What a substantial film! From SHANE to OPEN RANGE, so many westerns are concerned with good guys and bad guys battling for control of frontier towns, or ranch land, or whatever. Lots of righteous vengeance, the assumption that violence is justified, necessary (if sometimes regrettable) to put the bad guys in their place. That sometimes terrible things need to be done to uphold honour.

BIG COUNTRY is about a sea captain who goes west to be reunited with his fiancee. He's tested, but unwilling to do the things needed to prove his honour and win the respect of those on either side of a feud between two ranching families.

The film doesn't stereotype anybody. Characters are complex, and develop (or are revealed) in unexpected, but not melodramatic, ways. I've only seen Burl Ives in Mr Nice Guy roles (okay, I admit, my exposure to older films is somewhat limited), but he's a potent force here. Two of the most gloriously beautiful actresses you'll ever see. And some fabulous dialogue, as well. (The soundtrack is great when it's doing the sweeping vistas thing, but there are scenes where it's absurdly intrusive. Not just a little, but laughably inappropriate at times.)

I don't know if the central character should exactly be called a "pacificist," as I read in the thumbnail description that drew me to the film, but he certainly aims to be a man of peace. In any case, the film is an extended study of turning the other cheek, and the nature of real honour.

I wonder what Robert Jewett thinks of this one?

I've deleted the duplicate topic.

You got da POWAH!

Thanks.

So hey, can you use your powers for a good end? Can you do something so I can see the posts (my own included) over on the "Members Only" Top 100 thread. Perhaps only administrators can view non-administrator posts? I can read yours and Alan's, but not mine or anyone else's. Can anything be done?

Ron, do you mean THE Big Country, the 1958 film starring Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston? I've never seen it, but any film that co-stars King David and Moses oughtta be on my list, especially if it was directed by the guy who went on to make Ben-Hur.

If memory serves, Heston says in his autobiography that he almost balked at making this film when his agent sent it his way; Heston had already played Moses in The Ten Commandments -- one of the biggest smashes of all time -- and starred in Touch of Evil, the last Hollywood film directed by Orson Welles, and he figured he should limit himself to leading-man stuff, rather than play second banana to Peck. But Heston's agent slapped his wrist (figuratively) and said, basically, "This is a WILLIAM WYLER film. It will HELP YOUR CAREER, even if you aren't the leading man. TAKE IT." So he did.

And lo and behold, one year after The Big Country came out, Wyler directed Heston in Ben-Hur. Lucky for Heston he'd already worked with the guy, eh?

On a side note, I've been reading some proofs for an upcoming book on religion in film, and it makes the very interesting point that you can chart how films reflected the changing political tenor of the times, between the early '50s and early '60s, by looking at how The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) supports Harry Truman's "containment" approach to Communism, whereas The Ten Commandments (1956) supports Dwight Eisenhower's "we'll fight for liberty anywhere in the world" rhetoric even to the point of suggesting that the infliction of massive plagues (some of them nuclear-inspired?) might be warranted, whereas King of Kings (1961) -- which came out after Eisenhower failed to do anything about the situation in Hungary, etc. -- backs off from all that and is all about peace, peace, peace and the brotherhood of man.

I mention this trajectory because you see that pacifist emphasis cropping up already in Ben-Hur (1959) -- so I'm intrigued to hear that it may have also been there in Wyler and Heston's previous collaboration, the year before.

Good catch!

Boy, I've been basking in the afterglow of this movie all day. How great to expect only to be mildly interested, maybe entertained, and end up seeing what ends up to be a real favourite. Can't say enough about this movie - it really got me.

(P.S. Peter, I'm planning to see SANSHO THE BAILIFF and UGETSU tomorrow night at the 'theque - can you imagine, two A&F 100 perennials, neither of which I've seen before! Want I should bring the baby clothes and the Lewton dvds? Drop them by your place? Or meet up with you? If the former, I'll need your address.)

Ron, I haven't seen The Big Country, but Sansho the Bailiff is one of my top ten films of all time. Enjoy.

Thanks! I fully expect to. Don't think it will be tonight: I was up late last night and early this morning, and I want to see these films fresh, so since the same double feature is on Sunday and Monday evening as well, I should be able to hit them fresh as a daisy. Water lily. Floating weed.

Doug, I strongly encourage you in particular to seek out THE BIG COUNTRY. I really think its themes would resonate with you - they sure did with me! I just keep thinking about that film.

I've never been a big fan of Westerns, but I happened to see The Big Country on AMC or one of those classic movie channels on day, and I loved it. I thought Gregory Peck was excellent in his portrayal as a man who struggles to do the right thing in the middle of a feud; not wanting to get into a fight but knows he needs to act as a man of honor. Burl Ives was very good, not a stock villian but a truly human character. Jean Simmons was quite lovely. And the cinematography was top-notch.

