Tue 3 Dec 2013
A Movie Review by David Vineyard: BIG JIM McLAIN (1952).
Posted by Steve under Crime Films , Reviews[9] Comments
BIG JIM McLAIN. Warner Brothers, 1952. John Wayne, Nancy Olson, James Arness, Alan Napier, Veda Ann Borg, Hans Conreid. Screenplay: James Edward Grant, Richard English, Eric Taylor, James Atlee Phillips (uncredited), William Wheeler (story); quotes from “The Devil and Daniel Webster†by Stephen Vincent Benet. Director: Edward Lustig.
It’s 1952 and all that stands between us and ruin is Joe McCarthy, Big Jim McLain, and Mal Baxter …
Things were never blacker — or is that redder?
Sadly only two of those are fictional characters, though Tailgunner Joe was at least ninety percent a product of his own vivid alcohol mist of a mind. I suppose we should be grateful no actual communists were harmed in the making of this movie — come to think of no actual communists were harmed by Joe McCarthy either… It was a strange era.
You can’t separate the Red-baiting hysterical witch-hunts of the era from this badly written, acted, directed, and intended film. The Duke would have been better served to get his buddy Mickey Spillane to write the script, at least that might be watchable. I warn you this one isn’t. Even location filming in Hawaii doesn’t help, since the scenes there are mostly interiors probably shot back in the states, and the few outdoor scenes in the tackiest parts of the island. It’s a half-assed attempt at the docu-noir style so popular then, and handled with no subtlety whatsoever.
So, now to our plot — such as it is. Jim McLain (John Wayne) and Mal Baxter (James Arness, who was pretty much owned by Wayne at that point of time, acting-wise) are investigators for the House Committee on Un-American Activities — the beloved HUAC of every crackpot right-winger’s dreams (“Were you prematurely anti-fascist? Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party …â€) sent to investigate the hold the party seems to have gained in our then territory. Apparently our vital supply of pineapple was under extra-ordinary threat by Communist labor organizers (those radicals who believed in revolutionary ideas like minimum wage).
Have a sense of humor guys, I know Hawaii was a vital military and shipping asset, I remember Pearl Harbor, that and a trip to the island are why they chose it in the first place to associate communist with the sneak attack by the Japanese. Clever these occidentals.
I’m sorry, but it is hard to take this clunker seriously, and it stands an insult to those who fought the actual cold war against the Soviets and not the headline war against drunken screenwriters, labor organizers, and actors. Red’s weren’t only in your community, they were in our entertainment — and — gasp — thanks to the garment union, our underwear.
Meanwhile Jim and Mal are tracking down Mr. Big with stops along the way for a suspicious Nancy Olsen (Nancy Olsen femme fatale), Veda Ann Borg (she’s virtually a Wayne regular from this period on), and Hans Conreid (say it ain’t so Uncle Tunoose). Conried was also in John Wayne’s much more entertaining Red-baiting Jet Fighter — which thanks to producer Howard Hughes had sex appeal to spare from Janet Leigh as a Russian fighter pilot — a film that at least knows it is stupid and enjoys itself. I guess Conreid struck the Duke as more frightening than he did me. Maybe The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T scared him. In Jet Fighter he’s a Russian officer, here he’s only a traitor.
Of course from scene one you know Arness isn’t leaving this one alive, and since he’s the only person in the film even pretending to try, you will miss him. So now it’s personal for Big Jim against those dastardly Reds. At least this promised to be good for a rousing Spillane style bloodbath finale, but if anyone could kill a good payoff it seems to have been director Edward Lustig, who seems to think he’s making a serious and important film and so develops no thrills and no surprises when Big Jim almost casually catches up with with Struac, the dirty Commie ring leader — played by Brit accented Alan Napier (Alfred to Adam West’s Batman), because to be a Commie you had to have an accent or a foreign sounding name. No red-blooded American with the right amount of vowels in in his name could ever be a Red. For instance no red blooded name like Hammett …
I wish I was being unfair to this film in the name of a few laughs, but sad to say I’m not. This has all the drama and suspense of cottage cheese (less if you leave the latter out too long).
Now before you start, I’m a huge John Wayne fan. The High and the Mighty, The Searchers, and The Quiet Man are among my all time favorite films, and I admit unashamedly I held back a few tears when he died in The Shootist. But that’s no excuse for this lunk-headed thud-ear piece of propaganda disguised as a movie. It doesn’t even flag-wave well, being so dull as to negate any patriotic fervor — the only fervor this movie generates is how fast you can reach the remote and cut it off. It needs much more than a few quotes from Stephen Vincent Benet’s “The Devil and Daniel Webster.†If you want to hear that masterpiece quoted watch the delightful film Anything For Money with Walter Huston’s Mr. Scratch and Edward Arnold’s Dan’l Webster.
