McLintock of 1963

By | JACK & JILL SMITH | The McLintock of 1963: We find John Wayne, as a rowdy, muddy, old dude in the Old West. There’s a particular kind of movie that exists mainly to let its stars have a good time, and McLintock! is one of the finest examples the 1960s Western ever produced. Released on November 13, 1963, by United Artists, the film wasn’t trying to be a serious meditation on frontier life the way The Searchers or Red River had been. It was trying to be loud, funny, a little rowdy, and thoroughly entertaining—and on those terms, it succeeded well enough to become one of the year’s biggest box office hits, earning roughly $14.5 million against a $4 million budget. Today it enjoys a second life as one of the more beloved public domain films in circulation, having lost its copyright protection in 1991 when its claimants failed to renew the registration in the required twenty-eighth year after release. That accident of paperwork has made it one of the most freely available John Wayne pictures in existence, a happy circumstance for fans who can now watch it without hunting down a licensed print. At the center of the story is George Washington “G.W.” McLintock, played by John Wayne in a role tailor-made for his particular brand of blustery charm. G.W. is a cattle, timber, and mining baron who essentially runs the entire territory bearing his name, a self-made man of enormous wealth and even larger ego who spends his days managing his sprawling ranch, playing chess, and—whenever he comes home a little too drunk—attempting to toss his hat up onto the longhorn-shaped weather vane perched atop his house. It’s a small running gag that tells you everything you need to know about the character: proud, a bit foolish, utterly convinced of his own competence, and endlessly amused by his own antics. That comfortable bachelor existence gets upended when his estranged wife, Katherine (Maureen O’Hara), returns to the territory after two years away. She’d left him, suspecting him of infidelity, and has spent the intervening time living the high society life back East while their daughter, Becky (Stefanie Powers), finished up her college education. Katherine hasn’t come back for a reconciliation, though—she’s returned to demand a divorce and to take custody of Becky, who is now old enough to have her own opinions about where she belongs and whom she might fall for. This central marital conflict is where the film wears its literary inspiration most openly. McLintock! is loosely based on William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, transplanted from Renaissance Italy to the American frontier and given a Stetson and a Colt-Six.

Widow Louise Warren

Into this domestic tug-of-war walks a fresh complication in the form of Louise Warren, a widow played by Yvonne De Carlo, billed in the credits as a “special guest star.” G.W. hires Louise as his cook and, in doing so, welcomes her and her two children into his household. One of them is her grown son, Devlin—known simply as Dev—played by John Wayne’s real-life son, Patrick Wayne. Dev is capable with his fists and quickly finds himself drawn into both the ranch’s rougher business and, more interestingly, into Becky’s orbit once she returns home from school. Becky doesn’t arrive home alone, either. She brings along a college beau, Matt Douglas Jr., nicknamed “Junior,” played by Jerry Van Dyke as a banjo-strumming suitor who seems charming enough on paper but doesn’t quite measure up to frontier standards of masculinity as the film defines them. In one of the picture’s more notorious comic set pieces, Dev ends up taking Becky over his knee and spanking her with a coal shovel—a moment that, viewed through a contemporary lens, reads as jarringly retrograde, but one that was clearly intended in 1963 as knockabout slapstick in keeping with the film’s Taming of the Shrew framework. It’s a scene that tends to come up in almost any modern discussion of the film, both because of how enthusiastically the movie plays it for laughs and because of how differently such content reads today. Whatever one makes of it, Becky’s affections shift from Junior to Dev over the course of the story, adding a second courtship plot that mirrors and complicates the central one between her parents. Beyond the romantic entanglements, McLintock! layers in a subplot involving territorial politics that gives the film some of its more substantial thematic material, however lightly it’s handled. G.W. finds himself butting heads with a local troublemaker, the elder Matt Douglas, and with the territorial governor, Cuthbert H. Humphrey, a scheming, self-interested bureaucrat determined to discredit McLintock, push forward aggressive settlement of the territory, and force the removal of the local Comanche population. These threads bring in questions of land, power, and the treatment of Native Americans on the frontier, though the film handles them with the breezy, uncomplicated tone of a comedy rather than any real historical seriousness. G.W., for his part, is generally positioned as sympathetic toward the Comanche and skeptical of the governor’s ambitions, which was in keeping with a strain of paternalistic sympathy for Native characters that ran through a number of Wayne’s later Westerns and into his personal opinions

