Glucedee It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

Siflutter It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Sarita Rafferty There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Leofwine_draca BIG JIM MCLAIN feels like a big screen outing for the McCarthyist witch-hunts that were going on in Hollywood at the time. This black and white drama/thriller sees John Wayne and James Arness, both taller than tall actors, travelling to Honolulu on the trail of some Communist bad guys in order to bring them to book.The film benefits from a decent and unusual setting with a great number of local character actors playing in support. Unfortunately, the villains in this film are rather weak and not really villainous at all depending on your political persuasion. There are a couple of bouts of fisticuffs but too much of the screen time is bogged down in lethargic romance and time-wasting. You can sense that Wayne is itching to get back in the saddle and go for his guns against a real enemy.

classicsoncall It appears most reviewers of the film here treat is as a propaganda piece. Since I'm no fan of Communism I didn't find it as bad as most, though the patriotic approach did get heavy handed at times. What would you expect in a John Wayne flick - he "shot at the other guy because he was an enemy".Infiltrating labor unions and intending to plague the islands of Hawaii with disease infested rats made the Commies a bad bunch in this story. Even so, Big Jim McLain had time enough on his hands to fall for the personal secretary of one of the Commie collaborators, though unknown to either one of them at the time. I don't know how, but Nancy Vallon (Nancy Olson) managed to get better looking as the movie progressed. The Duke must have had that affect on her, especially after he told her that "what I think about you has to be said in the dark".Politics aside, the movie is an average effort and certainly a product of it's times. That doesn't make it a bad one, even as some viewers bemoan Nurse Namaka's (Soo Young) view that Communism is a vast conspiracy to enslave the common man. Sounds over the top, though I don't know of any common men from former Soviet bloc countries who would disagree.

wes-connors 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

JimB-4 Before getting into the political aspects of this film and the reviews posted here, I wish to correct a couple of misstatements in other reviews. 1: John Wayne never testified before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and 2: Senator Joseph McCarthy had nothing whatsoever to do with the House investigation of Communism in Hollywood (he was a Senator, and not a member of the House; McCarthy's Senate investigation was into Communism in the Army and the State Department). Now, the film: reasonable people can disagree on matters of import, whether they are political issues or social, cultural, or religious issues. But Hollywood -- the commercial, money-making Hollywood -- rarely does nuance. And all nuance is missing from this film's attempt to portray what its makers saw as a grave threat. I would like to think that Hollywood was capable, even in the midst of the paranoia of the early 1950s, to create an anti-communist film that truly explored the issues and compared and contrasted the viewpoints at play in the country at that time. But I'm unaware of any film of the time that did so and did it well. Virtually every anti-communist film that came out of the Red Scare period is as nuanced as a sledgehammer hitting a muffin. This film is one of the worst examples. I love John Wayne, regardless of his politics, and he's fine in this. But it is embarrassing for me as a citizen of the U.S. to know that this was not only the nadir of film-making of the time on this subject, but actually as high as the intelligence level of such films ever got! Everything is black and white, belief in one system is good, belief in another is irredeemable evil. Horns sprouting from the heads of the communists among the characters would not have been surprising. And whatever side you might find yourself on in this ancient argument, viewers do not deserve to be treated as idiots. I suspect that even intellectual anti-communists hated this film and must have thought something along the lines of "Get off our side!" As much as I love Wayne and his films, I find it necessary to pretend Big Jim McLain is investigating pedophiles or some such, if I want to get through this movie. The arguments used against the commies in this movie are about what you'd hear in a cops-vs.-pedophiles movie. "Them bad, us good. Ugh."