Working for the U.S. House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), tall wizened John Wayne (as Jim McLain) is disgusted as guilty citizens take the Fifth Amendment when asked, "Are you now or have you even been a member of the Communist Party?" With tall young James Arness (as Mal Baxter) as his partner, Mr. Wayne is sent to root out Commies in Hawaii. In the future 50th state, Wayne is attracted to much younger Nancy Olson (as Nancy Vallon). Wayne and Ms. Olson get cozy as the soundtrack plays "Hawaiian Wedding Song"... Located anywhere and everywhere, the Commies are bent on "enslaving the common man." Wayne is there to stamp them out. Veda Ann Borg and Hans Conried make the most of the assignment, and some of it is unintentionally amusing. "Big Jim McLain" is Wayne with the warts showing, and they're not all political.** Big Jim McLain (8/30/52) Edward Ludwig ~ John Wayne, Nancy Olson, James Arness, Alan Napier

"Big Jim McClain" is distinctive in several ways. First, it features three of the tallest men in the movies. John Wayne (six-feet, four inches), James Arness (six-feet, six inches), and Allan Napier (seven-hundred-and-twenty-two feet). Second, this, along with "The Green Berets", is the most political movie that John Wayne has ever made. It reflects accurately Wayne's view of the Communist Menace. This is the John Wayne who carried a cigarette lighter inscribed "**** Communism." Boy -- are they shifty -- and ruthless too.Allan Napier is the Russky head of the Hawaiian cell. He says something along the lines of, "I hate these domestic communists. These 'committed' party members. But we need them until we take power. Then -- liquidate." This is a staple of spy movies. They sacrifice one another remorselessly for the good of the cause. They're getting in all over too. After a professor takes the fifth, Wayne grumbles, "Now he's free to go back to teaching economics at the university and contaminate more young minds." We never learn about the nature of the contamination. There is a lone reference to Marx and several bitter comments about "the party line" and "all that baloney," but all we ever see of the Red Menace is that they plot to infect everybody by releasing a horde of sick rats in Honolulu. They could be pod people from outer space. They're pure e-vil.Wayne and Arness are members of the House Un-American Activities Committee, sent to Honolulu to uncover these Red moles who have infiltrated the unions. There is also a plot hatched by Napier to unloose all sorts of evil on the islands and halt shipping -- what with strikes and those infected rats. Arness is accidentally killed by the commies, but Wayne and the Hawaiian police capture the evildoers.It's a terrible movie but fascinating too. Never dull. It's hard to generalize about the acting. Some performances are decent, others are ludicrous. Wayne exudes his usual John Wayneness. Arness, who was The Thing in Howard Hawks' "The Thing From Another World," is likably competent as the sidekick. Nancy Olson is beautiful, in an extra-ordinary way. She plays a medical student and she should know how to do it, medicine having been demystified by her physician father. Captain Liu of the HPD cannot act. Neither can a couple of other members of the cast. An elderly Polish refugee is played like a character role in a movie from the early 1930s -- only badly. The lack of talent on display is embarrassing.As if in compensation the movie takes us on a tour of the sights. See the Pali? Notice John and Nancy riding the surf in a catamaran at Waikiki. Aren't the little native girls cute, doing a slow, hip-swinging hula? It's those darned Russkies who cause trouble in paradise.The intent of the flag-waving should reach the most "low-information" of voters. The opening scene has Daniel Webster practically rising from his grave and asking, "Neighbor, how stands the union?" The chief narration is by Wayne, who sometimes seems to shout his apoplectic, angry pronouncements into the microphone. He gets extra points for believing what he says.There's a humorous interlude involving Veda Ann Borg as a good-natured, alcoholic, nymphomaniac who refers to Wayne as "76" because he is 76 inches tall. "Oh ho, manama nui!" It's at once gripping and hilarious to see Wayne try to shepherd her through a dinner at the Royal Hawaiian.It occurred to me, as Wayne's plane is about to land and the stewardess announces that several fancy hotels can be seen on Waikiki through the window -- the Manoa among them -- that when I was a teaching assistant at a semi-exclusive university, I had cause to counsel a student who was agonizing over her low grades in my class. She didn't want to fail because she'd have to leave and attend a state university and it would kill her father. He was the manager of the Moana Hotel. I never could afford to see the inside of the Moana but years earlier I stole an over-sized towel with the Moana logo from its beach front. I squeaked her through, partly out of guilt.All apologies for that digression into the ironic but, really, it wouldn't have been much more helpful if I'd stuck to a discussion of the movie. It is to film what Grandma Moses is to painting.It's an awful movie, but you might enjoy it. I know I did.

