William Wyler (52 page)

Arriving from the East to marry Patricia, McKay not only becomes embroiled in the feud but also finds himself at odds with the Major's foreman and surrogate son Steve Leech (Heston), who is also in love with Patricia. Leech hates McKay's eastern, gentlemanly ways, which he considers effete and unmanly. As if that were not bad enough, McKay compounds his strangeness by not believing in violence and feeling no need to prove his courage. This pacifist attitude eventually causes a falling-out with Patricia, who comes to doubt his manhood; she also belittles him for not being like her father. Meanwhile, McKay is having second thoughts about Patricia and begins to fall in love with Julie. When Patricia and McKay fight over what she perceives as her fiancé's cowardice and inability to live up to her father's example, he walks out. The feud ends when Major Terrill and Rufus Hannassey kill each other during a shoot-out in Blanco Canyon. McKay and Julie then ride off together.

As he did in
The Westerner
, Wyler breaks with a number of generic conventions. He makes his hero an easterner who wears fancy clothes (including a derby hat) and does not carry a gun. Jim McKay has a seagoing heritage; he has no knowledge of the wilderness or the land—when he goes out on his own, he needs a map and a compass—and he is clearly not a man of the West. In contrast, the traditional western hero has no associations with the East, which is linked with education and culture; in fact, he is considered upright and strong precisely because he is a child of nature, uncontaminated by civilization.

None of the westerners in Wyler's film are strong, pure, or upright—they all make McKay look admirable by comparison. Major Terrill, whose home boasts eastern influences, and Patricia, who dresses like an eastern lady, are revealed to be greedy and selfish, with no discernible redeeming qualities. The viewer is relieved when McKay leaves the Terrill home and moves into town, for he is clearly too good for them. The Hannasseys, however, are no better than their rivals. Unlike the Terrills, they have not been contaminated by eastern ways, but their status as pure westerners does not make them very sympathetic either. Their isolated, all-male lifestyle has deprived them of social graces, and Buck is a boor and a bully who, late in the film, tries to rape Julie. Rufus, though endearingly honest, straightforward, and possessed of an innate sense of proper behavior, is brutally disfigured by his hatred of the Terrills. Despite his defects, Rufus may seem preferable to the Major, but both are presented as single fathers who have not succeeded in raising admirable children.

The other westerner, Steve Leech, is too much of a Terrill to command the sympathy of the audience. He is openly contemptuous of McKay and regularly tries to goad him into fights. In the climactic scene between the two, when McKay finally agrees to a fight, the brawl goes on for some time and concludes in a draw, with both men exhausted. Leech thereupon changes his mind about McKay, and after the fight, when the latter asks him, “Now, what did we prove?” he is unable to reply. He seems to be having second thoughts about the western code of violent behavior.

Wyler's standing the genre on its head might have been interesting, but the script remained a problem throughout the shoot; it offered no compelling dramatic conflict and provided no ending. Since both families are essentially unsympathetic and the central love stories uninteresting, there is no one for the audience to care about. Peck brings little to his rather stiff character beyond his usual presence and dignity. Each of the other central characters has only one dimension, as Wyler no doubt recognized early on, for he shows little interest in the human drama but concentrates most of his attention on the landscape instead. (Perhaps Robert Warshow was right when he wrote that the notion of “the western” is violated when social issues become its central concern.
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)

The idea of a “big country” did seize Wyler's imagination, however, and he turns “bigness” itself into a theme. The film's most recurrent stylistic feature—repeated so often that it becomes annoying—is the contrast between big and small. It is introduced with the opening credit sequence, as a stagecoach makes its way toward town. Between close-ups of the horses' hooves and wheels, Wyler cuts to extreme long shots of the stagecoach, which appears like a speck on a vast landscape. Then, as it approaches the town, Wyler cuts to a different angle, showing the town from the coachman's point of view. It appears remote, and that feeling is magnified by a crane shot looking down on the town, which is small and primitive and located in the middle of nowhere. There is nothing around it but space.

