Watching westerns, I usually think about what I would do if I had to live there. How I would scrape together money for train fare to get back east. But, of course, there was an economic depression from the 1870's to the early 1890's, the cities were full of disease and poverty and you'd have to work in a factory or a slaughterhouse; if you lived on the coast you could get Shanghai'd. That's probably what drove people west.
The Big Country (1958), directed by William Wyler, starring Gregory Peck, Burl Ives and Charles Bickford among others was a two hour forty-five minute epic. Gregory Peck arrives in a tiny desert town. The children laugh at his suit and his tiny hat. His fiancee arrives to take him home to her father's giant ranch. On their way, they're attacked by local ruffians, Chuck Conners among them. They don't shoot at his feet and make him dance, but they take his hat and lasso him.
Gregory Peck doesn't think it was a big deal. He went through worse at his college fraternity and his shipmates had fun keelhauling him in the Navy.
Gregory Peck is tougher than anyone else but he doesn't want them to know it. Charlton Heston and the other cowhands try to initiate him by getting him to ride a bucking bronco. He refuses, then breaks in the horse later when the men are gone.
As an actor, Burl Ives was like Ernest Borgnine or Andy Griffith. I always thought he was folksy and grandfatherly, but he was really good at playing the heavy.
Weird that Ives got into the movies by way of folk singing.
In this case, Gregory Peck's future in-laws are in a violent feud with Burl Ives and his kin, ostensibly over water.
The movie was long but not boring. But that may have been because of the caffeine I took before watching it. The desert looked better than it does in most of these movies.
Available on Amazon Prime.
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