THE BIG COUNTRY (1958)

Phenomenally impressive, especially on the big screen, William Wyler’s handsome Western gets a welcome boost in a crisp new restoration out on Kino Lorber DVD & Blu-Ray that helps it live up to something nearer its full potential. Co-produced by Wyler and star Gregory Peck, the two friends had stopped speaking by the end of a difficult shoot, but as so often the case, an unhappy shoot made for a superb film, one that’s still somewhat underrated. Peck, a former ship’s captain from the East, a man of great inner strength not for show, now a greenhorn out West, landed in cattle country to meet his intended, Carroll Baker. But once there, he's a stranger in a strange land full of mismatched pairings (Peck, Baker, Charlton Heston, Jean Simmons, Chuck Connors) and unwittingly involved in a three-way feud over water rights (Burl Ives, Charles Bickford, Simmons). Wyler handles the unusual structure with beautifully paced steady-as-she-goes story rhythms (people really take time to think things thru in this film) and a nearly unmatched feel for the use of visual scale over the vast territory. And it pays off in a series of tense and/or comic set pieces like a delayed fight, played largely in longshot, for Peck & Heston (the latter transformed under Wyler) and in Wyler’s thrilling climactic shot organization/orchestration as Bickford rides into a winding canyon, pigheaded & alone, for a fatal meeting with nemesis Ives, only to be serially joined by Heston & his reluctantly loyal men. Jawdroppingly precise moviemaking from Wyler, aided by Franz Planer’s striking cinematography* and one of the all-time great traditional Western scores from composer Jerome Moross. (The Saul Bass credit sequence with Moross’s title track alone worth the price of admission.)

DOUBLE-BILL: *Planer’s next, Fred Zinnemann’s THE NUN’S STORY/’59, utterly different, equally gorgeous & masterful.  OR: See a younger Peck play something like the Heston role in King Vidor's DUEL IN THE SUN/’46.  Charles Bickford’s in that one too, but not in Peck’s spot which is more or less taken by Joseph Cotton.  DUEL as looney as BIG is sane; not entirely a bad thing.