My obsession/involvement with real-life politics — and the fact I didn’t even know about it until Election Day — have made it difficult for me to craft a proper entry for The Politics & Movies Blogathon being held over at Jason Bellamy’s The Cooler. However, since this particular blog is often pretty much it’s own politics and movies blogathon, I could hardly ignore it. So in honor of Jason’s fine ‘thon, I’m dusting off this post from September of ‘07, originally written for Goatdog’s William Wyler blogathon. Enjoy and marvel and at just how irrelevant the term “neocon” is starting to become. 

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It’s silly to look for one-to-one allegories to historical events in most movies. It’s even sillier to see direct parallels to recent events in a western made 47 years ago. But, to wax Rumsfeldian, my goodness gracious but it’s hard to ignore the anti-neoconservative stance of The Big Country. Even if director William Wyler, producer/star Gregory Peck, and a passel of writers had no idea we’d ever be going to war with Iraq, neoconservatism was a going cause even then. The virus may have mutated some since the Cold War, but the disease looks pretty much the same.

The Big Country bring us Gregory Peck as Jim McKay, a wealthy ex-sea-captain brought west by Patricia Terrill (Carroll Baker), the beautiful daughter of, “the Major,” an enormously wealthy rancher (Charles Bickford). Having been a seaman, McKay’s actually a fairly tough guy himself, but when a few members of the Terrill’s enemy clan, the Hannasseys, give him a light roughing up, he allows himself to be mildly humiliated before his bride to be rather than play into the bullies’ hand by trying to fight back — in any case, he’s badly outnumbered. This would be bad enough, but he also objects when the major tries to use the incident to escalate his ongoing violent feud with the Hannasays.

Everyone on the Terrill estate thinks McKay is a coward and a weakling, because that’s what yahoos generally think of thoughtful people. They are so blinkered by their lives in a particular corner of the prairie that it never occurs to them that 19th century seafaring life might require even more courage than working  dry-land frontiers. This is especially true of the ranch’s foreman and Terrill’s surrogate son, Steve Leech (Charlton Heston, with all that implies), who has been carrying a long-burning torch for Patricia. Meanwhile, a war over water rights is brewing.

Ultimately estranged from the machismo-obsessed, daddy’s girl, Patricia, McKay finds himself drawn to the land, and to Julie Maragon (Jean Simmons) the owner of “the Big Muddy” — a large, moist chunk of that land situated between the two warring estates. Being essentially Atticus Finch on the range, McKay resolves to try and stop an utterly needless range war and prevent the deaths of scores of people.

And, damn if you can’t help but think of a vastly more effective John Kerry trying to make all sides happy, while being slandered from all those same sides, including the honorable-yet-vicious (or is that vicious-yet-honorable?) patriarch of the Hannasays (Burl Ives) and his vicious-yet-stupid son (Chuck Connors), who wants to do to the bright and pretty Julie what his dad and the Major are already doing to the land.

It’s impossible at first. What McKay is selling, no one but Julie is buying. Peace is so boring and the stakes are so high. Everywhere McKay goes, he is reminded that he’s in a big country, and William Wyler’s carefully staged shots and Jerome Moross’s earworm-opera of a film score constantly reinforces is that it really is a B-I-G big country.

In fact, when McKay is asked if he’s ever seen anything so big, he replies that he has: a couple of oceans. The answer is not an understanding nod but barely concealed anger. How dare he suggest that anything is bigger than the valley just because something out there actually is bigger? These ranchers create their own new realities on the ground.

As much as anything, The Big Country is a movie about manhood, or the fear of losing it — and size. When the final confrontation finally comes between the two violence-loving patriarchs, they are seen in massive overhead shots and look a lot like ants fighting on an ant hill (at least that’s how it looks on a TV set or computer monitor).

Even when the less crazed characters played by Peck and Heston have their own inevitable fistfight, they are hardly glamorized and barely visible in the day-for-night slugfest. A fight might be necessary at times, but so is a trip to the outhouse. If this movie were made a few years later, perhaps Wyler and company could have made the point even clearer.

In today’s neoconservative lexicon, what Terrill sees lacking in McKay as a prospective son-in-law is called “will.” We can bring democracy to the Middle East in a manner of a few years if only we have it. Iran will give a nuclear bomb to the terrorists any day now if we don’t have enough of it and on and on. McKay lacks the will to start a fight for small matters, to be forced to ride an unrideable horse in public (though he later breaks the horse, in private and on his time, just to see if he can). He lacks the will to do these things because he thinks about consequences and is too well mannered to be a show-off.

To be fair, The Big Country is about the time it was made, and that means it’s actually about the Cold War. As early as 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler’s characters were worrying about nuclear weaponry’s potential for wiping out mankind. In this blacklist-era western, the old west is standing in for a worldwide battlefield.

There’s reason to think that Terrill might actually be a much better man and his clan more decent and respectful than Hannassey’s, just as the U.S. in 1958 was certainly an infinitely better place to live than the Soviet Union, anti-communist hysteria notwithstanding. The problem is the two clan leaders’ mutual failure to care about anything other than their desire to ground the other into the dust. If they have to destroy the lives of countless others to do so, then so be it.

When Hannassey finally kidnaps Julie, it becomes clear that all she really is to both men is an excuse for their final showdown. Though they’d prefer otherwise, they don’t mind too much if she might die or get tortured or even raped in the process, even though Terrill feels a great deal of not-too-fatherly affection for Julie, and Hannassey still regards her late father with servile respect for a “gentleman.” If something really bad happens to her, well, they’ll both chip for a nice funeral after she’s gone. Besides, peace equals surrender and surrender is for weaklings.

Though much of this is in the screenplay, Wyler underscores this without any need for undue subtlety, working with broadly telegraphed glances and an Aaron Coplandesque film score that prefigures Ennio Morricone’s work on Once Upon a Time in the West in terms of its importance to the film, if not quite in its quality. (Morricone’s music was sad and transcendent, Jerome Moross’s is just damnably hummable and seems to want words to go with it…Sing with me: “It’s a BIG country/It’s a really, really big COUNTRY!”)

Wyler is not making overt agitprop, however, and he’s skillful and smart enough to let the film partially embrace what it criticizes. He allows us to be mesmerized by the prospect of violence as Terrill enters the valley alone, apparently abandoned by his men who have had a sudden attack of intelligence, with Steve Leech proving to be more of a real mensch, at least initially, than Colin Powell was when the chip were finally down at the U.N.

But then, in a single lengthy shot (shown at the top of this post), he is followed by Steve, who catches up quickly and rides side by side with him to what seems like certain death. In the background, the rest of Steve’s men gradually catch up. The big frame and the deep focus approach of other riders in the distance is stirring even as we know the pointlessness of their behavior. It’s not the final walk from The Wild Bunch, but it’s getting close.

Later westerns saw the pointlessness of brutality for what it was, but they rarely proposed a solution other than death. The Big Country is, somewhat like traditional liberalism, more cautiously optimistic. That final walk into a pointless fight with fat and debauched General Mapache or the fatter but somewhat more sympathetic Rufus Hannassey is not inevitable, and there are better ways of protecting innocents from villains than walking into a blood bath — though that may be the best way to end some movies. But not this one.

Glorious final battle, or flea circus?

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