WILLIAM WYLER’S The Big Country was among the last of the big-budget westerns done by a major director. I was damn lucky my agent made me do it. The genre has faded out of fashion with critics, its core ethic jarred by the Vietnam syndrome that plagued us for so long, undertaken now only occasionally by uncertain hands daunted by the cost and wondering how much tongue to put in which cheek.
Apart from jazz, the western is the only totally indigenous American art form. Nobody else can do it, and now most of us are afraid to try. That’s too bad. More than any other kind of story, the western cries out for a camera and uses it most gloriously. Indeed, the western reaches for its basic images many millennia back before the camera to man’s first instinctive creative urges in the cave paintings at Lascaux and the Cretan murals: the running horse, the weaponed confrontation, and the steady eye, unfearful. These are the echoes planted in the bones of Man, the territorial carnivore, immune to shifting taste.
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