THE BIG COUNTRY

William Wyler made "The Big Country" in 1958 and it's a magnificent film, one of his very best, and yet it's seldom sited among lists of great westerns, perhaps because it's closer in spirit to those gargantuan family sagas like "Giant" which in turn lead to such television series as "Dallas".

He shot it in Technirama and much is made of the scenery and the fact that it's 'a big country' but it's far from being a conventional cowboy picture; it doesn't really feel like a western, (Indians are conspicuous by their absence). It's also superbly played but then in a Wyler picture that was very much a given; no less than thirteen actors won Oscars under his direction, a record unbroken to this day.

Gregory Peck, too old for the part but excellent nevertheless, is the greenhorn who comes west to marry the daughter, (Carroll Baker in one of her best performances), of big-shot rancher Charles Bickford, (again an actor at the top of his form), and runs into the middle of a range war between Bickford and Burl Ives' Hennessy clan, (Ives walks off with the picture and was rewarded with an Oscar). Others involved in the shenanigans include Jean Simmons as the local school-marm and owner of the Big Muddy, the land and river at the centre of all the trouble, (the name Big Muddy has already passed into the lexicon of western movie myth), and Charlton Heston, quietly outstanding as Bickford's loyal foreman. The breathtaking cinematography of that 'big country', (it was actually filmed mostly in California), is by Franz Planer and the justly famous score is by Jerome Moross.