THE BIG NIGHT: a big name in need of a big talent

Choosing to go into acting with a name like John Barrymore jr is just asking for trouble, especially when you decide to jump into leading roles without first taking the time to learn your craft.
But that's what the 18 year old son and namesake of the legendary Broadway and Hollywood star chose to do in 1950 and, by all reports, he made a considerable hash it.

But by the time he came to make his fourth film, THE BIG NIGHT in 1951, he had developed at least a rudimentary understanding of the basics of acting although he still wasn't anywhere close to being bona fide leading man material. Luckily for him the film's production values are so low that they help mask his inadequacies. 

As a teenage boy who comes of age on the night he witnesses his father being beaten and humiliated by a local gangster, he certainly looks the part (even down to the acne) but he struggles to convincingly convey the appropriate emotions.
His preferred approach is to do everything at half speed or less. Barrymore jr acts in slow motion with every gaze held for several moments too long and every reaction played out as if in a drug-induced haze. It's as if he were acting out the story for a series of still photographs rather than a movie.
What's surprising is that director Joseph Losey settled for so little from his leading man. By 1951 Losey was an established director and came to this project off the back of the superb film noir thriller "The Prowler." 
But possibly his mind was on other things. He'd recently refused to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee and was facing the prospect of an open-ended self imposed exile in Europe. Perhaps, given these circumstances, he was just happy to be able to work and was willing to overlook the cheap sets, inadequate acting and thin storyline.
In the 53 years that were left to him Barrymore jr never succeeded in living up to his father's illustrious reputation as an actor. Sadly he had much more success in emulating John Sr's tumultuous off-screen life, and today if he's remembered at all, it's as the father of Drew Barrymore. THE BIG NIGHT  does nothing to change that legacy.

BIG JIM McLAIN: Big John kicks some commie butt!

John Wayne was never shy about wearing his heart on his sleeve. He was never going to be mistaken for one of those liberal lefty Hollywood types who dared to question the motives and morals of the American Way. But rarely did he display his politics quite as nakedly as in 1952's BIG JIM McLAIN. Here he doesn't just wear his heart on his sleeve - his heart is the sleeve and most of the rest of the shirt as well!

Big Jim (Wayne) is an investigator for HUAC - the House UnAmerican Activtities Committee. HUAC had come into it's own in the second half of the 1940s as the US Congress' primary tool in rooting out American born communist subversives who were working on behalf of Moscow to bring about the downfall of capitalism. Often confused with Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch-hunt of the early 1950s, HUAC actually got there before him, and the committee's probing of communists in Hollywood in the latter 40s started rolling the bandwagon which McCarthy jumped aboard in 1950 and then hijacked to whip-up anti-communist hysteria in the USA with wild claims of Reds under almost every bed.
There's no room for baseless accusations or irrational hysteria in Big Jim's world. He and fellow investigator Mal Baxter (James Arness) remain scrupulously law-abiding and polite, even as the stinkin' pinko university professors they know beyond a doubt are redder than a red rose walk free after invoking their fifth amendment right against self incrimination while testifying before the heroic HUAC committee members (woodenly playing themselves). 
But things start turning ever so slightly dirty when Jim and Mal are sent to Hawaii to investigate a commie spy ring. Big Jim's forced to take time out from romancing a doctor's receptionist (Nancy Olson) to punch one of the conspirators on the nose after he insults a lady of dubious morals, who is nonetheless worthy of protection because she's red white and blue through and through.
The whole film is an unashamedly simplistic exercise in flagwaving which bears only the slightest relationship to the reality of HUAC's work. But it's also a fascinating artifact of a time not so long ago when the nation which prides itself on being the personification of freedom and democracy allowed itself to be plunged into a nightmare of fear, betrayal and ruined careers by the increasingly ludicrous claims of McCarthy and his HUAC associates.  BIG JIM McLAIN plays now as a far-fetched yarn but back in 1952 Wayne and Warner Bros were deadly serious about alerting Americans to the threat posed by the supposed traitors in their midst.
Even without the right wing politics BIG JIM McLAIN is far from Wayne's finest cinematic moment. There's really not enough storyline to fill the 90 minute running time so it's padded out with a couple of excruciatingly unfunny and pointless comic scenes, some excruciatingly bad acting by the real life Police Chief of Honolulu, and same painfully sappy mugging by Wayne attempting to portray bashfulness in his courtship of Nancy. 
Genuine modesty was never his strong point.