Director William Wyler had spent most of his film career trying to gain creative control of his pictures but kept falling short of his goal in his dealings with Paramount and other studios. In 1956, he attempted to remedy that situation by entering into a joint venture with his good friend, Gregory Peck, to create an epic western called The Big Country (1958). In Wyler’s words, the film was “about a man’s refusal to act according to accepted standards of behavior. Customs of the Old West were sort of debunked.”
The Wyler-Peck collaboration was released by United Artists and turned out to be a financial success, earning a place among the top ten box office hits of 1958. Based on “Ambush at Blanco Canyon,” a short story by Donald Hamilton that was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post, The Big Country told the story of two rival families – the wealthy Terrill clan and their white-trash neighbors, the Hannasseys, who were locked in a long-standing feud over water rights for their cattle. Gregory Peck headlined the cast as James McKay, a former sea captain who has come west to marry Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker) but is soon drawn into the family conflict as well as an intense rivalry with the Terrill ranch foreman (Charlton Heston). Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons), a schoolteacher, also becomes a central figure in the story as her ranch The Big Muddy is named after the invaluable river that runs through it.
Peck was a natural for the role and in the William Wyler biography, A Talent for Trouble by Jan Herman, he said, “I knew about those things. I had a cattle business. I leased grazing land in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, Merced, Modesto. I had dreams of owning a ranch. I would take part in roundups, the roping and the branding. It was part of my life at the time.”
Shot on location at the Red Rock Canyon in Mojave, California and at the three-thousand acre Drais ranch in Stockton, The Big Country was truly an epic in the classic Hollywood tradition and considering what was going on behind-the-scenes, it was a miracle that it turned out so well. Tempers flared on the set between numerous individuals, particularly Wyler and Charles Bickford, who had fought on the set of Hell’s Heroes (1930) years before and were continuing their antagonistic relationship. Wyler liked to shoot numerous retakes and Bickford was very cranky, often refusing to say a line he didn’t like or to vary his performance no matter how many takes he was forced to deliver.
Jean Simmons was so traumatized by the experience that she refused to talk about it for years until an interview in the late eighties when she revealed, “We’d have our lines learned, then receive a rewrite, stay up all night learning the new version, then receive yet another rewrite the following morning. It made the acting damned near impossible.”
The experience was no better for Carroll Baker who had some physically punishing scenes. In the Herman biography, Charlton Heston said, “I had to fight with Carroll in one of my scenes. It’s actually one of the best scenes I was in. I’ve got a grip on her wrists, and she’s struggling to get out of it. Willy gave me secret instructions not to let go of her. He told Carroll, ‘Break loose, so you can hit him.’ Well, I’ve got a big enough hand I could have held both of her wrists in one. We must have done – I don’t know – ten takes, easy, on this shot. She’s got sensitive skin and she’s getting welts. Between takes they were putting ice and chamois cloths on her wrists. She was weeping with frustration and anger and all kinds of things. Finally she tells Willy, ‘Chuck won’t let me go.’ And he says to her, ‘I don’t want him to. I want you to get away by yourself.’ Christ, I outweighed her by nearly a hundred pounds.’
Of all the disputes and confrontations on the set, the most unfortunate one was a major altercation between Wyler and Peck. While they had numerous disagreements over certain aspects of the film (one concerned the use of ten thousand cattle for a scene), they had a final parting of the ways over a scene where Peck is apprehended by the Hannasseys and is forced to step down from the buckboard for punishment. Peck wanted to do a retake of the scene but Wyler refused. Peck felt so strongly about it that he walked off the set and had to be forced to return. By the time the picture was completed, they were no longer friends.
One of the actors who didn’t have a problem with Wyler was Burl Ives. He later said, “I found Willy delightful. I never got annoyed at him. I learned a helluva lot from him. He was enigmatic sometimes, but that’s what he did to make me figure things out.” Ives would go on to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance as Rufus Hannassey in The Big Country. It was a peak year for Ives since he was also getting rave notices for his performance as Big Daddy in the film version of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.
The Big Country earned one other Oscar nomination – the rousing score by Jerome Moross – but lost to Dimitri Tiomkin’s music for The Old Man and the Sea. Moross’s music stands tall among other classics in the western genre and is just as stirring and dynamic as Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for Giant (1956) and Elmer Bernstein’s music for The Magnificient Seven (1960).
With The Big Country, Wyler might have been striving for something as mythic and evocative as George Stevens’s Shane (1953) but even if the film fell a little short of that, it remains an entertaining and engrossing big budget western in the Hollywood tradition. It was popular with moviegoers but critics were mixed in their assessments. On the positive side, Richard L. Coe of The Washington Post, proclaimed it “super stuff. Franz Planer’s photography of Texas is downright awe-inspiring, the characters are solid, the story line firm, the playing first-rate, the music more than dashing in this nearly three-hour tale which should delight everybody.” And Harrison’s Reports called it “a first-rate super-Western, beautifully photographed in the Technirama anamorphic process and Technicolor….there is never a dull moment from start to finish and it holds one’s interest tightly throughout.”
Among the naysayers were Bosley Crowther of The New York Times and The New Yorker. Crowther wrote “for all this film’s mighty pretensions, it does not get far beneath the skin of its conventional Western situation and its stock Western characters. It skims across standard complications and ends on a platitude.” Equally unimpressed was The New Yorker’s John McCarten who stated, “Of those involved in this massive enterprise, Mr. Bickford and Mr. Ives are the most commendable as they whoop and snort about the sagebrush. But even they are hardly credible types, and as for the rest of the cast, they can be set down as a rather wooden lot.”
In the end, I think Brian Garfield, author of Western Films: A Complete Guide, provides the most balanced take on The Big Country: “The plot – from the novelist who started as a Western writer but found later fame with his Matt Helm spy stories – is rather warmed-over Ernest Haycox, but the adaptation by all those big-name writers [Jessamyn West, Robert Wyler, James R. Webb, Sy Bartlett, Robert Wilder] is first rate and, while it’s not profound, it’s fun.”
Some final trivia: The Big Country was said to be one of President Eisenhower’s favorite films.
The title credits were created by graphic designer Saul Bass (Vertigo, Psycho, Phase IV).
This was the final screen appearance of Alfonso Bedoya, the Mexican character actor who is unforgettable in 1948’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (“Badges? We ain’t got no badges. We don’t need no badges. I don’t have to show you any stinking badges.”)
As for William Wyler and Gregory Peck, they finally patched up their relationship in 1960 when Peck congratulated Wyler on his Oscar for Ben-Hur (1959). When they shook hands, Wyler reportedly said, “Thanks but I’m still not going to take the buckboard scene again.” Peck would later pay tribute to Wyler at the AFI Lifetime Achievement Award ceremony for the director.
The Big Country has been available on DVD and Blu-ray over the years but fans of the movie will probably want to own the Kino Lorber Blu-ray special edition version (released in February 2024) which includes a wealth of extra features including the documentary Directed by William Wyler, the featurette Fun in the Country, an audio commentary by film historian Christopher Frayling and much more.
*This is a revised and expanded version of an article that originally appeared on the Turner Classic Movies website.
Other links of interest:
https://brentonfilm.com/making-of-a-masterpiece-the-big-country-1958
https://therapsheet.blogspot.com/2007/04/donald-hamilton-dies.html
https://www.nycitywoman.com/three-days-with-gregory-peck/
Cinema Sojourns 