Romantic Political Personal

All of these tensions—romantic, political, and personal—eventually collide and erupt into chaos: brawls break out, gunfire punctuates the action, there’s a tense standoff involving the Comanche, and the film builds toward its most famous sequence, an enormous, sprawling fight that spills down a hillside and ends with practically the entire cast wallowing in a giant mudhole. It’s a wonderfully absurd, good-natured brawl that has become the film’s signature set piece—a bit of pure physical comedy chaos that captures exactly the spirit the filmmakers were going for. Nobody watches McLintock! for subtlety, and the mudhole finale delivers exactly the kind of rollicking payoff the whole picture has been building toward. Part of what gives McLintock! its enduring charm is the chemistry between its two leads. This was the fourth and final on-screen pairing of John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, following their earlier collaborations in films like Rio Grande and The Quiet Man. By 1963, the two had developed an easy screen rapport built over more than a decade of working together, and it shows in every scene they share. O’Hara, in particular, brings real fire to Katherine, refusing to let the character become a simple shrew to be tamed; she gives as good as she gets throughout the film, matching Wayne’s bluster with her own sharp-tongued resolve. Their scenes together crackle with a combination of genuine affection and stubborn antagonism that makes the eventual softening between the two characters feel earned rather than simply demanded by the plot. The supporting cast is stacked with familiar faces from the era’s Western landscape. Jack Kruschen and Chill Wills, both previous Academy Award nominees, appear as G.W.’s ranch hands and confidants, while veteran character actors Edgar Buchanan and Bruce Cabot round out a roster of local townsfolk and rivals. Strother Martin, who would go on to become one of the most recognizable “that guy” character actors of the era, shows up as well, alongside a young Aissa Wayne—John Wayne’s real-life daughter with his third wife—playing the small role of Alice Warren. The film’s willingness to cast members of Wayne’s actual family alongside him gives the production a lived-in, almost communal quality, as though the whole affair had the atmosphere of a big, extended family outing that happened to be filmed for public release. The film was directed by Andrew V. McLaglen, working from a screenplay by James Edward Grant, and produced by Michael Wayne—John Wayne’s son—through the elder Wayne’s own production company, Batjac Productions. This marked the beginning of a fruitful partnership between Wayne and McLaglen, who would go on to direct the star in several more pictures throughout the decade, the union was successful.

Technicolor and Panavision

William H. Clothier, a frequent cinematographic collaborator of Wayne’s, shot the film in Technicolor and Panavision, giving the Arizona-shot exteriors a sweeping, vibrant look that suits the film’s larger-than-life tone. The musical score was composed by Frank De Vol, and the picture was edited by Otho Lovering and Bill Lewis. Filming took place from late October 1962 through January 1963, and the production made extensive use of genuine Old Tucson, Arizona locations to capture its frontier-town setting. As with a number of mid-century American films, McLintock!‘s slip into the public domain came down to a technicality rather than any deliberate choice. Under the copyright law in effect at the time of its release, films needed to have their copyright registrations actively renewed twenty-eight years after publication in order to remain protected. When that renewal didn’t happen in 1991, McLintock! became free for anyone to copy, screen, and distribute without licensing restrictions—one more entry in the long list of otherwise commercially successful films that fell through this particular bureaucratic crack. That lapse has, if anything, only helped preserve the film’s popularity. It’s widely available in home video collections, streaming compilations, and free public-domain archives, and it remains a perennial favorite for holiday viewing, frequently cited by fans as ideal Thanksgiving or Fourth of July programming alongside other Wayne classics. Batjac Productions did eventually release a restored and remastered print on DVD in 2005, complete with documentary features and commentary tracks, giving fans a polished way to revisit the film even as unrestored public-domain copies continue to circulate freely elsewhere. Nearly sixty years on, McLintock! endures not because it broke new ground for the Western genre, but because it’s simply a lot of fun—a rollicking, good-natured showcase for two screen legends at the tail end of their long collaboration, surrounded by a game supporting cast, a farcical Shakespearean skeleton, and one unforgettable mudhole brawl. It’s John Wayne doing exactly what audiences of 1963 wanted from him: swaggering, sparring, and eventually getting thoroughly, hilariously dirty in the pursuit of a happy ending. The battle of wills between G.W. and Katherine echoes Shakespeare’s Petruchio and Kate—two strong-willed, stubborn people who can’t quite stop sparring with each other even though the attraction between them is obvious to everyone but themselves. It’s a framework that gives the film’s comedy some structural backbone, even as the movie takes the material in its own broad, farcical direction rather than attempting anything like a faithful adaptation, which is a good blueprint for a successful western comedy, film of the time.

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