McLintock! (July 21/15)

A fairly interminable Western, McLintock! follows John Wayne's George Washington McLintock as he's forced to contend with the sudden return of his irate wife (Maureen O'Hara's Katherine) while dealing with a host of other problems within his tight-knit community. Filmmaker Andrew V. McLaglen, working from James Edward Grant's screenplay, employs an aggressively episodic structure that's nothing short of disastrous, with the patchwork narrative revolving around one far-from-engrossing incident after another (eg McLintock finds himself in the middle of an epic brawl, McLintock prepares to welcome home his daughter, etc, etc). McLintock! does, as a result, suffer from a palpable absence of forward motion that grows more and more disastrous as time (very slowly) progresses, and it's clear, too, that the movie's various other elements (eg brief forays into comedy) fall hopelessly flat and perpetuate the pervasively lackluster atmosphere. And while McLaglen offers up a small assortment of admittedly compelling sequences (eg McLintock has a touching heart-to-heart with his teenage daughter), McLintock! ultimately contains few attributes designed to capture and sustain the attention of most contemporary filmgoers. (And what's with the almost abhorrently backwards conclusion, in which Wayne's character publicly spanks his wife?)