And the West is history.

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.

The western is utterly unavailable to the stage, not just because it can't contain the wide Missouri in flood, or a war party of mounted Sioux braves, but because the stage is, finally, the domain of the spoken word. This is its strength and mystic power. Film, conversely, is images: light and shadows, moving images as art. Very often, they speak most eloquently without words. A woman's sleeping eye, suddenly alert to an opening door, running horses splashing through a stream, a limp hand hanging with drops of blood falling from a finger, or wind sweeping over an infinity of wheatfield under a roil of cloud. These images often need not, cannot, be acted; the most brilliant dialogue pales beside them.

William Wyler knew all this from his earliest days directing in silent films, along with John Ford and C.B. De Mille. Willy was also, I think, the best director of performance in film. Actors working for Wyler have been nominated for Academy Awards more than thirty times, and won a dozen Oscars (one of them for Burl Ives in Big Country). No other director has come close to this record. Willy was also a brilliant script editor. I learned a great deal about this, watching him scrape every fleck of fat off the dialogue in a scene. His basic dogma was right out of Strunk & White: "Omit needless words."

He demonstrated this wonderfully even in the opening footage of the picture, behind the credits: a lean montage of running horses and spinning carriage wheels, with Jerry Moross's unforgettable score, probably the best ever composed for a western. The sequence somehow prefaced the picture and fulfilled its title. The Big Country, indeed.

The offer from Wyler came through my agent, Herman Citron at MCA. "It's a western," Herman said. "With Greg Peck. This is a very classy project, Chuck." That was dear; the only problem was my part. Greg had the lead, of course, but my guy was only about the fourth role.

There's a great deal of egotistical hoo-hah among actors and agents about billing--above the title, first position, co-star billing, last billing in a separate box, and so on. It's useful as a negotiating ploy ("No, we can't up the price but we'll give her star billing, third position above the title"); otherwise, billing order is meaningless. I'd been at it long enough to figure that out, but I was still very preoccupied with the size and centrality of my part. I called Herman. "Look, this is a good script, I know it's a major movie, but my part isn't. We're getting too many offers now, anyway. I'll pass on this one."

It was not mild-mannered Herman who answered, but (as he was also called) The Iceman. "Kid," he said, "you don't know what the f--- you're talking about. You have an offer to work with Gregory Peck for maybe the best director in film, and you're worrying the part isn't good enough for you? Don't you know actors take parts with Wyler without even reading the damn script? I'm telling you, you have to do this picture!" So I did.

Willy worked his usual magic with the actors. He and Greg had assembled a fine bunch. Jeannie Simmons, Chuck Connors in his first good part and maybe his best performance, and Burl Ives, originally a folk singer. When Willy was through with him, he not only richly deserved his Oscar, but was well-launched on an acting career that left him little time for singing.

I still remember, as I suspect my son Fray does too, Burl singing "The Blue Tail Fly" to him one night. Lydia, my wife, had brought Fray to visit our location in the rolling prairie you could still find east of Stockton before they planted it with bloody broccoli. At two, Fray was stunned by the look and feel of it all. For years after, whenever we drove through any landscape that seemed at all plausible, he'd ask me, "Daddy, is dis da weal West now?"

I understand that. I think most American men feel a sort of blood-call to that search for the real West. For our grandparents, or their greatgrandparents, it was a new chance. I never knew an actor who didn't like making westerns. To stand by a wood fire at six in the morning, with the sun coming up behind you and look west at real country--mountains, prairie, desert--with a cup of coffee in your hand and the sound and smell of horses around you, is to reach back through centuries, beyond our beginnings as a nation.

I realized there were some advantages in, for the first time, not being the main man in the movie. Instead of shooting a 12-hour day, week after week, there were stretches of days of standby, when I could spend time with Fray. Sometimes Lydia would join us, sometimes she'd go off with her increasingly active camera, exploring the "weal West" as eagerly as Fray.

