I waded my way through this overrated Western shown in widescreen on BB2, a British major television channel. Mercifully the BBC shows films without advertisements. I am in a minority, but I see nothing exceptional in this film. It is a VERY American film, sprawling as a lot of mediocre American novels do and straining to be GREAT. For me this is as stolid and worthy of such BIG novels turned into film like ' From Here To Eternity ', ' Gone With The Wind ' and despite the just rightness of its subject matter ' Exodus ', and the list could go on of badly written novels turned into BIG cinema. I think the cast is a mess and on or off screen I cannot buy any relationship of any kind between Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck. Carroll Baker so good in ' Something Wild ' and ' Baby Doll ' fades into the noise of it all and the scenery. I give it a 5 for that great actress Jean Simmons, bigger to me than this tiresome film and William Wyler's bland direction. Do not get me wrong. I like Westerns, but I am not a fan of this one. It is pretentious and far too conservative in its direction to see it more than once. And the music is terrible, and the opening sounded like an anthem to the GREAT and BIG country America. It flaunts itself with its clean surface and muddled content, brainwashing us to believe it is one of the BIG and GREAT Westerns. A small film in a BIG country.
Review of The Big Country
