The Big Land

Too many good points already listed. Good redemption movie about beef, wasted time and sleeping past 5AM. Easy to believe business could ever be so simple. Easy to see how Alan Ladd became so popular.

The Big Land is a western that has Alan Ladd as a war weary Civil War veteran who wants to go into the cattle business. He's had enough of killing over five years, but in the end Ladd has to let his skill with a gun settle the usual problems of the frontier.

Anthony Caruso, a good friend of Ladd's in real life, has control of the rail shipping head where the Texas cattle arrive to be sent to the slaughterhouses in the east and he's not letting go. Of course the thing to do would be to just have it out right then and there with Caruso. But Ladd's had enough of killing from the Civil War and besides there would be no picture.

He persuades a group of settlers to found an incorporate a town where the railroad will eventually be coming to. Designing and planning the town is a dissolute architect played by Edmond O'Brien. O'Brien's got a pretty sister in Virginia Mayo which is another reason Ladd stays interested and around.

The thing I most remember about The Big Land is that constant repetition of the phrase, "the east needs beef." It's the reason Ladd, O'Brien, Mayo, are doing all that they are and enduring all the hardships. It's almost like no one will have a protein component in their diet unless Alan Ladd accomplishes what he sets out to do. It seemed to be a bit silly at times.

There's enough action though for any good western fan to overcome a rather trite story. American viewers would soon be seeing all about cattle drives in the western television series Rawhide. And on the silver screen, cattle drives were the background for much better films like John Wayne's Red River.

There is a lot about this sprawling Western that resembles SHANE.

Again, Ladd plays a quiet man who is tired of killing. Here, though, he is not a gunfighter, but rather an experienced soldier who learned to use a hand gun very well.

The real star of this film, though, isn't either hero Ladd or heroine Virginia Mayo, but Edmond O'Brien.

O'Brien's character becomes a parallel to the Stonewall character of Elisha Cook, Jr. in Shane. The similarities are more in what happens with the character than in the character.

However, unlike Stonewall, who is simply a pathetic doomed soul with little input in SHANE, O'Brien is given a chance to eat the scenery here, going from drunk to respected architect to manager of a new town to peace keeper for the town.

The story is his. We even get to see him with family. He begins at the low end of the totem pole, then rises to great achievement, only to find himself in a situation where he must make a terrible decision.

In ways, this film is superior to SHANE, and SHANE is a classic. The bad guys, however, were cloned too much after Jack Palance's Wilson, and therein lies the weakness. There are two sadistic bad men here, and their characters just aren't fresh, and too much like Wilson.

Still, it's got a lot of character, and a lot of characters who make this a top Western.

The Civil War has ended, but residual hatred remains. Texas cattlemen are driving their herds towards Missouri. Chad Morgan (Alan Ladd) is a former Confederate officer leading a cattle drive. Cattle baron Brog cheats him out of a fair price. He is forced to back down and his men blame him for it. He befriends local drunk Joe Jagger (Edmond O'Brien). As he heads home, he encounters farmers who can't get their grain to market and comes up with a mutually beneficial idea.

This sets up an interesting conflict at the beginning. Almost as quickly, the movie drops this idea and moves away. Morgan needs to stay in that town and fight back against Brog. The good early tension is lost and it never truly recovers. The Billy Tyler character is idiotic and he flips so quickly. Alan Ladd is a low energy lead. The story is a lot of little jumps and it feels jumpy. The story is too long and the slow pacing feels the length. Brog is a fine villain, but the other cattle buyers should be more hardened. It's not their first time tangling with Brog. The climatic gunfight is so short that it feels anti-climatic. This western story is too big for its own good.

The more I see of Alan Ladd the more I come to regard him as the male Kay Francis; a good actor who made a cargo ship full of mediocre to crappy movies. This is yet another, a fifties western from Gordon Douglas that, aside from early intimations of a homo erotic relationship between Ladd and Edmund O'Brien that is snuffed out the moment curvaceous Virginia Mayo arrives on the scene, is at best a "Shane" with tired blood. Give it a C.

PS...This is the second time that Edmund O'Brien has played a possibly, if not plausibly, closeted character in a Gordon Douglas film. The first was "Between Midnight And Dawn", made in 1950, in which O'Brien's cop had an unusually strong interest in keeping his partner away from marriage to Gale Storm.