Big Country, The (1958)

William Wyler’s last Western was filmed on a grand scale, in widescreen and almost three hours long. The film took five months to shoot and cost $3 million to make.

James McKay (Gregory Peck, who also produced) is the mild-mannered easterner who has moved west to marry a ranch lord’s daughter and gets caught up in a feud between the would-be patrician rancher and his ruffian neighbours.

Wyler’s use of the landscape is grandiose, satirising the attempts of westerners to match their surroundings with equally outsized gestures. An allegory of the Cold War isn’t hard to find.

One of the highlights is a desperate fight between Peck and Charlton Heston, but Jean Simmons gives the outstanding performance as a schoolteacher caught in the centre of a land dispute.

Jerome Moross contributes one of the all-time great movie scores.

The US President at the time, Dwight D. Eisenhower, screened the movie four consecutive times at the White House and called it “simply the best film ever made. My number one favourite film.”

James McKay
Gregory Peck
Julie Maragon
Jean Simmons
Patricia Terrill
Carroll Baker
Steve Leech
Charlton Heston
Rufus Hannassey
Burl Ives
Maj. Henry Terrill
Charles Bickford
Ramón Gutierrez
Alfonso Bedoya
Buck Hannassey
Chuck Connors
Rafe Hannassey
Chuck Hayward
Dude Hannassey
Buff Brady
Blackie/Cracker Hannassey
Jim Burk
Hannassey Woman
Dorothy Adams

Director
William Wyler