A Film Canon

The Big Country resists the emergent neo-western's co-option of Cold War hysteria, fusing vigilantism and brinkmanship, and offering a diplomatic alternative to both in the calm, gentlemanly demeanor of Jim McKay (Gregory Peck), who, upon becoming engaged to the daughter of a prominent landowner, finds himself at the epicentre of a vicious local feud. This culminates with a dispute over 'Big Muddy', the local water supply - and, as a retired sea captain, McKay imbues the west with an oceanic fluidity, tactility and malleability, transforming it into a rhizomatic, or metonymic surface - starkly opposed to the overdetermined, metaphorical co-ordinates of the feud, which are what ultimately sustains it, rather than any real sense of how it originated - and tacking across it at any angle, in defiance of its established, roads, byways and ethos. This opens up an infinitesimal number of potential trajectories, embodied in Wyler's combination of widescreen and deep-focus, which, with the aid of cinematographer Franz Planer's taste for crystalline, blue-mauve hues, transforms the landscape into a hushed, lunar beach, or an ante-diluvian uniformity, beautifully enrythmned by the tidal undulations of cattle heads and horses' hooves. That said, Wyler's earlier taste for chamber drama - and the increasingly chambered tendencies of the western itself - re-emerges as a symptom of the sickly proximity induced by the feud ("If there's anything I admire more than a devoted friend, it's a dedicated enemy"), both in terms of the dialectic between home invasion and hostage taking that set the claustrophobic climax in play ("...a coyote couldn't slip through that canyon"), as well as a pervasive, unsettling sense that rape and murder are the logical conclusion of being inside.