Seeznak

Bigness: Brought To You By ‘The Big Country’

William Wyler’s ‘The Big Country’ (1958) is a grand, majestic, and dare I say big movie about the little things that make good men good and bad men bad. The plot centers around the activities of Gregory Peck’s character James McKay, who has just arrived in cattle country from the east, where he was a the captain of an important merchant ship. The purpose of his coming is to marry his intended, Pat Terrill (Carol Baker), the daughter of the biggest rancher in the region, Major Henry Terrill (Charles Bickford). The Terrills have long had problems with the neighboring clan, the Hannasseys (lead by the somewhat elegant, somewhat disgusting Burl Ives, who won the Best Supporting Oscar for his performance as Rufus), and McKay quickly finds himself caught between the bickering clans while his fiancée begins doubting his masculinity because he won’t stand up and be a man when it counts, which, in the great big west, apparently means fighting anyone who calls him a wimp.

We in the audience are, of course, familiar with Peck’s quiet nobility, so it comes as no surprise when he secretly breaks the crazy horse which the Terrill’s foreman, Steve Leech (The Greatest and Most Nuanced Actor Ever) tried to get McKay to ride in front of his family-to-be and all the ranch hands, or when he accepts Leech’s challenge to fight in the middle of the night, hours after refusing, again, in front of everybody. As the two screen legends punch each other repeatedly in the quiet wee hours of the morning, the camera backs away to give us a view of the big country, and we realize that these are two very small men who throw very small punches.

Wyler keeps this perspective throughout the film; as the egos of the two clans’ heads and their respective problems grow, he pulls the camera back, and reveals how small they are in spite of themselves. When the two men finally meet, head to head, Winchester to six-shooter, in the bottom of a canyon, Wyler’s camera soaks in the results from several hundred feet above, emphasizing their insignificance and the futility of their tiny passions.

Yet there is another sort of smallness Wyler captures in Peck as the quiet McKay: the subtle strength it takes to act according to his conscience, the humility of accomplishing much without caring if anyone notices, and his submission to the gentleness of wisdom over the passions of treachery. In the end, it is not the pompous, self-endorsed Terrills or the bitter, wild Hannasseys who can hold their own when set against the backdrop of the sweeping plains and hills; it is McKay who, through his humble wisdom, proves to be a truly big man.