John Wayne and "Big Jim McLain" (1952): The Duke's Cold War Legacy

Ron Briley

Critic Bosley Crowther of the New York Times described Big Jim McLain (1952), in which Western star John Wayne portrays an investigator for the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) cleaning up communist subversion in prestatehood Hawaii, as an unsatisfactory mixing of ''cheap fiction with a contemporary crisis in American life.'' He concluded, ''No one deserves credit for this picture,'' and most reviewers agreed. Time found the action ''implausible and fumblingly filmed,'' while Newsweek believed the weak melodrama was saved by a ''certain amount of adroit comedy players.'' On the other hand, Kay Proctor of the Los Angeles Examiner extolled Big Jim McLain as a ''walloping good movie,'' alerting

john wayne. courtesy of www.geocities.comviewers to the dangers of the communist peril. In the final court of public opinion, Big Jim McLain was a box office success, ranking twenty-seventh on Variety's list of top-grossing films for 1952. While the film was made for slightly over $800,000, it earned $2,600,00 in domestic rentals during its 1952 release.¹

Although McLain was commercially successful, it is not usually perceived as a film withstanding the test of time. It is usually described as a period piece, representative of the anticommunist film genre, in which filmmakers, responding to Congressional inquiries regarding communist influence within the Hollywood community, attempted to demonstrate their Americanism by bashing communism and communists as a clear and present danger to American security and principles. Accordingly, one might be prone to dismiss McLain as simply another historical Hollywood relic, such as I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) or My Son John (1952), of America's paranoid 1950s response to communism and the Cold War. Most anticommunist films, however, did not feature a national icon such as Wayne, who in 1995, although deceased for sixteen years, was selected by Americans in a Lou Harris poll as their favorite movie star.²

Also, a closer screening of McLain indicates that many of the political views are almost identical to those espoused in Wayne's controversial The Green Berets (1968), another moneymaking film panned by reviewers. Wayne's simplistic solutions to complex problems, exemplified by Jim McLain punching communists in the mouth, are still appealing to American audiences, whether they are screening...