BIG JAKE (1971)

THE FILM

FILM DIRECTOR: George Sherman

SCREENWRITER: Harry Julian Fink & R.M. Fink

FILM STARS: John Wayne, Richard Boone, Maureen O’Hara, Patrick Wayne, Christopher Mitchum, Bruce Cabot, Bobby Vinton, Glenn Corbett, Ethan Wayne, John Doucette, Jim Davis, John Agar, Harry Carey Jr., Dean Smith, Hank Worden, Chuck Roberson

COUNTRY: USA

THIS BOOK

AUTHOR: Richard Deming

TYPE: Novelization

PUBLISHER: Paperback Library

THIS EDITION PUBLISHED: 1971

COUNTRY: USA

COVER: Paperback

THE ORIGINAL BOOK

ORIGINAL AUTHOR: As Above

YEAR FIRST PUBLISHED: 1971

ORIGINAL BOOK TITLE: The film title

NOTES

GENRE: Western

WORDS: One of my favourite John Wayne films from the 1970s. A lot of humour amongst the action. The closing of the west / turn of the century films have always intrigued me. That point where horses and cars shared streets together. There is a lot of humour in the film, and humour that works, especially in the first half. The director, George Sherman. was an old hand on action westerns like this. It can be clunky but if you know enough about John Wayne and get the in jokes it’s a lot of fun. The cast is populated with Wayne regulars (let’s call it “Wayne’s stock company”) and included Robert Mitchum’s son, Christopher, in a showy role (his third Wayne film). Two of Wayne’s sons (to different wives), Patrick and Ethan, appear, and Patrick’s older brother Michael produces.

Bandits kidnap Wayne’s grandson (played by real life son Ethan) for ransom and someone has to recover him. This is Wayne as the patriarch, a man of action and one liners and determination in a world which is black and white.  Did that world exist? Probably not, but if it did and you needed to get something unpleasant done you would want Wayne’s character, Jake McCandles. As Maureen O’Hara’s estranged wife character, Martha McCandles, says “It is I think going to be a very harsh and unpleasant kind of business and will I think require an extremely harsh and unpleasant kind of man to see to it”.

The novelisation is based on the script. A lot of the films dialogue has been changed to suit Wayne, and then, of course inevitably it is changed again. Richard Deming (1915-1983) was a solid and reliable pro whose crime-writing career extended from late 1940s pulps to early 1980s digests. He also wrote several volumes of popular non-fiction late in his life. He is most likely to be remembered as one of the most prolific contributors to Manhunt and the early days of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and as a paperback original writer, sometimes of novels based on TV shows (Dragnet, The Mod Squad, and under the pseudonym Max Franklin, Starsky and Hutch). He was also a frequent ghost for the Ellery Queen team on paperback originals and for Brett Halliday on lead novelettes for Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.

LINKS

TRAILER