The only John Wayne movie placed under an FBI investigation: “It was a difficult time for me”
It was hardly a secret that John Wayne wanted those damned commies run out of Hollywood, with the actor a staunch supporter of the industry blacklist and the movement that sought to eradicate anyone who sympathised with the party from the business.
Ironically, when he decided to make a movie about it, he found himself on the receiving end of an FBI investigation. ‘The Duke’ was a staunch American through and through, so he was understandably taken aback when J Edgar Hoover came sniffing around the set of a political thriller to see if anything untoward was going on.
Performers who mix their politics with their pictures always run the risk of having it blow up in their faces, but Wayne didn’t care. 1952’s Big Jim McClain was the leading man’s most blatant ‘fuck you’ to the alleged communist element lurking in cinema’s shadows, only to catch the eye of the federal authorities.
The narrative saw his title character, an investigator for the House Un-American Activities Committee, dispatched to Hawaii to locate and apprehend the leaders of a local communist organisation. Painting them as out-and-out villains, the commies drug, kidnap, blackmail, and threaten their way through the picture, with only Wayne’s Big Jim capable of saving the day.
“Duke believed in what the film had to say,” assistant director Andrew V McLaglen told Michael Munn in what was the understatement of the century. “Warner Bros was concerned because the film would show witnesses refusing to answer questions in the hearing room of the House Un-American Activities Committee.”
Thanks to a series of crossed wires, word of Big Jim McClain eventually reached Washington, and the feds descended upon the production under the misapprehension that ‘The Duke’ and co-star James Arness were playing FBI agents and not anti-commie investigators, leading to several unexpected visits.
“Even J Edgar Hoover had me and the film investigated,” Wayne said. “He sent agents to Hawaii to check us out. He thought we were playing FBI agents, and he wanted to know how the FBI would come across. But when the agents found out we weren’t playing FBI but House Un-American Activities investigators, they left us alone.”
The combination of backlash from left-leaning forces from inside and outside Hollywood, becoming the target of an FBI investigation, and his crumbling personal life made Big Jim McClain a particularly taxing project. “It was a difficult time for me,” he confessed. “The film was getting criticism from the do-good leftists before we’d finished filming, and at the same time, my second marriage was coming to an end.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d been looked at by the FBI, with the bureau keeping tabs on his alleged extramarital affair with Marlene Dietrich when she was suspected of being a potential Nazi sympathiser, and there was an entire file kept on him like there was on so many other celebrities during Hoover’s reign, but Big Jim McClain was the only one of his films that was investigated, even if it was all for nothing.
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