Me neither, and me too to everything else you wrote. I also loved the way characters kept proving to have more depth than you think they do. They don't just start one place then end another: we keep re-evaluating, and they keep being revealed and changed. And there are so many substantial characters! In a pretty much perfect balance: it never felt over-plotted, or crowded.

I also loved the riffing on the title - the main character getting tired of being told "It's a big country." And how about that moment when the old timer says, "Well, I guess you ain't never seen anything as big as this country." And he replies, "Yes. A couple of oceans." Nifty.

I went ahead and ordered the DVD on eBay for a good price, and can't wait to watch it again with friends. Heck, I think my wife might even like it. And she doesn't like westerns...

I really want to see this movie. I've heard of it, certainly, but never really paid much attention. Thanks for the tip.

Oh, and by the way--hopefully you'll start liking westerns soon.

I've watched fourteen William Wyler films over the last two or three months. Next up are Friendly Persuasion and The Big Country. I should get to them next weekend.

It doesn't surprise me at all to read your description, Ron. Wyler wasn't at all a pacifist himself, but his films -- maybe more than those by any of the other Hollywood studio greats -- are often concerned with the ambiguities, the gray areas. I just finished watching The Desperate Hours (1955), which is about three escaped cons who terrorize a middle class family. What interested Wyler in the material was drawing a parallel between the lead con (Humphrey Bogart) and the father of the family (Frederic March), two men who become increasingly driven by desperation and anger. Friendly Persuasion, which Wyler made between The Desperate Hours and The Big Country is about a Quaker who must decide whether to fight back in order to protect his family during the Civil War.

A decade earlier, Wyler made Mrs. Miniver (1942) to build, deliberately, pro-war sentiment in the States and around the world, and he was incredibly successful at it. But after joining the Army Air Force and making two documentaries, Memphis Belle and Thunderbolt -- after experiencing the brutal realities of war first-hand -- he admitted that he'd "gotten it all wrong" in Miniver. As a Jewish immigrant, he felt absolutely no ambivalence about the necessity of World War II, but as a filmmaker who always concentrated first and foremost on the human element of every story (he's often described as the "actor's director"), he was forced to acknowledge the complicated psychological and sociological consequences of becoming a participant in violence. It can be felt in most of his post-war films (or at least in the ones I've seen so far). And it can especially be felt in what I consider the best film to ever come out of a classic Hollywood studio, The Best Years of Our lives.

By the way, Ron, here's some trivia you'll appreciate. After working his way up from the studio mailroom, Hal Ashby's first real job was as an assistant under Wyler's long-time editor, Robert Swink. He got credits on both Friendly Persuasion and The Big Country.

Oh my gosh! FRIENDLY PERSUASION's on my list, for similar reasons to THE BIG COUNTRY, but I hadn't made the Wyler connection. That's it, I'm going straight out to rent it! Darren, I owe you.


Fantastic background stories, Darren. Looks like I'll be grabbing BEST YEARS at the same time. Whit Stillman will just have to wait...


Great stuff! Okay, now I'm seeing Harold and his uncle on the seacliffs, and Maude with her protest sign... It's all beginning to come together!

Bazin has a great essay in which he talks about the precision of the actors' eyelines in Wyler's films. He even suggests that the dramatic structure of whole scenes would collapse without that precision. Yesterday, while watching Roman Holiday for the first time, Bazin's comment finally made sense. At the very end, when Audrey Hepburn (in close-up) is scanning the crowd of reporters, I knew intuitively exactly where she would have to look in order to spot Gregory Peck. When her eyes hit that spot, I got chills. Wyler's mapping of the scene was perfect.

I mention all of that because Ashby often spoke of how working under Swink taught him everything he needed to know about filmmaking. The editing room , he said, "is the perfect place to examine everything. Everything is channelled down into that strip of film, from the writing to how it's staged, to the director and the actors. And you have the chance to run it back and forth a lot of times, and ask questions of it – Why do I like this? Why don't I like this?”

When I first read that comment, I wasn't familiar with Wyler's films, but now I can see how much Ashby learned from him.

Ron, will this be your first time seeing The Best Years of Our Lives?

It's a fantastic movie, too; hope you like it!

Would that be in "William Wyler, or the Jansenist of Directing"? If so, eureka! I've got "Bazin At Work," and it's in there. Thanks for being my Wyler guide!

Indeed it will.



Another Wylophile! Place is crawling with 'em. Cool.

I love this board. Where else could I stumble on a gold nugget like BIG COUNTRY, then have a passel o' folk come along and point me in the direction of a whole vein of the stuff?

Wow can't believe so many people here haven't seen this, and I'm glad it's finally got some love.Not to mention "Diana" in The Robe, (or Variana in Spartacus, and the two evangelists girls in Elmer Gantry and Guys and Dolls.

