bit inert and distant.  I can't quite put my finger on what goes wrong with this picture in its last hour but something isn't right -- the movie doesn't deliver what it should.  My best surmise is that Gregory Peck is simply too involuted, too virtuous, too respectable for the film -- he seems too stiff and, ultimately, we can't relate to him.  Peck plays a peace-maker par excellence but so many people get killed in the last half-hour, despite his best efforts that the viewer is put in mind of the famous slogan -- "they made a desert and called it peace"; there's really no one left alive to enjoy the peace that Peck's character imposes.  This film disturbs me because I can't quite put my finger on what is wrong with its last hour -- but somehow all the brilliantly designed preparations for the climax yield an ending that isn't exactly convincing.  This is made manifest in a scene in which Terrell and Hannasay engage in rifle duel and end up shooting each other to death.  To exploit the Cinemascope ratio, Wyler stages this scene in extreme long shot, interposing some inserts of the men facing off and pacing to their death.  We see Terrell shot but not Hannasay and, on my screen, I couldn't see Hannasay's body -- this led me to question whether he had, in fact, been killed and how, exactly, this happened.  It's odd to me that this pivotal scene, otherwise immensely impressive (we see the desert walls of the canyon sprinkled with snipers and sharpshooters emerging from their coverts to watch the final gun battle), isn't managed properly.  The best things in the movie are in its first hour -- this includes a tremendous display of horsemanship when the Hannasay boys harass the dude sea-captain after his arrival in town; the movie delivers copiously all the pleasures of the Western in its first half.  The rest of the film, for some reason, leaves me oddly dispirited although it dutifully crosses most "tees" and dots most "i's" -- perhaps, the problem is very simple:  the movie is just too long.