When I was a small child growing up next to the North Sea, one of the few pleasures that my mother seemed to have was going to the local cinema (now recently and sadly defunct) to see new blockbuster movies. (I would later pester my father to take me to see Beatles movies at the same venue, which he did on sufferance, but that's another story).
One of the movies that she went to see was "The Big Country", which was not only a successful movie, but one with a soundtrack that gained a lot of radio exposure at the time. I remember hearing the main theme a lot on the radio, and it had a sweeping, swooping grandeur that impressed me deeply at the time.
Much later, when I first listened to "Facing West" by Pat Metheny, from his solo CD "Secret Story", I heard in that tune elements of the grandeur that I first recognized in "The Big Country".
The soundtrack music was composed by Jerome Moross, who was never one of the better-known Hollywood music composers. He started out composing music for Broadway theatres, and also wrote classical works, before starting to write film music.
The interesting thing I recently discovered reading his family web site is that the main theme was inspired by the open spaces of northern New Mexico, which Moross stopped over to visit en route to California in the late 1930's. Moross says:

...as we hit the Plains I got so excited that I stopped off in Albuquerque (which at the time was a small town of about 35,000 people) and the next day I got to the edge of town and walked out onto the flat land with a marvellous feeling of being alone in the vastness with the mountains cutting off the horizon. When it came to writing the Main Title of the film, [The Big Country], I wrote the string figure and the opening theme almost automatically.

Anyway, I just ordered the original soundtrack music from the movie, so now I can wallow in nostalgia...if it's still what it used to be...