Review of The Big Country

William Wyler directed this big budget spectacle. Critics always loved Wyler. His movies dominated the Academy Awards for decades (Burl Ives won Best Supporting Actor in this one). This was Wyler's second and last Western of the talkie era. He directed Gary Cooper in "The Westerner" 18 years earlier. I found both movies very disappointing.

Here's what I liked:

• Wyler excelled at creating compelling heavies. Walter Brennan's Judge Roy Bean in "The Westerner" may the best Western bad guy ever. Here Chuck Conners gets the best role of his career. His sniveling "inadequate son" henchman makes my "Top Ten Western Henchman" list. Very similar to Jack Lord's excellent character in "The Man From The West", released the same year. Of course, both Conners and Lord went on to '60's TV stardom.

• Gregory Peck is well cast as the bottled up pacifist.

• The characters are well developed and there are no glaring plot holes.

• It's impressive thematically as a pacifist metaphor during the height of the Cold War. "The Westerner" was similar, but was a metaphor for U.S. isolationism leading into WW2.

• It's a good looking movie if you like a lot of shots of wide open prairie.

• Charlton Heston underplays his role perfectly as the "cattle baron's adopted son turned loyal foreman" (See Arthur Kennedy in "The Man From Laramie" and Burt Lancaster in "Vengeance Valley" for similar characters).

Now here's what I didn't like:

• Nice acting job by Peck, but he's not my idea of a Western hero. In that sense, this is an "anti-Western" like "High Noon". Like I always say, if I was anti-Western, I would watch musicals and romantic comedies, not this movie.

• I'm not a big fan of "range war" Westerns. They tend to get stuck in one place. The landscapes in this movie are impressive, but limited.

• The story is too melodramatic. I felt like I was watching "Peyton Place Goes West". Usually the romantic subplots in Westerns are gratuitous. Here we have the opposite problem. Romance is overdeveloped to the point where this is barely a Western.

• I liked Carol Baker in this, but I don't get the attraction of Jean Simmons. Never went for Audrey Hepburn either.

• I didn't buy Burl Ives's character. I thought he overacted and was very "stagy".

• I thought the musical soundtrack was indulgent and intrusive.

• There is not an iota of comic relief.

• Not a single Indian or Mexican reference, except for a highly stereotyped Mexican servant. Like George Stevens ("Shane") and Fred Zinneman ("High Noon"), Wyler wasn't really a Westerns director. All three men had little understanding of the milieu of the era and saw little reason to include these colorful cultural elements.

• The conflict resolution at the end feels a little contrived. Also, it was unclear to me just how "peace" was going to come so naturally with so many potential claims on the land, considering the two main owners die simultaneously.

• As Peck and Simmons stared contentedly into the sunset in the film's final scene, I cringed, fearing they would once again remind us that the country was, indeed, "big".