Big Jake (1971)

Film: Big Jake (1971)

Stars: John Wayne, Richard Boone, Maureen O'Hara, Patrick Wayne, Christopher Mitchum, Bobby Vinton

Director: George Sherman

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Maureen O'Hara-click here to learn more about Ms. O'Hara (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Maureen O'Hara's career is too big to properly go across one month, and in hindsight, I should've realized that.  An actress where I'd seen most of her major films before this (which makes it harder to ground you in her career if you don't have the context of How Green Was My Valley or The Quiet Man), she might have been a better fit for a full summer or at least a month with five Saturday's (which May is, so I'm hoping you're enamored with our star, as she's with us for a while) as I think we kind of skipped over some of her leading lady work in the 40's.  It's possible that O'Hara is one of the rare actors we'll go back to in the future if the theme fits, as there's lots of room to bring back more of her pictures.  But for now, we're going to end her career in the early 1970's, when O'Hara retired from the industry (though not forever-more on that in a second).  O'Hara after her heyday in the 1940's & 50's attempted a number of second careers.  She tried a musical career (with limited success) and a theater career (with no success).  She found more success in the 1960's working in family-friendly films, most notably The Parent Trap, and she saw her career shift from the beautiful Irish maiden into a hip 1960's mother.  By 1971, though, she was tired of Hollywood, and it seems thought (at least for a time) the best way for her to exit the screen was opposite one of her most frequent leading men, John Wayne, in Big Jake.

(Spoilers Ahead) Set in the early 20th Century, Big Jake initially starts on Martha McCandles (O'Hara), a wealthy ranch owner working with her sons.  When the Fain Gang, led by John Fain (Boone) ransack the ranch, killing many of their employees & kidnapping Martha's grandson little Jacob (Ethan Wayne). Martha is told she must pay $1 million in ransom to get the boy back, and she asks her estranged husband Jake (John Wayne) "aka Big Jake"  to bring the ransom to the other men, accompanied by two of his sons James (Patrick Wayne) and Michael (Mitchum), both of whom have a fractured relationship with their father.  As the men hit the road, they start to bond, and it's revealed that Big Jack & Martha had no intention of paying the ransom (even though they could afford it), as they instead decided to kill the kidnappers/murderers who pillaged their farm.  The men eventually kill the kidnappers, with Big Jake meeting his grandson for the first time, and the McCandles family reunited, now ready to live together again.

The film doesn't break any new ground with the western format.  Wayne has played this part a hundred times (considering how many movies he'd made in his career, that might not even be an exaggeration), and O'Hara wasn't far behind him.  So your tolerance for this type of film relies on how much you're willing to overlook in Wayne's toxic masculinity universe (there is none of the nuance that he'd bring to The Searchers or Liberty Valance here), but I liked it.  I generally like Wayne's persona onscreen, even if it could get cartoonish, and he brings a rough charm to this role, and it's fun to see him play off of his real-life sons Patrick & Ethan.  O'Hara is only in this movie for a bit (she gets "and Maureen O'Hara" billing, which is always a crapshoot in terms of actual screen time), but she does well with the limited role.  At this point, she seems to understand the history that she brings just by standing onscreen or appearing opposite John Wayne in a movie, and she leans into it rather than trying to discourage it, letting the moviegoers fill in the blanks through past onscreen collaborations between the two...the script doesn't have to do all the work at this point.

O'Hara would retire from film after Big Jake.  Her offscreen commentary is frequently a bit prudish by modern standards (and bordering on the vain when it comes to describing her own work), as she thought Hollywood only made "dirty pictures" during this era.  Weirdly, though, O'Hara had a second act, and it was opposite someone you would have never guessed considering her leading men numbered icons Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, & Charles Laughton: Canadian comedian John Candy.  O'Hara loved playing his mother (she remarked he was one of her favorite leading men), and she got better reviews than the film did (I've never seen it, but I'm kind of surprised she didn't get more Oscar buzz in a similar fashion to Don Ameche, Jack Palance, & Lauren Bacall at the time, as it feels like that kind of role...anyone who has seen it weigh in in the comments).  O'Hara would eventually get her long-coveted Oscar, an Honorary trophy from the Academy in 2014; she would die less than a year later at the age of 95.