I often had time to sketch, impossible when you're in every scene, with Fray scrawling away happily beside me; or I could leave him digging under a tree while I worked the big pinto stud they'd found for me in the film. He was a beautiful animal, but edgy, as studs are, really barely short of being more horse than I could handle. As they say, any horse is stronger than any man, but the horse doesn't know that, not being very brainy. The trick is never to let him find out. I did my best to keep Domino in happy ignorance, and he looked marvelous on film: high headed, wonderfully loose-gaited, like a horse in a Delacroix painting. (Delacroix didn't really know how to paint a running horse, but he could paint the spirit of one.)

Fray kept clamoring to ride too, and I took him up in front of me a few times, feeling a little outnumbered by a feisty stud and an equally feisty two-year-old. At least, the first time he had his bottom on a horse's back, it was a good horse.

There was even time for me to enjoy friends visiting the location, as often happens. (Friends visiting, not the time to enjoy them.) My half-sister, Kay, came up for a week, too, fresh out of college. It was lovely to have her with us, suddenly grown up and (I think), rather taken with a handsome young stunt man named Chuck Hayward.

Coincidentally, Greg's stunt double was also Chuck... Robeson. Chuck Connors and I took him to dinner one night, making well over six hundred pounds of Chuck at the table before we ate a bite. The script supervisor was the fifth Chuck on the company, confusing everybody when one of us was called on the bullhorns. They finally numbered us one through five. "Chuck One!" (me) "To the camera, please."

WILLY worked, as I was to find he always did, with fiercely focused concentration and little small talk. Off the set, he was a warm and delightful man; we remained friends till his death more than twenty years later. Shooting a film, he was very different. Not harsh--there was nothing of the cartoon tyrant with a view-finder that writers are so fond of when inventing a film director. He was abstracted, digging inside himself for the scene till he got to the root of it, then giving it to the actors.

I think he found that last part the hardest--getting it through to the actors. He didn't try to charm; he wasn't particularly eloquent in conveying his vision. In fact, I'm pretty sure he had no preconceived idea of the whole film. Again, unlike the stage, there is no whole film till months after the shooting's done. Willy understood this as well as any director I know. He was willing to let the scene, and the movie, become what it would become. Working on both sides of the camera since, I've tried to remember that. He'd take what you and the other actors gave him, along with any idea the cameraman might have about how to shoot it, and worry the scene through rehearsal till he decided on a master shot. Then, he'd start on the performances.

People claimed Wyler did fifteen or twenty takes on every set-up, which is a wild exaggeration. He averaged, in my experience, maybe six or seven (quite a lot, mind you). In fact, he'd shoot till he was convinced neither you nor he could make it any better. I think it never occurred to him that encouragement was a useful part of the process. Early on Big Country, Willy was working me through a tough close-up. Finally, after maybe ten takes, he stood thinking a moment, then turned to the first AD. 'Well," he said. "Let's do the two-shot now."

I hurried after him. "Look, Willy," I said. "Let's not quit on this now. We'll get it. I'm not tired. Tell me what we need here."

He looked at me oddly. "Chuck, if I don't say anything, that means it's OK. All right?" Yes, it was, but it was heavy going sometimes. Working for Wyler was like getting the works in a Turkish bath. You damn near drown, but you come out smelling like a rose.

He expected a lot from everyone. His towering reputation and his track record, with both critics and customers, daunted any challenge to his demanding approach. We were having a tough time with a scene one day; I thought of an extensive dialogue cut I was sure would solve it. "Let me show you what I mean, Willy," I said, looking for my script. His was lying nearby in a leather binder, and I snatched it up. It fell open to the leather flyleaf, where the titles of most of his films were stamped in small letters: Dead End, Little Foxes, Counselor at Law, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Westerner, Dodsworth, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Letter, Roman Holiday, Friendly Persuasion, The Heiress. I put the binder down. "Forget it," I said. "I agree with you."

Greg, of course, had an impressive track record, too. Also, as co-producer of the film with Willy, he had not only the right but the responsibility to explore any creative differences with him well beyond what's appropriate as actor to director. As far as I know, they had only one serious disagreement, but it was a lulu. When honorable men differ, this is likely to be so.

Looking at the dailies of an important early scene in a buckboard with Carroll Baker, Greg felt he could do a better job on his close-up. He asked Willy to do a retake, not uncommon for an actor of Greg's stature and reputation, even were he not a partner. Willy responded, reasonably enough, "Let me do a rough assembly of the whole scene first. If you're still unhappy with the shot, we'll do it over."

