McLintock: Getting Wild in the Wild West

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.