The Big Land

Plot synopsis:
Back home in Texas following the Civil War, former Confederate officer Chad Morgan (Alan Ladd) leads a cattle drive to Missouri, assuring fellow ranchers that their stock will bring $20 a head at auction. Instead, ruthless cattle baron Brog (Anthony Caruso) has scared off all competition and offers much less.
Blamed for what happened, Morgan chooses not to return to Texas. He spends a night in a livery stable and meets town drunk Joe Jagger (Edmond O'Brien), who is nearly lynched for trying to steal whiskey. Chad helps keep Joe sober after they leave town.
They meet farmers who need a better way to sell their wheat, so Chad and Joe ride to Kansas City to meet Tom Draper (Don Castle), a railroad man who is engaged to Joe's sister Helen (Virginia Mayo), a singer in the saloon. Tom likes the idea of a railroad spur to aid the farmers.
Helen is pleased at the change in her brother and thanks Chad, which brings out some jealousy in her fiance. Brog and his henchman disrupt the town's construction attempts while Chad is out of town. Joe tries to stand up to him, resisting the strong temptation to drink, but when he does, Brog guns him down.
Her brother's death causes Helen to turn on Chad upon his return. Brog stampedes cattle through the town. He and his henchman then attempt to ambush Chad, who kills them both in self-defense. Helen embraces him and Tom realizes he has lost her for good.

Tags: violence, murder

Review:
Familiar but very well done..
When Alan Ladd and his partners bring their cattle from Texas to Missouri, local cattle buyer Anthony Caruso cheats the men and treats them like he's doing them a favor in the process!
Ladd, however, doesn't fight--having a live and let live attitude.Ladd travels to a nearby town and is treated pretty poorly by the locals since he's a Southerner and the Civil War just ended.
However, he stumbles into a relationship with Edmond O'Brien--an alcoholic who has a long history of screwing up his life.
Ladd is able to help this new friend find a sense of direction and clean up his life, as they both hit on a scheme to build a town in Kansas that will make cattle drives closer AND they won't need to deal with Caruso.
Of course, Caruso made it a habit of playing evil jerks in Westerns during the 50s, so it's pretty certain that he won't just sit back and watch as this new cattle town is created.
And when he does behave in a naughty fashion, guess who's the guy to bring justice to this new town?
The film is helped by two excellent leads--Ladd and O'Brien.
While story elements are often quite familiar here (the tough boss, the hero that is slow to act, John Qualen with his Swede routine, etc.), the film is handled well and is enjoyable throughout.It's interesting that in this film O'Brien plays an alcoholic (a pretty familiar role for him actually, as he played this type character in several films) but in reality Alan Ladd was destroying himself with alcohol.
He looks pretty lean in the film, but in subsequent films he became puffy and sometimes slurred his lines.
It's really sad to see when you are a fan--fortunately, there isn't much evidence of this decline in THE BIG LAND..
An undistinguished star Western!.
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...
Why,........."Cause the East Needs Beef.".
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..
A Shade of Shane.
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..
A Big Movie.
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 worst....
I love a good western but this one is not it.
Slow moving with a robot performance by Alan Ladd.
Do not waste 90 minutes of your life watching 2 bad guys (dressed in black of course) kill good people, control the entire cattle business, burn down a fledgling town while Alan Ladd is always calm and never around when you need him.
When this was over all I could think of was where were all of the Civil War vets living out west?
I am sure two bad cowboys running amok would not have had all of them cowering behind little Alan Ladd...Pathetic waste of time..
Not a bad film.
I know.
That title isn't very enthusiastic, but it's how I feel.
It's an okay film, nothing special, and without Alan Ladd it would probably have gone nowhere at all.
But Ladd was a fine actor, talented at being subtle...and that makes the film worthwhile.I know this is a vague statement, but there's just something not quite right about this film.
Maybe it seems a little to fairytale-ish.
You almost expect Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney to jump out of the scene for a ho-down when they're building the town.
Okay...I jest.
But something's just not right about the plot.And even though he was one of my favorite character actors, and could play the part of a drunk magnificently (think "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" and "Seven Days In May"), his drunk act here didn't quite ring true.The rest of the cast was adequate.
Virginia Mayo was "okay" as the love interest.
Anthony Caruso did not impress me as the main "bad guy".
John Qualen played his typical Sweede role...always entertaining.
And interestingly, David Ladd is here as "Echo"...Alan Ladd's real son.As Westerns go, this is not one of the great ones.
But it's also a little more than one of the "just another Western" films that were in overabundance in the 1950s.
It's good for watching...once.BTW, the print shown on cable is not good.
The color changes drastically, and some scenes are in very good shape, while others seem terribly faded and a bit blurry.
It need at least a basic restoration.