OVP: The Big Country (1958)

Film: The Big Country (1958)

Stars: Gregory Peck, Jean Simmons, Carroll Baker, Charlton Heston, Bul Ives, Charles Bickford

Director: William Wyler

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Supporting Actor-Burl Ives*, Score)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on Gregory Peck: click here to learn more about Mr. Peck (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last week we talked a lot about Gregory Peck's long career in westerns, and how they were a large part of his persona throughout the 1950's.  This week, we're going to end our season with another western (it is our theme for a reason-he made a lot of them), but we're going to talk in terms of Peck's career around how, after a long decade of being leading man in a variety of films, he finally gained his stature as one of the "important" actors of his generation by securing an Academy Award for Best Actor, which to this point had alluded him.  Between 1960-64, Peck appeared in a lot of very big & well-received movies, including The Guns of Navarone, Cape Fear, and How the West Was Won, but it was not in a western but as a small-town lawyer that Peck found his signature role.  Playing Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Peck got his Tom Joad, his George Bailey, his Sergeant York role that would define his career, and is usually the performance that he is name-checked with.  Decades later, Atticus would be named by the American Film Institute as the "Greatest Hero in American Film History" and would win him an Oscar in 1962 against the very stiff competition of Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia.  As I've seen The Big Country many times before, we are going to focus on the Oscar win of a different actor, Burl Ives, today with our film as we finish up our month devoted to Peck.

(Spoilers Ahead) A giant, nearly three-hour western from director William Wyler, The Big Country is an adaptation of a series of Saturday Evening Post stories by novelist Donald Hamilton.  This is a big movie, so I'll try to summarize enough to keep us grounded.  To start we have James McKay (Peck), a docile sea captain who is in the West to meet his spirited fiancee Patricia (Baker), whose father the Major (Bickford) owns much of the land in the area.  His rival, and by proxy Patricia's rival, is Rufus Hannassey (Ives), with whom he has a long-standing feud that we initially read as being Rufus's fault (after all, his daughter is engaged to our leading man), but as we continue we begin to understand that this is a complicated, shades-of-grey western where Rufus is just trying to get access to a water reservoir that is owned by Julie Maragon (Simmons), a kindly schoolteacher who is best friends with Patricia.  After a standoff between the Major & Rufus at Patricia & McKay's engagement reception, things escalate, with all sides starting to show their true colors.  Patricia, not liking McKay's more gentlemanly attitude, particularly after ranch-hand Steve Leech (Heston, in a rare for this era supporting role) insults him, calls off the engagement, and the film ends with the Major & Rufus killing each other in a standoff, with McKay & Julie ending up together and riding off to their own ranch & life in the west.

I really liked The Big Country, much more than I expected for a western that rarely makes it onto the pantheon of great movie western lists.  I thought the cinematography was astounding.  The fistfight scene between Peck & Heston, shot much in the dark, is glorious, and there's a clear love of the countryside that encapsulates the best of western photography.  The movie needed a bit more focus (there's maybe one too many plotlines keeping it away from being an all-timer), but I think the strangest thing for me was how good Ives was.  Ives' win here is generally considered by most Oscar historians to be something of a proxy win for his more notable work in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof that year, which he'd been campaigned as lead for by MGM, but he's superb here as a man who understands the value of everything around him, and is much smarter and even mildly sympathetic compared to what you'd find for a traditional western villain of this era.  His views on honor, and the way he handles his whimpering son (loving him, but also not respecting him) is really smartly played, and adds levels to a movie that could've been paint-by-numbers.  It's a cool win, something I honestly didn't anticipate going into this movie given other reviews I've read of this picture.

Coming out of To Kill a Mockingbird, it's clear that Peck was ready to move onto a different chapter of his career, his time in Hollywood cemented by the city's highest honor.  While he'd make other movies, including roles in MacArthur and The Boys from Brazil, as well as in smaller parts in remakes of his films Cape Fear and Moby Dick, he'd never be in a movie as big as the ones from his 1940's to early 1960's heyday.  He would go on to a number of leadership roles in the industry, including as AMPAS President and Chairman of the American Film Institute.  He would become involved with politics, being a critic of the Vietnam War, and would campaign for a number of Democratic politicians, including US Senator Donald Stewart and Peck's own son Carey who ran for Congress in California in the late 1970's.  He even did voiceover work in the (successful) commercials made to stop the confirmation of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987.  Peck died of pneumonia in 2003 at the age of 87.

Next month, we're going to take a step back and take a look at an actress whose career started before Peck's and the one woman we're going to profile this year for Saturdays with the Stars, a performer who for a time in the 1930's & 40's would find success in the most unlikely genre imaginable given how her career started: the western.