You might well emerge from this film thinking, that if that’s the best the Communists could do maybe they weren’t such bad guys after all — it is literally such a bad film it achieves the opposite of it’s intent. It diffuses the communist menace with its comic book plot — no. I take that back the anti-commie comics were better written.
He’s a Go-Get-‘Em Guy for the U.S.A. on a Treason Trail that leads Half-a-World Away!
That tagline is the most exciting thing about this snoozer.
You can watch this full movie at Amazon. Do yourself a favor and don’t.
Incidentally in this film both HUAC and the Duke don’t seem to know it wasn’t illegal to be a Communist in 1952, so Congress hasn’t changed all that much over the decades.
If you would like to see this done right check out I Was a Communist for the F.B.I., My Son John, Woman on Pier 13, Walk East on Beacon Street, A Bullet for Joey, or Walk a Crooked Mile. They all surpass this film by miles, with genuine suspense and menace even when they are silly or over the top. Even The Whip Hand with rough tough all American Eliot Reed battling commie Raymond Burr is better, and that’s saying a lot.
Wayne did a little better in contemporary dress in McQ and Brannigan, not a lot, but a little, and the latter has one of the funniest scenes ever filmed with the Duke doing that famous walk across the floor of a London disco replete with mirrored ball and strobe lights. Take that John Travolta.
Alas Big Jim McLain has nothing going for it despite the screenwriters who have done much better, and the stars who were do doubt sincere. Truth be told a lot less sincerity and more melodrama would have helped. A better movie than this could have been made about the threat of tooth decay and gingivitis. Talk about a red menace …
December 4th, 2013 at 10:36 am
This picture doesn’t work well on any level, but I thought, the politics fine. If Senator McCarthy over reached himself, and he did, much of what we now know is strictly of the hindsight variety and he was not attacking social democrats — these were card carrying communists with alliances formed with and by extensions of the soviet government. That some of these did not know about Stalin’s reach only indicate that ignorance is no excuse. Separate the communists from the Nazi’s and what have you. The same bastards trying to take over our world.
December 4th, 2013 at 10:44 am
This is one of the few John Wayne movies, except for some of those very early westerns that he made, that I could not finish watching. The consensus on IMDb is five stars out of ten, which is a couple of stars too high, in my opinion, but I won’t cast my vote there — not having seen the whole film. The political aspects, even allowing for the time period in which it was made, I found clumsy and far too preachy.
December 4th, 2013 at 1:13 pm
It happened I ran Walk East on Beacon last night. Dignified, dull and with caricatures, certainly in Finlay Currie’s performance, dominant. Walk A Crooked Mile is fine, well directed and short of a reference to Benedict Arnold, well done. Agreed that I Was A Communist For The FBI just plain works well. As for Elliott Reid in The Whip Hand, well…
December 4th, 2013 at 6:52 pm
Barry
I’m no fan of the commies, and the left in that period were duped by the Stalinists as the German-American bundists were by the Nazi’s, but unlike the bundists they were a pretty harmless lot and Moscow neither trusted them or thought most of them were capable of much (I’m not talking about the Rosenberg’s, but the average American communist who accomplished little or nothing politically), but Joe McCarthy did not uncover a single actual communist unless the KGB files revealed one I don’t know about — unlike Richard Nixon and the Kennedy’s. McCarty’s shenanigans were a circus, not legitimate investigation. There is no Whitaker Chambers who fell under McCarthy’s evil eye. At worst a few of his victims belonged to pre-war college leftist organizations or were former members. He wasn’t even part of getting actual communists like Dashiell Hammett and Dalton Trumbo — harmless as they were.
McCarthy was an alcoholic who lied about his military service in the war, and ruined the lives of numerous innocent people in the name of self promotion until Joseph Welsh famous “do you at last have no shame’ speech after McCarthy destroyed the career of an innocent man, and Edward R. Murrow’s devastating expose on television in McCarthy’s own words.
Some in the right try to rehabilitate him once in a while, but most would as soon his name was never mentioned in public again. He was a major embarrassment to his cause, his party, the Senate, and this country. Real cold warriors who fought the Soviets at home and abroad have been unfairly tarnished by his actions. In recent years I’ve even heard the right accusing the left of ‘McCarthyism’ — using him themselves as a symbol of extremism and unfairness.
