It's a Biiiiig Movie

This week's film screening is going to be a little different from the others.


It's not the most controversial film I have ever shown (I've screened Cuties and For Colored Girls) nor is it the most difficult to watch (I once made you sit through Taza; Son of Cochise... in 3D!). It's not a silent film and it's not an opera, so don't worry.


It is however a bit long.

When planning these film nights I have generally tried to restrict myself to films under two hours, out of consideration for everyone's bedtimes and/or sanity. There have been a handful of exceptions. I showed West Side Story a few years ago (2 hours and 32 minutes) and The Music Man (2 hours and 31 minutes) as well as Metropolis (2 hours and 29 minutes and silent).

Our next film is about 15 minutes longer than any of those.


Don't panic.


Actually, two hours and forty-five minutes is quite modest when it comes to the world of epic cinema. Spartacus runs for more than three hours, and Ben Hur is over three and a half. Cleopatra clocks in at four hours and eleven minutes (the original cut was over six). 


Most Shakespeare plays (if they are unabridged) run between three and four hours, while your typical Wagner opera was intended (as Peter Schickele memorably put it) for "that boring stretch between leap years."



All of this is to say that The Big Country could have been bigger.

The difference of course is that I'm not planning to show any of those other films anytime soon; but I am showing The Big Country on Thursday.

This is not a decision I am making lightly.

The Big Country was very well received when it was first released, and has gone on to become a landmark of mid-Century American cinema. Burl Ives (deservedly) won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, and President Eisenhower considered it one of his all-time favourite films (more about that in a moment).



So it's very revealing that many devotees of the "Western" genre actually dislike it. One reviewer on IMDB sums up the perspective of the Wild West community:

This is the opposite of a good, entertaining western. If you want to watch a good western then please stay away from this movie. Go watch one of Sergio Leone's masterpieces or Clint Eastwood; John Wayne... But this movie is just long and boring. Definitely not worth watching.
[Lightly edited for coherence and basic grammar]

The Big Country has a Big Secret. It's not really a Western.


Yes, it's set in the 19th Century American West, and yes, it has horses and guns and a musical score that borrows heavily from Aaron Copland (who was exactly as much of a cowboy as I am, by the way) but The Big Country marches to the beat of a different kettle of fish. 

It tells the story of Jim McKay (Gregory Peck) a sea captain who has travelled two thousand miles across country to marry his fiancé Pat Terrill (Carroll Baker). The locals are singularly unimpressed with this East Coast urban sophisticate, whose manner and appearance are glaringly out of synch with the rest of the community.


He very quickly discovers that he has wandered into the middle of a... situation... between Pat's father and Rufus Hannassey (Burl Ives), the patriarch of a rival household. Their mutual hatred and escalating antagonism has poisoned the entire district, and threatens to develop into an all-out range war.


Director William Wyler (another Cowboy, exactly like Aaron Copland) very explicitly intended this as an allegory for the Cold War, and that allegory was not lost on his audience in 1958. As I mentioned earlier, President Eisenhower considered this his favourite film, and had it screened (repeatedly) at the White House while he was in office. I'm just not sure which character he thought he was...


But The Big Country is far more than merely a metaphor for the Cold War. Gregory Peck's character is extremely unusual for a Hollywood Western (one of the reasons why many Western fans react badly to it) and the story of the film grounds itself unambiguously in the personal. It may be a big country (as characters never tire of reminding Gregory Peck) but it's a very intimate drama. And it includes one of the coldest and cruellest insults a father could ever level at his son, as you will see on Thursday.



Charlton Heston, by the way, appears here in a slightly unusual supporting role (he normally plays the lead). 


This was, by all accounts an extremely difficult and challenging production, but Heston and Wyler were at least able to relax a little afterwards, when they moved directly on to their next project: a little film called Ben Hur.


Because of The Big Country's hefty running time, I plan to forego my usual introductory ramblings on Thursday. We will start the film on the dot of 7.30, which should allow us to finish at an appropriate hour. 

This is a monumental film, but it's also a surprisingly understated and subtle one. A study in contrasts, if you will.


One might even say that it's Genre Fluid.