While Big Jim McLaine was made during the early Red Scare years of the Fifties, it still would have been a good action movie without the topical headlines that helped promote it. The villains could have been gangsters or hoodlums and nobody would have taken the position that maybe these people were just misunderstood. Granted, John Wayne may have been outspoken in his politics, but his movies were popular because of the image he projected. The men that went to see his movies may not have been as big or strong as he was but would have liked to have been. The John Wayne image was classic Hollywood wish fulfillment. Just as the Joan Crawford or Bette Davis image was for a lot of women. In those days, you picked your hero or heroine and stuck by them so regardless of what anybody else said or did, you went to see their movies. These people who delight in revealing what they have heard about your favorite star are doing it out of a sense of meaness. Movies originally were meant to entertain. That's why they ran them in theaters. Those films meant to educate were usually shown in classrooms. How many kids would have shown up at a theater if there was going to be a film about the pioneers crossing the desert and their hardships, but no Indian attacks. No drama, just historical fact. Aside from its topical subject matter, Big Jim McClain still would have drawn a crowd because John Wayne was in it. Like him or not, the guy had to have some sort of charisma to have lasted as long as he did.

(Some Spoilers) John Wayne as James "Big Jim" McLain in a very restrained role for him, in the action department,as an investigator for the House on UnAmerican Activities Committee. Big Jim is sent to the island of Oahu Hawaii who along with his friend and fellow investigator Mike Baxter, James Arness, is out to expose and arrest a Communit group operating there. Planing to start labor unrest and even going as far as planing to release disease infected rats loose on the unsuspecting people living there these commie swines were up to their old tricks again in fomenting fear and hatred among the local population in order to start a Communist take-over of the island. Big Jim and Mike get a very important lead that may well break the entire Communist operation wide open when they find out from a former commie member that was the treasury secretary of the communist party Willie Namaka is cracking up under the strain of being a Red in Paradise. Willie may well spill the beans on his commie comrades but they, the communists, get to Willie before Big Jim and Mike can put him into protective custody. Totally unconscious from drugs injected into his system by a local commie Doctor Willie is now useless to the US and local official's in getting any information out of him about what his "friends" in the movement are planing for the good and honest people of Hawaii. What the commies didn't plan on is that they were up against Big Jim and he was gonna make them pay in full for what they planned to do and later did, the rotten and cowardly commies murdered Mike later in the film, and that they were going to pay for it in spades. There were some things in the movie "Big Jim McLain" that was obviously over-the-top but at the same time the film was very honest about the threat of Communisum that the USA and the Free World faced at that time. At the conclusion of the movie we see US Marines going on a troop ship to the Korean Front to fight the Communist North Koreans and Chinese troops. The movie was made in 1952 when the Korean War was at full tilt and tens of thousands of Americans were being killed and wounded fighting the Communists there. With thousands of US servicemen fighting and dying in Korea, against the Communists, what was so wrong to put the local Communists, who were totally supportive of the Red Communist army in Korea, in the film in a bad light? There were also excesses over the Red menace in the movie as well. We see Willie's wife Mrs. Namaka, Soo Yong, who was a commie like Willie but quit the movement after ten years to become a nurse, at the famous leper colony of Kalaupapa on the Hawaiian island of Molokai. This action by Mrs. Numaka to make amends for her past sins was a little too much to take. Later when we see the Lexiters, Paul Hurst & Sara Padden, who disowned and threw their son Eddie, Robert Keys,out of the house after coming home from a trip to the Soviet Union and declaring himself a commie was also somewhat ridicules. Eddie was a good and decent boy only for the fact that he was a commie! Was that enough for his parents to throw him out in the cold and not even make an attempt to try to talk him out of being one? I don't think that there was any parent, who loved their children, that would have done that to their own son or daughter even back then at the very hight of the "Red Scare". In general "Big Jim McLain" was very honest about how the USA was in it's fear of the Communist Menece and how the American people felt about it. In the movie, like in real life, I could never understand why people would join the Communist Movement. It offered them nothing but hopelessness and despair. It used the people like you would use a hanker-chief to blow your nose discarding its loyal members when they were no longer of any use to it. And even the Communist Party's promises of freedom and economic security was nothing but a fraud in the movie like in real life. It treated the working men and women with utter contempt like in one scene in the film where Big Jim let one the commies have it, right in the mouth, when he called those who worked for a living "White Trash and Cotton Choppers".You can overlook the excesses of "Big Jim McLain" and see a clear picture of how really vicious and deranged the hard corps Communist not the vast majority of Communist members in the movement, or "Useful Idiots" as their leader called them, really were and why that created the excesses that the US government went to in combating them.