A Family Matter
The McCandles are a wealthy family that own a lot of land and employee a lot of people. At the outset of the film, we see Richard Boone’s character, John Fain, and his gang of murderers heading right towards the McCandle farm. They ruthlessly kill nearly everyone on site, leaving Martha McCandle (O’Hara) with an ultimatum to deliver $1M to a to be determined location or their grandson, whom they just kidnapped, would be killed.
Distraught and left without an option, she reaches out to her husband, Jacob McCandle, who at some point in the past moved away from his family. He receives the word that his grandson, who he has never met, was kidnapped and is being held for ransom. Jacob teams up with son James (Patrick Wayne) and Michael (Mitchum), as well as his trusty friend Sam (Cabot) and together they head into Mexico per Fain’s instructions to deliver the strongbox containing $1M.
Along the way the group encounters several bad guys interested in the money and even fight themselves to a degree, as sons James and Michael reacquaint themselves with the father they hardly knew. This makes for some good comic relief, with Sam providing some funny looks and comments along the way. The acting is great and the pace and balance of the film is engaging. There is a good mixture of slower, character and plot building moments as well as classic western firefights. The addition of motor vehicles, James’ semi-auto pistol, and Michael’s scoped rifle are neat additions that add a nice twist to your typical western. Being set in 1909, this is a western that is set later than most, too.
Punctuated with many memorable quotes and scenes, Big Jake is one of those movies that has a very high replay value for me. I can easily watch this movie a few times a year, and it’s perfect for a lazy weekend afternoon.
Big Jake On Blu-ray
With Father’s Day around the corner, it’s perhaps not too surprising to see Big Jake and several other western films coming to Blu-ray. At the same time, given this movie’s relatively niche audience, it’s also not too surprising that it doesn’t get the “proper” treatment on Blu-ray. As far as the image quality goes, Big Jake is great, overall. There are ten or twelve short scenes where the image quality sinks to near VHS-level, though. And it’s pretty jarring when it happens because you’ll have a colorful, sharp image one minute, and then suddenly the scene changes and you have a muddy, much lower quality image the next. For the one hundred and ten minute duration, there is probably less than five minutes total of such lower quality scenes, but it’s certainly noticeable and definitely worth mentioning.
The audio package is an interesting one. The disc features numerous Audio and Subtitle options. Primarily there is an English 5.1 DTS-HD track but there are also many mono tracks for German, Spanish, French, and a few others. The same goes for subtitles. I appreciate the numerous options, although I think I can speak for the vast majority of consumers in saying that they are unnecessary. Additionally, at least with my Panasonic BD player, every time I boot up the disc I have to select English from a list of languages before the disc will load up to the main menu. Granted, it’s not very often that you will be putting the disc in your player, but it’s too bad you have to select your language each and every time.
As for the packaging and menu, it’s straight-forward and good. The colored menu features the theme and some scenes from the movie. Selections include Play, Scenes, and Options, the latter of which just contains the audio and subtitles choices detailed above. Extra features? None to be found, sadly, not even a trailer. I am pleased at least that Paramount didn’t put a bunch of out of place trailers for other films on here, but some kind of extra feature, even just a dusty old SD trailer for the movie, would have been a nice touch. Alas, there’s not a thing here.
With that, lets get to the summary…