Synopsis
The Big Country (1958) is William Wyler's wide-screen western you can watch online on iFILM — 166 minutes of sun-scorched Texas landscape, a landmark score by Jerome Moross, and a leading performance by Gregory Peck that quietly dismantles every cliché the genre had built up to that point. Peck plays retired sea captain Jim McKay, who rides west to marry into a cattle family and immediately walks into a feud he wants no part of.
Two ranchers — the established Major Terrill (Charles Bickford) and the rough-edged clan patriarch Hannassey (Burl Ives) — have been fighting for years over the only reliable water source in the territory. McKay refuses to pick a side or play the alpha male games expected of him, which infuriates the ranch foreman Leech, played by Charlton Heston with coiled, barely contained resentment. Carroll Baker and Jean Simmons round out a cast that keeps the human drama as big as the vistas.
Burl Ives took home the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for this role. Cinematographer Franz Planer shot the canyons as though they were characters. The film holds up as a study in a particular kind of quiet courage — the kind that doesn't need an audience. Stream The Big Country (1958) online on iFILM.
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