McLintock!

John Wayne's most popular vehicle of the 1960s is a broad, boisterous comedy-Western and a family movie in every sense--in subject matter, casting, personnel, and the audience it aims to bear-hug. Wayne and his Quiet Man partner Maureen O'Hara reprise their large-boned lovers' quarrel in a Wild West variation on The Taming of the Shrew, while a cast of familiar supporting players do their best to avoid becoming collateral damage.

The picture is fascinating as an attempt to adjust and update the Duke as all-American icon. Rancher George Washington McLintock owns most of the town that bears his name, but James Edward Grant's screenplay is at didactic pains to establish the benevolence and socio-political enlightenment of his reign. G.W.'s former Indian foes have become his pals, he enjoys nothing so much as playing chess with his Jewish merchant buddy (Jack Kruschen), and he's tolerant--as his fellow landowners are not--of the homesteaders crowding into the territory. In what now seems like prescience about where things were headed in the 1960s, he even does his best to achieve rapport with (gasp!) impatient youth.

McLintock! was the first movie produced by eldest son Michael Wayne, and the first major assignment for director Andrew V. McLaglen (son of Quiet Man costar Victor). It steals like a bandit from a host of much better movies, but the Duke's great good humor and professionalism redoubtably anchor the proceedings. --Richard T. Jameson

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