We will screen The Big Country (promptly!) at 7.30 on Thursday, the 17th of October at the Victoria Park Baptist Church.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Carry On... #Don't Trust Anyone over 25

Image
Please note that this week's film has been rated  12  in the UK. Last week's film ( Logan's Run ) is a prime example of a science fiction film that was emphatically a product of the era in which it was made. If anything, its very relevance proved to be its vulnerability. By the time it reached the theatres in 1976, many of the social trends it was responding to were already starting to fade. That may also be why attempts to produce a remake have consistently failed to make any headway. Hollywood studios have repeatedly attempted to reboot Logan's Run over the decades, and at least six different directors have embarked on such a project over the last 30 years. Multiple writers have been approached, and in some cases have written complete screenplays - but to no avail. Logan's Run has remained stubbornly and imperviously un-remade. If you think about it (and I have, trust me) remaking Logan's Run is easier said than done. After a decade of hippie culture, you...
Read more

The Best Bond Film of All Time; Thursday the 14th of October

Image
 James Bond has been in the news quite a bit recently, following the much-delayed release of No Time to Die , the most recent offering in this (almost) 60-year-old film franchise. No time to die, indeed. Like all self-respecting zombies, the James Bond character is steadfastly refusing to lie down and stop breathing, despite (or perhaps because of) six decades of sexism, racism, casual violence, jingoism and sexism (sexism is a very big thing in the Bond franchise). It should really have been called  Enough Already. Still, the Bond Movie has become an important cultural icon, and each offering follows an instantly recognisable style and pattern: a suave hero in a tailored suit, a smooth-talking but quietly menacing villain with a dangerous and (devotedly) faithful henchman, a beautiful, sexually available girl, a wide variety of exotic and photogenic locations and an endless parade of increasingly complicated and implausible assassination attempts. What's not to love? With all...
Read more

The Feast of "Stephen"

Image
If you're a Christian, you might know "The Feast of Stephen" as St. Stephen's Day (the 26th of December) when young men dress up in vaguely nightmarish straw costumes and wander around the town playing alarming music while carrying a dead bird. This is not about that. If you're a Doctor Who fan, you might know The Feast of Stephen as the first ever Doctor Who Christmas episode (broadcast on Christmas Day in 1965).  This is not about that either. For our purposes this week, The Feast of Stephen  concerns a small but pivotal character in the beloved Noël Coward/David Lean classic Brief Encounter .  Brief Encounter is remembered today as perhaps the most famous unconsummated love affair in cinema history. Released in 1945 (but without so much as the slightest hint of a war or its effects) it tells the story of two (married) individuals who meet by chance on a train platform and proceed to teeter on the brink of having an affair for a few weeks. They do not, in fac...
Read more

Another Cold War Movie. A very, very Cold War Movie.

Image
 Last week we saw a film about the Cold War as seen by a director who experienced it as a young teenager. The International situation may have been apocalyptic and grim, but none of that mattered as much as the newest monster movie. This week is going to be another film about the Cold War, but viewed through the very different lens of a director in his mid-fifties who had lived through the eras of World War Two and The Holocaust. Billy Wilder may be (quite rightly) remembered for films like Sunset Boulevard, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Some Like it Hot etc. but One, Two, Three is one of his most cynical, savage and unforgiving comedies. Berlin in 1961 was a divided city. The East and West were controlled by the Russians and Americans respectively, but travel between the two regions was still possible. It was in fact during the making of this film that the infamous wall went up, sealing East Berlin off from the West for almost thirty years. I'm not going to attempt to expl...
Read more

And So, the 70's...

Image
 Raging Riders, and Lots of Bull Depending on who you ask, the ten-year period of 1965-1975 was either one of the best eras in American cinema, or one of the worst. While it was certainly a Golden Age if you were a straight white male who loved extreme violence, casual sexism, xenophobia and homophobia, it was far less enjoyable if such things tended to make you uncomfortable. (Three guesses how I feel about this era.) To some extent, Cinema was merely reflecting the tone of Society itself during that decade. After living through the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassination of  President Kennedy (and, two years later, Malcolm X; and a few years after that , Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King) there were the almost daily news reports of  violent suppression of  Civil Rights campaigners and (if you wanted some relief from the vicious and bloody domestic news) there was the ongoing horror show of the Vietnam War. Eventually of course the 1960s came to an end, and Ame...
Read more