Les loups dans la vallée

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 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.

Westerns of the 40's and even better the 50's held their own for entertainment and pleasure. Who doesn't like a story involving outdoors, cattle, the untamed west, shoot-outs, ranching, a love interest and more that when thrown together well gives us a memorable good time of it all. This is not a magnificent western but instead a standard for the western itself. On that note it delivers. Alan Ladd has a quiet type nature that is easy on the viewer and even when he gets mad he is still a nice guy. By contrast, the bad guys are just bad and stay that way all the time. In the background is still the civil war that is over but bad will is still harbored which in time goes away as we know. We get to like the characters and care about them having spent some background time getting to know them. This movie works and for that reason you get to spend your precious time watching a worthy movie. Everyone wins including the happy ending which wont let you down. Be clear that towns sprung up all over and it was the people in those towns that made sure they survived this difficult time in our history. It wasn't easy but then, anything worth having has a price beyond what we can see. The question is: Will we pay that price to have it? You see that is the true test of how bad you want it. In this movie, men on both sides risk their lives but the side that stuck up for law & order, for what's right and true will win every time. Good slow-eatin popcorn movie or delicious snacking with a tasty drink here. Mount-up and lets ride!

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.

Director Gordon Douglas, one of Warners' more versatile directors, teamed previously Ladd on 'The Iron Mistress', 'McConnell Story' and 'Santiago'...

Alan Ladd has the familiar assignment of a man of action who has seen enough of killing in the late war... He brings it off in his smoothest style...

Here, he is a six-shooter with no alternative, in a tale about cattlemen and wheat growers, who join forces in building a railroad near their land in an attempt to crush the activities of ruthless cattle-buyers... Ladd is forced to take action against Anthony Caruso and his henchman before settling down to marry the lovely Mayo and rebuild the new town...

Virginia Mayo gives the film its few moments of sensitivity in the scene where she takes out on Ladd her grief over her brother's execution...

Edmond O'Brien is cast as an educated man turned alcoholic... He is a wanderer disgusted by his cowardice, and gunned down when he makes a hopeless attempt to stand up to a heavy, bad man...

Despite a few pretentious moments, 'The Big Land' is, on the whole, an undistinguished star Western..