I agree wholly with you about the similarity of the far left and right. Without going into it, and I won’t, I didn’t spend twelve years in intelligence because I thought there was no Soviet menace. It was very real, but McCarthy was no help. He was loathed by most oc’s and noc’s, if a few political types in DC loved him because his fear-mongering had increased their budgets. Fortunately we weren’t worrying about screenwriters and labor unions in my era.
Barry you are dead on about the movies, and I still hold BIG JIM McCLAIN is worse than any of them — even THE WHIP HAND.
December 4th, 2013 at 10:15 pm
Whether McCarthy was a help, or not, doesn’t affect the issue that we seem to agree about. Soviet sympathizers, whether Castro or Rosenberg enablers, were just that enablers. People, especially in the arts, able to influence with some small skill electoral opinion, and perhaps outcome. My personal issue is with the softening of tone and content when describing our home grown Stalinists. They empathized with torturers and got away with it under the guise of socialism. They had collective and individual influence, they used it, and are guilty of siding with people who contained half of Europe. The Walter Duranty’s of this world should not be excused. The commies, the Nazi’s and the KKK, all the enemy.
December 5th, 2013 at 3:01 pm
A by the way point: Edward Ludwig, the director, made at least one clear classic with John Wayne and Gail Russell, Wake of the Red Witch. My understanding of both projects, the creative force, for good in one instance, and not-so-good in the other, was Wayne. So much for the auteur theory.
December 5th, 2013 at 4:21 pm
Agree 100%, Barry.
I never worked domestically, but I can say distractions of the sort McCarthy presented did do harm to our security in the manpower and time his pointless excursions wasted. We had limited (well relatively) resources, sometimes only one semi trusted man in an entire country, and you could not afford to be wasting effort on some congressman’s pet paranoid fantasy. McCarthy was fully as harmful as the Rosenberg, and certainly more harmful than the early Castro supporters before his communist leanings were revealed (politics makes funny bedfellows — at one time Mao was on our payroll).
Still, I do agree with you, which is why Lindbergh is no hero of mine whatever his excuse — if you were pro Nazi in 1940, as he was, you were flirting with treason.
But if Dalton Trumbo or Dashiell Hammett ever produced a single traitor or enabled the Soviets to achieve any end there is no record of it or defenders of Red-baiting would have dug it up long ago. In Hammett’s case, he was too drunk to even write. They were a huge waste of our time, and the hearings about leftists in Hollywood wasted money and effort better directed towards the real thing.
I will point out one instance in which the distraction proved fateful, James Jesus Angleton, the extraordinary CIA executive, suspected Kim Philby early on while he was attached to the embassy in DC, but so much of the agencies time was being wasted hunting ghost connections between the Soviet’s overseas and Hollywood and other intellectual leftists that his concerns about Philby were ignored and pushed aside. In intelligence too often the problem is not the quality of the information (granted I’m prejudiced here), but the fact your superiors will not listen to the truth, only what they want to hear. Philby succeeded because no one wanted to admit he had let the side down.
Hoover was seeking communists under our beds in this era, and denied the existence of the Mafia in this country. The mob worked with virtually no Federal oversight from the days when Nitti took over from Capone until Joe Vallachi started spilling his guts under Bobby Kennedy’s investigations into organized crime. No American communists, not even the handful who actually worked for the KGB, ever did that much harm to this country.
As far as anyone knows not a single Soviet sponsored politician was ever elected, and if anyone not already a leftist and Stalinist had their opinion changed by left leaning artistic types no one has ever been able to show it — and believe me they have done the research looking for it.
Except for how attractive Streisand is, THE WAY WE WERE is pretty accurate about how ineffective the left was in the entertainment industry. Only a handful of pro Soviet films were made in the war, and they were almost all huge flops and critical failures, and the few films accused of promoting communism, like TENDER COMRADES, are about nothing more threatening than communal living or farming.
I don’t know if you lived through this period, if you recall Kirk Douglas being accused of being a commie because he was of Russian descent or Lucille Ball because she signed a petition at a rally in college in the ’20’s? This was the sort of nonsense that made it difficult to uncover genuine threats.
If you want to execute someone start with John Walker, a good Christian anti communist CIA agent, who sold out for money to the Soviet’s and got people killed in doing so — some his own colleagues. The self professed and easily identified communist sympathizers achieved next to nothing — for one thing they were closely watched in Hoover’s infamous gossipy files. There were rare cases like the Rosenbergs (and the left made an ass of itself defending them), but for the most part the intellectual left leaning types and entertainers like Paul Robeson achieved nothing save ruining their careers.
