Copyright 2019 by Gary L. Pullman
To get a true idea of the
complexity of the American West, as it is suggested by the posters
that promote John Wayne's many Western films, it's necessary to
analyze many of these advertisements. In this post, however, only one
is considered, so, admittedly, only the surface has been scratched
here.
The point of this post is
to identify some of the elements that Hollywood filmmakers
considered, at the time of the poster's appearance, to be of
sufficient interest to the genre's fans that they could be used to
persuade them to part with the price of the movie's admission.
McLintock, released
in 1963, stars John Wayne, Maureen O'Hara, Patrick Wayne, Stefanie
Powers, Jack Kruschen, Chill Wills, Jerry Van Dyke, and Yvonne De
Carlo. Three women in a Western are two (or, in many cases, even
three) more than usual; consequently, their presence suggests that
this film focuses on the relationships between men and women of the
Old West more than many other such films.
Despite the presence of
Patrick Wayne, Jack Kruschen, Chill Wills, and Jerry Van Dyke,
there's really only one male character of importance in the motion
picture: Wayne's character, George Washington (“G. W.”)
McLintock. As the movie's poster
makes clear by focusing on him and O'Hara, the flick is
primarily about his
relationship to her.
Wayne
is shown as huge, his portrait taking up the upper two-thirds of the
poster's space. He appears to be laughing, except that he looks more
pained than merry (but, then, Wayne often
looks pained, on screen and in posters). The fact that the film is a
comedy suggests that he is, in fact, laughing.
Beneath
his image, the movie's title, “McLintock!,” appears, complete
with exclamation point.
Beneath
the title, three pictures, looking much like snapshots, are featured,
the middle one of which slightly overlaps the one before and the one
after it. Comprising a sort of triptych, these smaller images seem to
be the soil, so to speak, out of which the comparatively gigantic
head and shoulders of McLintock arises, as if his being is rooted in
the activities the “snapshots” depict. The order of the smaller
images also suggest a beginning, a middle, and an end, and all of
them suggest violence of a sort.
The
first picture shows two men engaged in a fistfight, while a third
lies on the ground, apparently recovering from a blow.
The
second shows a man pursuing a woman dressed only in her underwear; he
holds part of her torn dress; she, the rest of it. One of the
buildings behind the couple is the McLintock Hotel. Probably to
maintain an element of suspense, neither of the two figures (or those
of the fighting men) are identifiable as members of the cast and, in
fact, look like any of the actors, so viewers can't tell whether the
fighters include Wayne or the couple consists of him and O'Hara.
The
third of the smaller pictures shows another brawl, in which one man,
shown in the foreground, knocks his opponent down, while, in the
background behind them, a third man holds a fourth, while a fifth
falls to the ground. Most of the men, of course, wear six-shooters,
holstered on their hips.
The
poster seems to indicate that McLintock is a man of violence, a
fighter and (by today's understanding) a perpetrator of domestic
violence. A businessman, probably of some social and economic
standing in town, he's outwardly respectful, but he's certainly no
saint. Like his business rivals, physical combatants, and his own
wife, others are subject to his will; a dominant personality he's
able and willing to impose his will on men and women alike. Somehow
(perhaps because the bigger image of him is laughing), he appears to
be likable.
With
some speculation, based on the poster's imagery, these notions are
about all a viewer can discern concerning the movie's likely plot.
Filmmakers were betting that these inferences would be enough to lure
fans of Westerns in general and of Wayne in particular into theaters
in 1963.
By
consulting a summary
of the movie, we can see whether the implications suggested by the
movie's poster (or the interpretation of it, at least, that's offered
in this post) are close to the content that the film actually
delivers, are far afield, or are somewhere between these polar
possibilities.
The
movie, we find, is based “loosely” on William Shakespeare's
comedy The
Taming of the Shrew. G. W.
is more financially successful than his name on the hotel, as shown
on the poster, suggests, and he's not primarily a hotel owner; he's a
rancher, a cattleman, and a mine operator as well.
His
wife Katherine (O'Hara) has left him, to live back east, after
suspecting he's committed adultery. His daughter Becky (Powers), a
college student, lives with him. In Katherine's absence, G. W.'s
hired a homesteader, the beautiful widow Louise Warren (De Carlo),
whose adult son Devlin (“Dev”) (Wayne's son Patrick) lives in
McLintock's house with her.
All
is cleared up between G. W. and Kathleen, after G. W. spanks her with
a coal scuttle, a technique he picked up from his daughter's fiance,
Dev, who earlier delivered the same punishment to Becky, using the
same instrument, whereupon the quarreling younger couple became
engaged.
The
poster is vague about the fistfights it depicts, but, it seems, they
reference the brawls that occur in the movie. The man pursuing the
woman in the central picture at the bottom of the poster is G. W.;
the woman he pursues, his wife (although their identification is,
perhaps intentionally, left unclear in the poster).
Wayne,
who developed the script, included the spanking scenes to indicate
his own aversion to domestic violence. However, according to O'Hara,
Wayne “really spanked me! My bottom was black and blue for weeks!”
Although
the poster seems purposely vague about the motives of the characters
and the particular details of the situations in which they are
depicted, again, probably to preserve suspense, it does a fair job of
hinting at the nature of the film and its general theme.
Fans
of the Western who enjoy action and adventure that includes sex
(symbolized on the poster by O'Hara's half-dressed state) and
violence (suggested on the poster by the pictures of fisticuffs) and
features a manly, if familiar, star as protagonist were likely to
fork over the price of admission to enjoy McLintock,
the filmmakers apparently believed, since this poster was released to
promote the film.
The
persistence of these ubiquitous dramatic (and narrative) elements,
which have become more and more explicit and pervasive in Westerns,
as in other genres of film, suggests that today's audience remains at
least as interested in these elements of the genre as was the same
genre's audience in 1963.