Once it is introduced in this dramatic manner, however, the town—usually a major presence in westerns—is of little interest in this film. Here, the major reason for its existence seems to be that it is the home of Julie, who, significantly, has planted a garden in front of her house. During the party given by the Terrills to introduce McKay to their friends, one of the guests comments to Jim that “it's civilized out here,” though the town is obviously isolated, and it is not even clear whether there is a marshal to keep the peace. Indeed, later in the film, this judgment about being civilized seems to be contradicted when Rufus says to McKay that he would consider him a “law abiding man, if there was any law to abide by.” The filmmakers appear to be more interested in the grandeur of the land than the issue of bringing civilization to the wilderness. When McKay steps out of the stagecoach in his fancy suit, tie, and derby, accompanied by his elegant leather suitcases, he is clearly out of place. He is immediately derided by Buck and some other cowboys. Leech, who has come to pick him up, advises him to get rid of the derby, or else some cowboy will get rid of it for him. How McKay and his eastern ways will transform the area is introduced as a potential central theme, but it gets lost too often before reemerging at the end of the film.

The contrast between the immensity and grandeur of the land and the insignificant, petty people who inhabit it frames the conflict between pacifism and violence that seems to be the film's central organizing theme. McKay, the easterner, has an aversion to settling disputes with guns or fists. As a gift for his future father-in-law, he brings his father's dueling pistols, noting that they have not been used in ten years. His peaceful ways are clearly in conflict with those of the Terrills, who believe in fighting—as do the Hannasseys. Such dualities extend throughout the film. Like the elegant McKay, the rough, violent Leech is in love with the spoiled and temperamental Patricia, who admires her father's ways and comes to despise her fiancé's views. She, in turn, is contrasted with the schoolteacher Julie, who is calm and sensible and eventually wins the love of McKay but is also pursued by the brutish Buck Hannassey. Finally, Patricia's love for her father is opposed to Buck's hatred for his own, though both relationships are presented as unnatural and problematic.

Early in the film, McKay is taunted, especially by Leech and the Hannasseys, but he refuses to be drawn into fights. His behavior is disapproved of but tolerated by Patricia and the Major. Like the Birdwells, however, McKay has his limits. After an argument with Patricia over his nonviolent philosophy, he decides to move out of the Terrill house. Before leaving, however, he challenges Leech to a fight, which takes place at night, with no witnesses. Again, Wyler pulls his camera away from the combatants to emphasize their puny insignificance against the massive expanse of their natural surroundings. Even the music fades out, leaving only the sounds of insects and pounding fists. The silence and the seeming stillness of the moonlit scene are in stark contrast to the way such a thematically crucial scene of violence would be handled in almost any other western.

The film's other violent scene, Buck's attempted rape of Julie, is handled in a similar manner. Wyler films this sequence inside the Hannassey house, which, unlike the Terrill mansion, is small and confined. As he so often does, Wyler includes in the frame the structure's low ceilings, creating a cramped space that seems to bear down on the inhabitants. Julie has been taken prisoner by Buck at his father's command—the goal being to get her to marry him and thus give them control of the Big Muddy. When Julie refuses, she is confined to a bedroom, and when Rufus leaves, Buck sneaks into the room. It is mostly dark, and the sequence is filmed in close-up, occasionally making the action difficult to follow. In one shot, Wyler films Buck on his knees framed through the legs of the bed. The darkness, the savagery, and Buck's caged-in posture become Wyler's symbols of a family deformed by violence and hate. When Rufus returns, he almost strangles his son, and the elemental hatred of son for father is displayed. This is Wyler's most brutal enactment of human behavior in either of his two pacifist films.

McKay's pacifist philosophy is further tested when he rides to the Hannassey place to demand Julie's release. Rufus admires his gumption, and when Buck tries to assault Julie again, McKay immediately moves to defend her by fighting off her assailant. His impulsive resort to violence parallels that of Eliza Birdwell when she lashes out with a broomstick at a Confederate soldier to defend her pet goose, as well as Josh's need to defend his land. When Buck tries to shoot McKay, Rufus draws on his own son, telling him that he will not tolerate the shooting of an unarmed man. Rufus then insists on an old-fashioned duel, using McKay's father's pistols. Buck violates protocol by shooting before his father says “Fire,” but his bullet only grazes McKay, who then fires into the ground rather than shooting the now defenseless Buck. Unlike Leech, who seems to have learned something from McKay, Buck does not. He runs to retrieve a gun from a friend, only to be killed by his father.

