Reception
Ives won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor as well as the Golden Globe Award. The film was also nominated for an Academy Award for the musical score by Jerome Moross.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower liked the movie very much and showed it on four successive evenings in the White House during his second administration.
A theme from Moross' score of The Big Country (as performed by the City of Prague Philharmonic Orchestra) was sampled by MC Tunes versus 808 State in a top 10 UK chart hit, The Only Rhyme That Bites, in 1990. A decade later, girl-group Atomic Kitten used the same sample on their Top 20 hit I Want Your Love in 2000. It is also quoted heavily in Yes' 1970 cover of Richie Havens' song "No Opportunity Necessary, No Experience Needed".
In a poll of 500 films held by Empire Magazine, it was voted 187th Greatest Movie of all time.
American Film Institute Lists
- AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores — Nominated
- AFI's 100 Years...100 Cheers — Nominated
- AFI's 10 Top 10 — Nominated Western Film
Read more about this topic: The Big Country
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)