Ten Movies That Shook Wanniski
Memo To: Website browsers, fans & clients Author: Jude Wanniski http://www.polyconomics.com Re: #4 The Big Country
Continuing with the "movie list," here is number four of the ten films that most shaped my life. These are not my favorite films. They are the movies I've seen that have had the greatest influence on my thinking, my character, my life. Some are favorites that I enjoy watching over and over again, which you can tell as you read each entry. Try to think of your own experiences with films and how they influenced the course of your life. It makes life more interesting to be aware, as you live it, to know how things such as books and films and magazine articles alter your path in significant ways. Sometime last year the Sunday NYTimes "Arts and Leisure" section had a piece on how difficult it is to think of a movie that may have changed history. The only movie they could think of was a silent film by D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, which had a scene about the KuKluxKlan that the author believes changed national thinking about the KKK. How silly. Each of the ten films listed here changed my history, and if I had not seen them, I would not have helped change history in the ways that I have. Films don't move masses. They move individuals who move masses.
4. "The Big Country" (1958) Another picture that I can watch at least once a year, never tiring of its strong men and beautiful women of the old west against gorgeous scenery and magnificent music. Gregory Peck and Charlton Heston are protagonists, with Chuck Conners thrown in for added manly tension. At another level there is the conflict between two older men, Burl Ives and Charles Bickford, ranchers who fight over the water of the Big Muddy. Jean Simmons and Carroll Baker are the beauties. Some critics saw this superb western as a metaphor for the Cold War, with Ives representing the proles, Bickford the capitalists. You can bear this in the back of your mind, although I didn't see it at first. The scene that most affected me, telling me it was okay to be a leader even if no one would follow, was Bickford riding into Blanco Canyon alone, when none of his men would follow him to what seemed certain death. Charlton Heston finally said "what the hell," and the rest came along too. It sounds like a man's movie, but it plays to all genders and ages.
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