The evolving disposition of McKay—who has now twice compromised his code of nonviolence—is paralleled by a change in Leech, who refuses to follow Major Terrill into Blanco Canyon to kill Hannassey and his men. His decision is motivated, in part, by his newfound respect for McKay but also by his realization that he and his men are outnumbered and are likely to be killed. Earlier, when trying to talk Hannassey out of the fight, McKay rhetorically asked him, “How many men know what they are fighting for?”—boiling down this proposed battle to a test of wills between two stubborn old men. Terrill now bears out the truth of this judgment in his own confrontation with Leech. Learning that he has been forsaken by his surrogate son and then by the rest of his men, he resolves to go it alone.

At this point, Wyler's mise-en-scène becomes problematic. As Major Terrill rides alone into the canyon, he is shown from the back and later from the front, looking like a gallant warrior, while marshal music plays. The audience knows Leech is right—the fight will be futile—but the framing of Terrill undercuts this recognition, suggesting, apparently, that his sense of honor trumps his foolish decision (as did Owen Thursday's in John Ford's
Fort Apache
). When Leech sees Terrill riding off alone, he decides to join him, despite his misgivings, and Wyler's shot of the two riding side by side, followed by the rest of the men, undercuts whatever power the pacifist message might have had.

Rufus Hannassey, however, has been influenced by McKay's opinion that he is a selfish old man. Realizing that the feud is indeed between himself and Terrill, he halts the gunfight and challenges his foe to a one-on-one duel. Again, Wyler pulls away his camera as the two old men fire at each other. Both are killed, but that end result is not represented visually. Thus, the final confrontation in Blanco Canyon is undercut by Wyler's ambivalence. He seems to want to distance his audience from the violence, yet some part of him (the former air force officer?) admires the sense of honor and the esprit de corps that motivate Leech and his men at the end.

Wyler's lack of involvement in this project became evident when he decided to leave for Rome to begin work on his next film,
Ben-Hur
, before the final sequence of
The Big Country
was even shot. His assistant Robert Swink, who had worked on Wyler's last five films, was left to craft the ending. So Swink called Peck and Simmons together to shoot what became the final scene. Having ridden to the foot of a mountain overlooking a majestic valley, McKay and Julie rein in their horses, look significantly at each other in separate shots, and then head down toward the Big Muddy together. They will, no doubt, marry and live together in the peaceful country. After seeing the final print, Wyler wrote to Swink, expressing his delight with the scene: “I can't begin to tell you how pleased I am with the new ending…. The shots [you] made are complete perfection. Exactly what was needed.”
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Whether Wyler truly meant that or was just happy to be rid of the film is open to question.

Wyler's letter to Swink camouflages the mood on the set, which seems better suited to the feuding Terrills and Hannasseys than to a famed director and his handpicked cast. The set was tense, as ego-driven fights erupted between the assembled stars, and even Wyler's friendship with Peck was affected. In an early scene, McKay and Patricia are seen riding in a buckboard back toward the ranch, when they are accosted by Buck and some Hannassey hands; McKay is tied up, dragged around, and humiliated. Objecting to one of the close-ups, Peck asked Wyler four or five times to retake the scene, and the director finally relented, agreeing to redo it before the company went home. When it became apparent that Wyler had not scheduled the retake, however, Peck left the set. The close-up was never reshot. Heston later defended his costar's reaction, explaining, “To him, I think, it was a question of ethics, not art. I agree—you have to keep your promises.”
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After this incident, Peck and Wyler did not speak to each other for three years.

The film opened to mixed reviews, but in spite of the critics—and the fact that westerns were a television staple and hardly a novelty anymore—business at the box office was brisk. Audiences thrilled to the colorful, widescreen splendor of Wyler's landscape, accompanied by Jerome Moross's Oscar-nominated score (which Heston considered the finest ever composed for a western film). Despite winning one Oscar—for Burl Ives as Best Supporting Actor—and finishing in eleventh place among top-grossing films that year,
The Big Country
barely broke even. Neither Peck nor Wyler participated in any profit sharing.