Big Jack (1949) User Reviews

Jacksonian Frontier Drama

[bkoganbing · 6/10 · 27 November 2010]

Big Jack turned out to be the swan song for Wallace Beery one of the mainstays of MGM ever since the era of sound. If Big Jack isn't the best film Wallace Beery ever did it certainly will provide the film historian and fan with what would most assuredly be called a typical Wallace Beery role.

The film is set in the Jacksonian era of American history with Beery leading a pack of bandits. On an impulse he rescues Richard Conte from a lynching party and since he's been wounded the fact that Conte is a doctor comes in handy.

But what Conte is being lynched for is stealing dead bodies from graves to use in experiments. Conte is a scientist and while he's not conducting Frankenstein like experiments, those are the fears of the local populace. And while grave robbing is not a hanging offense, that's not an argument to make to those people whose loved one's corpses are being experimented on.

Marjorie Main teamed with Wallace Beery for many films, she was his most frequent screen partner after Marie Dressler died. Beery and Main worked well together and Big Jack is a great example of their chemistry.

Wallace Beery was also a great example of the screen image totally being the opposite of the man. In real life Beery was a miserly and misanthropic individual who few would ever have said a kind word about. Far from the lovable lug that he was best known for after his Oscar winning performance in The Champ.

Beery with his hair grown long for the part, did not look well at all during the film. While Big Jack will never be classified as one of his great films, it's a good example of the appeal that Wallace Beery had with the American movie-going public.

W Beery's last film.

[ksf-2 · 7/10 · 10 March 2015]

Big Jack starts off in 1802, with a man (Richard Conte) about to be hanged in Maryland. Marjorie Main is Flapjack Kate. The larger than life actor Wallace Beery is "Big Jack" (Big Jack Horner... not Little Jack Horner). Jack is sick. Conte is Meade, the new doc, who heals him up, and has to decide if he will join the gang, which Jack leads. Jack even brings back a girl for Meade. Good stuff happens. Bad stuff happens. Lots of lessons learned. Beery plays it WAY over the top, while Conte plays it pretty straight. Its a strange combination of an old western, humor, with a sort of "history of medicine" story worked in. Oddly, it works out quite well. Lots of fun banter between Beery and Main. Last film Beery made. Well worth the time.

I'm surprised that it only is rated 6.5 as of today. Now that TCM shows it, I would expect more people to see and rate it. Directed by Richard Thorpe. Story by Robert Thoeren, who was born (and died) in Europe.

Not necessarily good...but enjoyable

[planktonrules · 5/10 · 12 March 2023]

"Big Jack" is Wallace Beery's final film and it's generally enjoyable but the ending...well...it's not especially good nor satisfying. Additionally, it has an incredibly odd plot...one of the strangest of the era!

The film is set in the Maryland/Virginia area in the very early 19th century. Big Jack (Beery) is a crook who is the boss of a pack of thieves. One day, he's shot (an occupational hazard) and his men force Dr. Meade (Richard Conte) to operate on Jack's leg. Fortunately for the doctor, Jack fully recovers and soon he adores Meade and wants him by his side through his adventures. However, Meade is much more interested in dissections and learning the be a better surgeon. But at the time, bodies to work on are hard to come by....so he resorts to stealing corpses! Jack offers to help...and is willing to create as many corpses as Meade wants! Meade, fortunately, is aghast and convinces Big Jack NOT to create corpses for him! What's next? See the film.

A few times, this film made me smile despite VERY uneven writing. It was especially a problem at the end....and featured the characters behaving quite strangely and unconvincingly. Still, the weirdness of the story make the film worth seeing...but don't set your expectations very high!

Wallace Beery's swan song

[jarrodmcdonald-1 · 26 September 2022]

BIG JACK marks the end of an era. It is the seventh of seven films that Wallace Beery made with frequent costar Marjorie Main. It also happens to be Beery's motion picture swan song...he died a few days after its release in April 1949.

