Grade: D+
Synopsis: A government agent (John Wayne) and his partner (James Arness) hunt Commies in Hawaii for the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Thanks to star John Wayne’s monotone voice-over narration, the flat characters, and dry story, Big Jim McLain plays more like an extended episode of Dragnet than a major motion picture. Indeed the lack of any real thrills or tension combined with the script’s heavy anti-Communist propaganda make for a rather dull, but not unwatchable, 90 minutes.
The Communists in the film have to be some of the worst bad guys ever. They’re totally harmless. In fact, just when you think they finally grew a pair and killed a man, you learn that he died from an allergic reaction to a sodium pentothal injection, and thus the death was an accident. Seriously, that’s like one of the Communists accidentally dying from a punch in the face.
John Wayne’s about the only man that could pull off this fiasco, as it’s his larger than life charisma, and that alone, that makes the film bearable. Granted, it’s sad when you think that Wayne in all likelihood actually believed and supported the film’s underlying black and white portrait of the Cold War, so try to avoid those thoughts when watching the film. If you can’t, well, it’s not that big a loss.
