John Wayne may have passed away 35 years ago, but he remains a hugely popular movie star.
Nearly every one of Wayne’s movies is on home video now, which is nothing to sneeze at since he made around 80 after director John Ford gave him a starmaking role in “Stagecoach” (1939), and before that, he was in another 80, half of them cheap B-Westerns.
But Wayne’s biggest movies haven’t just been issued on DVD and Blu-ray. Many of them have been released and re-released over and over again in a variety of packaging and formats.
His greatest classics, from “Fort Apache” (1948) to “Red River” (1948) to “The Quiet Man” (1952) to “The Searchers” (1956) to “Rio Bravo” (1959) to “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962) to “True Grit” (1969) to “The Shootist” (1976) and many, many more, can be found in dozens of box sets, on Blu-ray, on DVD, and before these formats, on VHS, Beta and LaserDisc.
But none of Wayne’s many films has had quite the convoluted history of “McLintock!”
The arrival of “McLintock!” on not one, but two Blu-ray releases over the past couple of months speaks to how popular the film remains and how many labels have released it.
This is a case of buyer beware, however, since not all “McLintocks!” are created equal.
It’s no coincidence that we have dueling Blu-ray “McLintocks!” as we run up to Memorial Day. For some reason, John Wayne Westerns are reissued in new sets and individually every year at this time.
World War II movies getting annual Memorial Day re-releases, that I get. But what’s with the Westerns?
Just over the past couple of weeks, two new DVD box sets of recycled Wayne movies — dominated by Westerns — have made their way into stores: the pricey “John Wayne: The Epic Collection” from Warner Home Video with no less than 40 movies and bounteous extras, and the more economical “John Wayne Film Collection” from 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with 10 films.
All of the movies in these sets have been out in many previous incarnations except for one. The Fox set includes “The Barbarian and the Geisha” (1958), which marks its disc debut. And this set is also available in Blu-ray, but for some reason it contains only seven titles.
One of the titles that is in the DVD 10-disc set but not the Blu-ray seven-disc set is “Red River,” which is getting a standalone Blu-ray release next week from the boutique label Criterion Collection, with exclusive bonus features.
That’s a whole lot of John Wayne on 21st-century store shelves.
But let’s get back to “McLintock!” which features Wayne’s frequent co-star Maureen O’Hara and is one of his few flat-out comedies, steeped in roughneck slapstick no less, at one point depicting an all-out brawl that climaxes in a soggy mud pit.
“McLintock!” — an acknowledged reworking of William Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” complete with two scenes of women being spanked by their men with small coal shovels — was a huge hit in its day (No. 11 on the box-office hit list for 1963). And it's obviously still very popular.
Male chauvinism (and other political incorrectness) notwithstanding, this broad comedy was one of the most sought-after titles of the 1990s when VHS movie collecting was at its peak.
There were many other titles that were slow to come to home video, including such frequently asked-about films as Steven Spielberg’s “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982), the romantic comedy-drama “An Affair to Remember” (1957) and Walt Disney’s “Fantasia” (1940). But for many years, “McLintock!” topped them all as the most-requested title among movies that had never been on video.
Part of the reason for that level of popularity was its scarcity. “McLintock!” had not been on television or anywhere else for so long that fans wanted desperately to see it again. But no amount of fan-based prodding could exercise its release.
Then, in 1991, a funny thing happened. The John Wayne estate, which owned “McLintock!” and a number of other films through Wayne’s production company Batjac, didn’t notice that the comedy was due for copyright renewal — and lo and behold, it fell into the public domain.
Suddenly, “McLintock!” was “common property,” meaning that anyone with a print of the film in his attic could copy it onto VHS tape and sell it. And that’s just what a little independent company called GoodTimes Video did.
This didn’t sit well with Wayne’s son Michael, who produced the movie, so he sued GoodTimes. But a couple of years later a judge ruled that no one owned “McLintock!” anymore and GoodTimes had a legal right to release it on home video.
So Michael Wayne struck a deal with MPI Home Video and in 1993, within weeks of each other, “McLintock!” appeared on two home video labels. MPI’s was more expensive but boasted pristine quality since its source was the original negative, while the source for GoodTimes was a scratchy, well-worn print that was missing three minutes of footage.
And that’s what sets the highest-quality discs of “McLintock!” apart from other releases today.
You can buy very cheap DVDs of “McLintock!” on a variety of public-domain labels: Delta, Reel, TGG, Vina, Genius, St. Clair … and, yes, GoodTimes. And many of these use as their sources inferior, flawed prints that can’t match the quality offered by Paramount Home Video, which has been licensing the title for DVD and now has released a brand-new Blu-ray upgrade.
As mentioned above, another Blu-ray of “McLintock!” was released a couple of months ago — on the Olive Films label, which has been issuing quite a few vintage Paramount titles over the past few years. And Olive’s is a good-looking transfer, but it’s also spare, with no bonus features.
The Paramount Blu-ray, on the other hand, boasts all the extras from its earlier DVD release, including an audio commentary that features Maureen O’Hara and Stefanie Powers, as well as several featurettes, a photo gallery and the original trailer.
Price-wise, they’re both in the same ballpark, but the Paramount release — which has the words “Authentic Collector’s Edition From Original Film Elements” on its box cover — obviously has the edge.
Chris Hicks is the author of "Has Hollywood Lost Its Mind? A Parent’s Guide to Movie Ratings." Website: www.hicksflicks.com
Email: hicks@deseretnews.com