Mr. Beery's success as an actor stretched back to the early 1900s, when he began working on the stage. By the mid-1910s he was appearing on screen in silent comedies. He was always a character actor, but he was one of those rare characters who became a star.

Producer Irving Thalberg signed him to a long-term contract at MGM in 1930 and cast him as one of the leads in the bleak prison drama THE BIG HOUSE. Beery quickly became one of the studio's most commercially successful and highest paid personalities. Though there were occasional loan outs, he appeared in at least one big budget MGM film each year from 1930 to 1949. He even earned an Oscar along the way.

By the later stage of Mr. Beery's tenure at Metro, he had settled into the types of roles that were his bread and butter. Typically, he played a blustering fool whose antics often led him astray, even if his heart was still in the right place. Middle-aged counterparts of the female variety were cast alongside him in these vehicles-- strong actresses like Marie Dressler, Janet Beecher and Marjorie Main. These gals kept him in like in case he got wild or too big for his britches!

As the title character Big Jack, Beery is placed into a frontier scenario. He is once again playing a blowhard with a tender side. This time he's the leader of a gang of outlaws in Maryland circa 1802.

While out robbing, he crosses paths one day with a doctor (Richard Conte) who is using corpses for medical research. Conte thinks conducting experiments on the dead will help save the living when he has to operate on them. Of course, law-abiding folks in the region don't see it that way. They regard vivisection as a gruesome act, and they want Conte strung up and hanged.

Beery intervenes just as Conte is about to be lynched by an angry mob. They soon become quite chummy. Conte also becomes involved with the attractive daughter (Vanessa Brown) of an influential politician (Edward Arnold).

While Conte's busy with his forensic practice, Beery abducts Miss Brown and brings her to Conte in order to speed up the courtship process. At first, Brown is rather reluctant to get cozy with Conte, thinking he put his pal Beery up to the kidnapping. But when she learns it was not his idea, she softens and begins to fall for him.

The subplot with Conte and Brown provides the romantic angle of the story. But most of the action is a hodgepodge of slapstick humor, medical drama and western. Contemporary critics had trouble reconciling the different aspects of the story, and so did some of the audience.

Supposedly the script was intended for Spencer Tracy, who chose to make the much more highbrow EDWARD MY SON instead. It would certainly have been a lot different in tone with Tracy in the lead instead of Beery. But at least with Beery, you know you'll be amused for an hour and half without the pretentiousness that this is anything more than mainstream studio entertainment.

Beery's character dies at the end of the film, and I think that's a rather fitting final note for the actor. He was only 64 years old at the time. How long would he have remained a star at MGM? Would he have transitioned to television? We'll never know the answers to those questions. But we do know that he left behind a lasting contribution. From THE BIG HOUSE to BIG JACK there are a lot of memorable Wallace Beery performances to enjoy.

Beery's fateful words!

[JohnHowardReid · 6/10 · 20 February 2018]

Copyright 24 February 1949 by Loew's Inc. An M-G-M picture. U.S. release: April 1949. U.K. release: 6 March 1950. New York opening at the Gotham: 21 May 1949. Australian release: 25 August 1949. 7,750 feet. 86 minutes.

SYNOPSIS: Big Jack and his outlaw gang save a young doctor from a hanging party.

NOTES: Wallace Beery's final fling. He died of a heart attack in his Hollywood home on the night of 15 April 1949.

Seventh pairing of Beery with Marjorie Main. Their ill feeling was mutual. She always complained he never spoke his lines as written, whilst he retorted that she could never remember hers. "She's blown her lines already thirteen times on this one take," Beery complained to a Hollywood reporter. "If I have to make another picture with her, so help me I'll have a heart attack!"