Was Hammett a damn fool, Trumbo? In my opinion the answer is a resounding yes. But I can’t find anything particularly leftist in THE MALTESE FALCON or JOHNNY GOT A GUN (well, the latter is anti-war). Hammett, at least, became a communist (and he was a Stalinist), out of guilt over his union busting days with Pinkertons. Other than the political corruption he showed in his books I never found anything really leftist in his books.
Supporters of Stalin were just as great a dupes of those of Hitler, and luckily neither were terribly effective, though we captured far more actual German fifth columnists than Soviet ones. I’m not being soft on the home grown communists, I’m laughing at how ineffective they were, and angry (not with you) with the time wasted protecting us from screenwriters and film directors while real traitors like Walker, Philby, and others walked free. For every Whitaker Chambers there were a dozen harmless big mouths we wasted resources on. They were only valuable to the Soviets because we were wasting time looking for them and only once in a while stumbling onto the Chambers and Rosenberg types.
The first rule of defending yourself from real threats is to define where the greatest threat comes from. We would have been pretty silly in my era to ignore the KGB and the likes of Bader Meinhof and the Red Brigade while we investigated Simmone de Beauvior and Picasso. While the press paid much attention to Che Guevera in my era, intelligence knew he was hugely ineffective, and had no military skill whatsoever — in Chile he invaded and took over a town so he could get drugs for his toothache from the pharmacy, and then forgot the drugs when he had to leave. African troops trained by Che made an attack across an open hillside and were chopped to pieces. Only the arms he brought with him were a threat, and half of them didn’t work. We only wanted him for the PR.
Sorry for being so longwinded, but I saw first hand the harm done by our paranoia about imaginary threats while we ignored the real thing. I lived through the witch-hunting era and remember how silly it really was. I’ve voiced concerns about actual threats while superiors worried about dominos that never fell. The greatest harm most communist supporters (or Nazi for that matter) did was to distract us from the less obvious and greater threats that were all too real.
I can tell you this much, we never recruited critics or intellectuals as deep cover or double agents — they were watched too closely. We chose good loyal communists (or whatever) and true believers, or if we got lucky a disillusioned true believer, who had a weakness we could exploit.
This does effect the issue, because if you guard your front door and leave the back open you are open to assault. Finding Red leaning entertainer while ignoring deep cover traitors like Kim Philby got people killed and did tremendous harm. Our own cupidity allowed the Soviet Union to last into the nineties when it was near collapse before WWII.
The war is won or lost based on the enemy you choose to fight. The Hollywood left had no power (the moguls were all pretty right wing), and little influence. The idea of communism was never a great threat here (the Soviets were), nor fascism for that matter. We have other serious problems, but we just don’t march in step very well, thankfully. Their collective and communal influence was virtually nil as was their threat. In fact the more they said the less influence most of the true Soviet supporters had.
There is an example of Hollywood having a huge effect. When Jack Warner pressed to make the film CONFESSIONS OF A NAZI SPY it was a hugely effective spur to prepare the nation for the eventual war and show the Nazi’s for what they were. As Konrad Lorenz famously wrote in his review, “Warner Brothers has declared war on Germany.” But it only worked because it revealed a real threat.
I don’t excuse the Stalinist supporters, but I do laugh at them — they were the most ineffective group of airheads to ever voice an idea, blind to reality, confusing anger about our real problems for a failed philosophy (even Marx said communism couldn’t work in Russia), and expending their talent and energy in pursuit of a tarnished ideal.
Maybe I should cry for them instead — what a lot of schumks.
December 7th, 2013 at 3:13 pm
David,
I think we can agree on the facts and come to remarkably different conclusions. The Marxists have eroded core values in America and elsewhere. They are the victors and the activists ( a new profession financed by the wealthy wing of Marxism). It is all round. Control of health care. Control of culture — including religion and its symbols. The debasement of our history. Coupled with the celebration of primitive cultures. I am generalizing for a reason. Don’t want to get into the current, newsworthy specifics of the good, the bad and incredibly ugly.
December 17th, 2013 at 2:18 am
If only the greatest threat to the well-being of the average citizen these days wasn’t the corporate upper-management class…as Orwell noted some decades back, rather hard to distinguish from the Soviet (or Chinese, or other) commissars.