Soooo, in a day or so Greg saw the assembled scene. Still dissatisfied with the shot in question, he asked Willy to schedule the retake, as agreed ... and Willy refused. To those of us raised to keep promises, this was a shocking breach of faith; to Willy, the film overrode all else, justifying any means.

A few years earlier, Willy had had a similar disagreement making The Best Years of Our Lives, arguably his finest film. Sam Goldwyn, his employer, ordered him to use a longer version of a close-up of Fredtic March instead of the shot Willy preferred. There was no question of a retake; filming was finished, the shot was there in the cutting room. Willy went into the film lab at night, ran down the negative reels to the shot in question, clipped out 15 feet of negative, and destroyed it. He was a man of firm opinions.

So was Greg. To him, I think, it was a question of ethics, not art. I agree--you have to keep your promises. Willy's version of the shot is in Big Country, and the two men didn't speak till nearly three years later. Backstage at the Academy Awards, Greg was about to make his entrance as a presenter when Willy walked off with his Oscar for directing Ben-Hur. Greg stuck out his hand and said, "Congratulations, Willy, you deserve it."

Willy grinned, shook hands, and said, Thanks, but I still won't retake that buckboard scene." That was the end of the feud.

During the Big Country shoot, relations were strained. Still, they were both consummate professionals with a picture to finish. They did it, I think, superbly. Greg's not capable of a bad performance, but he gave one of his better ones as the green eastern sea captain challenging the grim eye-for-an-eye western ethic.

As the ranch foreman, I was in fast company, but actors, like tennis players, often do better with a top-ranked opponent. Acting is not a competition, of course, but many, even most, good scenes are confrontations between the characters. Greg and I had one like that, beginning as a quarrel, ending in what is still regarded as one of the best bare-knuckle fights on film. We worked through it doggedly, blow by blow in the stifling August heat over two endless days. At one point, Willy moved the camera up on a ridge three hundred yards away. I thought I must be hallucinating; I knew enough about lenses by then to see we'd be the size of ants on the screen. This was Willy's point, of course: the fruitless insignificance of two tiny figures struggling in the dust of this vast land. In the end, there was no winner. Both of us lay bone-battered, panting in exhaustion. That last, we didn't have to act.

I had another fight scene, with Carroll Baker, which Willy solved very differently. Carroll played Greg's fiancee, a beautiful, spoiled child for whom my surly foreman nursed a hopeless passion. Willy was familiar with Carroll's Actors Studio background. He told her, as our quarrel burned to flash point, to hit me with her riding crop. "Chuck's a big guy, you won't hurt him. Really get mad. Let him have it." Then he took me aside and warned me. "You have to get that crop away from her, then hold onto her for the rest of the scene. That's a strong girl."

This is a useful director's ploy, common in acting school: give two actors conflicting goals and turn them loose. Guaranteed to generate genuine emotions. So it did. Carroll was pale with real fury when she swung at me. I managed to catch the crop, snatch it free, and hold her wrists in one hand (I have long fingers). She literally spat the rest of her lines at me, twisting like a trapped leopard. Her anger was wonderfully real and a little scary, which made me angry, too, both as the foreman and myself. "What if she'd caught me in the eye with that damn thing?!" Cut, print.

And that's where the Method collided with Wyler's relentless search for perfection. He wanted another take on the master shot, which became several more. For each, he exhorted Carroll to more effort and warned me to contain her attack at any cost. I missed the crop in one take and took a hard one under the ear. The first take committed me to holding her wrists with one hand, for matching in the cover angles, which I did with increasing desperation, fearful of what she'd do to me if she got loose. Her angry tears became sobs of pain before Willy got what he wanted. It is a very good scene; I guess only Carroll can say whether it was worth it.

It certainly was for me. I learned a great deal from Wyler on Big Country, about acting, and movies, and the need to do it better. In the end, you can only do this by pushing yourself.

This article is excerpted from Mr. Heston's autobiography, due out in 1993 form Simon & Schuster.