COMMENT: A promising script ruined by Richard Thorpe's typically lackluster direction. In his last film performance, Beery was allowed to act in an even more hammy fashion than usual. The support cast, with the exception of Marjorie Main and Syd Saylor, is not particularly strong. The best feature of the film is Robert Surtees' fine photography.

"No shootin' boys, we wanna hang him!"

[classicsoncall · 6/10 · 24 May 2023]

As you get into this picture, the general plot might take you by surprise a little bit. Saved from a frontier lynching way back in 1802, Alexander Meade (Richard Conte) is soon revealed to be a doctor with an interest in discovering how diseases of the human body eventually lead to death. So what was he being lynched for? He was a grave robber! Although we never actually see him steal a corpse, he's sidelined when he removes a bullet from the leg of Big Jack Horner (Wallace Beery), leader of a gang who wants to make Meade his personal doctor and in effect, his personal prisoner. Jack intervenes on behalf of the doctor by having one of his henchmen go into town and retrieve Meade's equipment and medical books from the sheriff so he can continue his practice. He even detains pretty Patricia Mahoney (Vanessa Brown) from a stagecoach in order to sweeten the deal to keep the doc around. From there, the story proceeds somewhat unevenly, as Meade and Ms. Mahoney escape to the town of Montville where her father (Edward Arnold) is the mayor. In his quest to capture Meade again, Big Jack and his hoods rob the citizens of Montville, but then he turns on a dime and has a change of heart, returning the loot and quickly fading from a gunshot wound that's too severe to operate. It's just an awkward ending in a film that could have used a little more thought put into it.

Wallace Beery's last

[SnoopyStyle · 6/10 · 22 May 2023]

It's 1802 in the backwoods of America. Dr. Alexander Meade (Richard Conte) is set to be hanged for grave robbing. He's been stealing bodies to study for medical science. He is rescued by Big Jack Horner (Wallace Beery), Flapjack Kate (Marjorie Main) and their band of outlaws. Big Jack forces him to join the group.

This is Wallace Beery's last film. He would soon die after its release. He is still the biggest personality on the screen in this one. He is in his full power. It is what it is. This is playing up the comedy whether it's there or not. Most of the time, it's not really there. It's end of a long career.

It's not the subject matter. It's the method of presentation.

[mark.waltz · 2/10 · 20 September 2023]

Giving this MGM "eastern" a second chance, I found it to be just as bad as I remembered. Not because of a flaw in the story, but because it could have better. Richard Conte is a doctor being given last rights before he is to be hung, found guilty of grave robbing, claiming that he needed bodies for scientific experimentation to aide a suffering humanity.

The film stars Wallace Beery in his last film and Marjorie Main, and I didn't find the characters as memorable or likeable as their previous ones, just putting them once again in period costume and giving Beery another "ah shucks" character, once again on the wrong side of the law. Edward Arnold is wasted in a thankless supporting role, and Vanessa Brown not exactly a sparkling screen personality. It's got the MGM gloss for sure, but outside of Conte and Main and a few minor supporting characters (Clinton Sundberg is always memorable), I could really do without having had to watch this again.

Great Classic Film of 1949

[whpratt1 · 10/10 · 21 October 2005]

Wallace Berry,(Big Jack Horner),"Wyoming",'40, made this film his swan song and gave an outstanding performance as a slick wise old owl up to no good, but had a very kind heart for doing good for people and sometimes the opposite. Marjorie Main,(Flapjack Kate), was his sidekick or wife, and gave him a hard time whenever she could. I was surprised to see Richard Conte,(Dr. Alexander Meade),"Tony Rome",'67,who was the only person all dressed up and looking like a million dollars. Big Jack Horner and the other supporting actors all dressed like hillbilly's from them thar Hills!! If you like old time actors and the rough ways of Wallace Berry, his deep voice and slow speech, you will certainly enjoy the slap stick story from the past years. My dad use to tell me that Richard Conte's father use to be a barber in Jersey City, N.J., and cut his hair for $1.25. (Way back WHEN!)