FWIW it was those combinations that made me so keen to see it originally.

Well mine likes it more than me! We actually joke about the "Biiiiiiig Country" thing. I don't know how tiresome it was for Peck, but it certainly is for the audience.

Ooh, could you give us more of a quote. We love Roman Holiday too. As a side note there's an interesting visual similarity betweene Jean Simmons, and Audrey Hepburn which makes comparing the two films quite interesting.

There is so much to love about this film. My favourite scene is the fist fight scene, which seems like the most realistic fight I've ever seen in a film. The two characters just get exhausted by the physical effort of it, and then get dwarfed by the scenery as the camera pulls out. Brilliant.

As for Burl Ives, does that mean you've never seen Cat on a Hot Tin Roof either?

Matt

Link to the thread on The Best Years of Our Lives. I've had that film out of the library a couple of times since that thread began, but still haven't gotten around to watching it. Some combination of the film's three-hour length and my new duties as a dad, or something, is to blame, I'm sure.

Oh, and coincidentally, my wife and I happened to watch Roman Holiday a few months ago (the first time, for me) ... and then a scene from that film was referenced in You, Me and Dupree this summer ... and now it's being discussed at A&F (albeit on some other film's thread; we don't seem to have created a thread dedicated to that particular film itself). Ah, synchronicity.

Ron, hold off on reading the essay until after you watch The Best Years of Our Lives.

Thanks Darren.

Matt

Anywhere else Darren is posting?

I checked the film out this weekend, and did enjoy its theme, although I felt the execution was pretty standard except for the astonishing fight scene Matt references portrayed in extreme long shots, which reduces the brawl to a frighteningly cosmic insignificance. Cueing Darren's "sociological consequences of becoming a participant in violence" comment, the film doesn't defend pacificism per se so much as admirably critique how violence is used and defended in the public arena for personal gain. Peck isn't opposed to violence, he's opposed to using it as a public platform, whereas the Major (Charles Bickford)--a dead ringer for Donald Rumsfeld, by the way--constantly uses pretenses to wage his own private war, killing a lot of common folk in the process. The party scene is a standout with the aforementioned "big country" dialogue and Burl Ives' accusation: "The next time you come a busting and blazing into my place scaring the kids and the women folks, when you invade my home, like you was the law or God Almighty... then I say to you, I've seen every kind of critter God ever made, and I ain't never seen a more meaner, lower, pitiful, yellow, stinking hyprocrite than you!" Wyler gets a lot of mileage out of highlighting the disparity between the characters' saber-rattling theatrics and their hidden self-interests.

SPOILERS

While I also appreciated the dualism of many of the characters (which shifts the usual stereotypes of patriarch-love interest-strong man), I still bristled at the heavy-handed dramaturgy in the final act, with Heston riding to the rescue (the celebratory tone seems at odds with the film at that point, although the scene is made emotionally potent by Wyler's famed deep focus staging and the music). Ditto the shootout, which goes way, way out of its way to belittle Buck Hannessey's character and justify his killing, even if Peck isn't the one who technically pulls the trigger. (As a matter of fact, "the hero will save the villian, who will attempt a last minute double cross that will necessitate his death" is one of my most reviled of movie cliches.)

/SPOILERS

In short, I appreciated Wyler's staging and compositions, and his theme, but I don't think the film ultimately compares in psychological or aesthetic intensity to contemporaneous westerns by, say, Ford (The Searchers, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance), Hawks (Red River or Rio Bravo), Mann (his string of Jimmy Stewart films), Ray (Johnny Guitar), or Fuller (Forty Guns). I'll see you The Big Country, Ron, and raise you one of these.

Okay, I hear you. Didn't strike me the same way, as I was busy being thrilled with the fact that the expected cliche that I was dreading didn't happen. I fully expected that, when push came to shove, Peck's character would finally have to resort to violence himself: they mistreated his woman, the guy actually shot him in the face (well, you know what I mean), now he was justified to shoot. ("That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more!") Yet he doesn't, beholding the pathetic man before him, knowing how empty and bankrupt an act it would be to shoot him at this point. The man has lost his honour, no point also depriving him of his life. I felt the full weight of the futility of violence, that it really would prove nothing, settle nothing, not even feel good, to exercise what seemed to be his "right" at that point and gun the guy down. The subsequent event, with the Ives character doing the dirty work, which galled you so, seemed almost entirely beside the point to me, so focused was I on Peck's character. It's what he did in the story, the choices he made, that were absolutely the centre of gravity for me in the picture: the fact that the otherwise violent folks gunned one another down in the folly of their continuing violence seemed only sad and pathetic, particularly in contrast with the choices and actions of the central character.

But I won't argue that the subsequent shooting is its own sort of cliche. Only, it didn't seem so important to me as the cliche-defying actions of the character i cared much more about.


