My review was written in June 1990 after watching the film on Magnum video cassette.
An insipid song-into-film feature, "Big Bad John" arrives nearly 30 years late with a whimper. Released in February in Tennessee, it's a minor video title.
Jimmy Dean topped the charts in 1961 with the gold record he penned and sang. He's comfortably cast as a lawman (given to aphorisms) in this movie, but material has no substance.
The morbid song lyrics paid homage to a "mountain of a man" who became a hero saving his co-workers in a mining disaster. Patchy screenplay creates an irrelevant chase motif of Dean as well as hired killer Bo Hopkins and a feuding clan all pursuing John Tyler (Doug English), who's run off with young Romy Windsor.
Poorly paced film has action crosscutting between the pursuers and the young couple getting married, setting up a home and English going to work in the mine. Time frame and logic of the story is nonsensical -it plays like two separate films spliced together.
Hectic final reel delivers the mine disaster; a survivor chalking the final song lyric sentimentality on the mine's facade and then a very phony happy ending of Windsor becoming reconciled with her real father (Dean) and pregnant with Big John's child.
Filmed on location in Texas, Colorado and New Mexico, pic looks all right but has no momentum.
Director Burt Kennedy, whose Budd Boetticher scripts and own films in the '60s were superior Westerns, seems to have succumbed to a low-key, enervating tv style.
Dean shows potential to be a tv series regular, perhaps in the Andy Griffith mold. English is miscast as the title character, way too cuddly and bland to fit the song's description.
Supporting players, mainly good old boys, have all been better elsewhere. Title song is esayed here not by Dean, but a more modern rendition by the Charlie Daniels Band, with guest artists Oak Ridge Boys.
