- Director: Andrew V. McLaglen
- AMG Rating:
- Genre: Comedy
- Movie Type: Comedy Western
- Themes: Battle of the Sexes
- Main Cast: John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Yvonne De Carlo, Patrick Wayne, Stefanie Powers
- Release Year: 1963
- Country: US
- Run Time: 127 minutes
Plot
George Washington McLintock (John Wayne) has a saddlebag full of trouble. The owner of the largest ranch in the territory, which also includes a mine and a lumber mill that he built up himself, should be a happy, fulfilled man, but he isn't. His wife, Katherine (Maureen O'Hara), walked out on him two years ago without a word of explanation and has been living back east and running in very fancy circles. He's getting older, a fact of which he's constantly reminded as friends around him decline in health. He's being challenged by their sons, eager to make their mark on the territory, and by the homesteaders who are pouring in with the support of the government, hoping to farm on land that's just barely adequate for cattle to graze on; he's got government officials underfoot, including an inept Indian agent (Strother Martin) and a corrupt land agent (Gordon Jones); the thick-headed, longwinded territorial governor, the honorable Cuthbert H. Humphrey (Robert Lowery), and the government back east are trying to push the Indians -- whose chiefs are some of McLintock's oldest enemies and his best and most honored friends -- by shipping them off to a reservation, where they'll be cared for like old women; and to top it all off, Katherine is coming back to secure a divorce and take custody of their 17-year-old daughter, Rebecca (Stefanie Powers), who's been at school back east and no longer likes anything to do with the West, any more than her mother does. All of that -- plus the presence of a young hired hand (Patrick Wayne) who's interested romantically in McLintock's daughter -- is the setup for a sprawling comedy Western with serious overtones, part battle-of-the-sexes and part political tract.McLintock! was made mostly to keep John Wayne's production company solvent in the wake of the losses incurred from the production of The Alamo. Wayne needed a film that could be made quickly and have mass appeal, and he got more than he bargained for in James Edward Grant's screenplay, which owed a little to both The Taming of the Shrew and The Quiet Man. Shot in the spring of 1963 and premiered in late November of that year, McLintock! proved to be one of the star's most popular and successful films of the '60s. It was a prized possession of the Wayne estate and was held unavailable for all of the '80s and beyond until they missed the copyright renewal in 1991 -- after that, it emerged in numerous substandard videocassette and DVD editions. There was an authorized VHS edition from MPI in the early '90s, and there were legitimate showings on WTBS, but until 2005 there was no decent quality DVD version. Late that year, Paramount Home Video, working under license from the Wayne estate, released a beautiful letterboxed DVD edition loaded up with extras. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Review
McLintock! is one of the most popular of John Wayne's movies, but it is also one of the most hated among critics and certain segments of the filmgoing audience. It pushes wildly divergent sets of buttons in different viewers, a reflection of the fact that it's a deceptively complex film. McLintock! is, on its face, a Western comedy, but it also falls in among that handful of more overtly "political" films that Wayne made, such as The Green Berets and Big Jim McLain, and additionally, resounds with echoes of his screen work with director John Ford (indeed, Ford even showed up to direct for a couple of days when the official director, Andrew V. McLaglen, fell ill). The film is a difficult one for fans of the actor to watch without feeling deep pangs of nostalgia at every turn. The first hour of McLintock! is structured very similarly to the openings of the three movies in the so-called "cavalry trilogy" -- She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Fort Apache, and Rio Grande -- that Wayne made with John Ford, with a leisurely (but carefully delineated) look at the characters and their inter-relationships. Its plot has echoes of both Ford's The Quiet Man and Rio Grande, dealing with courtship between two tempestuous personalities and the estrangement of a husband and wife, with an offspring between them.Mostly, however, McLintock is about age and impending mortality and what these things do to even the strongest of men. Wayne had previously essayed two roles of this type -- in Red River as a man driven to violence by his inability, with time and age, to control the events around him, and in She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, as a cavalry officer in the twilight of his career. McLintock! is a lighter film with a somewhat similar role at its center for the actor. The whole movie is filled with reminders that the circle of longtime friends surrounding Wayne was narrowing, as surely as the one surrounding G.W. McLintock.
In 1963, however, reviewers who disagreed with Wayne's politics couldn't get past the movie's digs at big government or the character of the fatuous territorial governor Cuthbert H. Humphrey, a nasty swipe at Senator Hubert H. Humphrey, who was then a living symbol of liberal government. As a result, many critics can't abide the movie's paternalistic attitude toward women or its generally conservative vision of right and wrong. Even in its overt politicking, however, McLintock! is more even-handed than it is often given credit for being -- the first act of violence depicted in the movie shows G.W. McLintock breaking up the lynching of a Native American; and McLintock, in deciding what will happen to his property after his death, arranges to leave his ranch to the government, to turn into a national park so that no one will cut down the trees and spoil the land. As surprising as it is in all of these ways, McLintock! isn't a perfect movie, to be sure -- at least one musical number could have been dropped, and the script is a little sloppy here and there -- but it's essential viewing in understanding the final evolution of Wayne's screen persona. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide
Cast
- John Wayne - George Washington McLintock
- Maureen O'Hara - Katherine McLintock
- Yvonne De Carlo - Louise Warren
- Patrick Wayne - Devlin Warren
- Stefanie Powers - Becky McLintock