Okay, I hear you. Didn't strike me the same way, as I was busy being thrilled with the fact that the expected cliche that I was dreading didn't happen. I fully expected that, when push came to shove, Peck's character would finally have to resort to violence himself: they mistreated his woman, the guy actually shot him in the face (well, you know what I mean), now he was justified to shoot. ("That's all I can stands, I can't stands no more!") Yet he doesn't, beholding the pathetic man before him, knowing how empty and bankrupt an act it would be to shoot him at this point. The man has lost his honour, no point also depriving him of his life. I felt the full weight of the futility of violence, that it really would prove nothing, settle nothing, not even feel good, to exercise what seemed to be his "right" at that point and gun the guy down. The subsequent event, with the Ives character doing the dirty work, which galled you so, seemed almost entirely beside the point to me, so focused was I on Peck's character. It's what he did in the story, the choices he made, that were absolutely the centre of gravity for me in the picture: the fact that the otherwise violent folks gunned one another down in the folly of their continuing violence seemed only sad and pathetic, particularly in contrast with the choices and actions of the central character.

But I won't argue that the subsequent shooting is its own sort of cliche. Only, it didn't seem so important to me as the cliche-defying actions of the character i cared much more about.

Ron

P.S. I'm mildly disappointed that Doug didn't like the film as much as I thought he might. But it is some balm to have Matt ride to my rescue. Which itself a sort of meta-movie cliche, by now - it should come as no surprise to me anymore when Page's tastes and mine line up, as they seem to time and again. I swear, apart from the whole rugby thing, we're twins, doppelgangers, cinematic soul mates! Open Range, Big Country, Dirty Pretty Things, etc, etc...

I wholeheartedly agree on Heston riding out. It neither allows his redemption (via defiance of the Major, moments earlier) to have any significance, (undermining the work of all Heston's scenes from the fight scene on), nor does it place him convincingly back in the saddle as the Major's sidekick/true adopted son. The ambiguity might have been delicious if there had been some sense of Heston being unable to truly leave behind his own loyalty now he knew the truth, or even, as you say, without the music. But as it is it's just puzzling and weak. (But as Ron says quickly forgotten given the work being done at the other end of the canyon).

Not sure what I feel about the killing scene. Buck becoming as low as possible is perhaps a bit cliche (but then some of these people at least totally screwed the native Americans), but it does underline one of the movie's key themes that first appearances can be deceptive, and that it's principles that are of crucial importance, and it does give Ives an astonishing moment after he shoots his son. I would be nice if the cliche could be avoided, but I'd prefer to have it left in for the pay offs I've mentionned than have it left out and miss those.

Matt

I finally got around to watching The Big Country last night. Thanks to a NetFlix snafu, I watched it out of sequence and it'll end up being the penultimate film in my personal Wyler-a-thon, followed only by Funny Girl. As an aside, I can't recommend highly enough these "director's studies" I've been doing. How amazing is it that technology now allows us to program thorough retrospectives in our own homes? (I can't wait for true video-on-demand.) Plus, without the discipline required by these marathons, there's no way I ever get around to watching a Barbra Streisand film.

I'm also not a big fan of westerns (or of Peck or Heston, for that matter) but I enjoyed The Big Country quite a lot. Since my last post, I've watch ten or so of Wyler's later films and caught up with a bit more of the criticism. After Ben Hur, many of the French critics turned against him, including Bazin, who I think was too quick to credit Gregg Toland for the greatness of the films he shot for Wyler. There are a few images in The Big Country that are flat-out brilliant. I especially love the long, high-angle shot of Heston walking away after Peck has refused to fight him. It's as stylized, formally inventive, and beautiful as anything in an Antonioni or Resnais film. (I have a screen capture at home and will try to remember to post it.)

Doug, I share your disappointment with the handling of Heston's character in the final act. I don't have the Wyler bio with me, but I remember that Willy had to do a lot of persuading to convince Heston to take such a small part, and I suspect there was no way the film could get made without a big shoot-out. Peck and Wyler, who were good friends at the time and who co-produced The Big Country, had a falling-out over the film and remained estranged for several years afterwards. I believe it eventually turned a small profit but wasn't the big money-earner both men had anticipated.

Normally, I also can't stand the "hero will save the villian, who will attempt a last minute double cross that will necessitate his death" cliche, but I'm willing to forgive it here because of what happens next. First, Buck doesn't just fall over dead; he crawls and moans in agony. Chuck Connors is great in the role, I think, and I especially appreciated the look of terror on his face. He doesn't look ashamed of his actions or for disappointing his father (which is the expected fallout from the cliche). Instead, he's only aware of death approaching. It's a strange and powerful moment, especially for a Hollywood film from 1958. I also like what Burl Ives does in that moment, holding the son he loved and killed.

A restored version is playing in L.A. on Friday.