“I had bruises for a week”: the co-star who took a literal spanking from John Wayne
No one would accuse John Wayne of being progressive off-screen or on. Famously conservative in his politics despite the generally liberal bent of Hollywood, he also stubbornly stuck to the classic western genre even as the film industry had well and truly moved on to easy riders and dirty Harrys. His role as a gunslinger with varying levels of subjective integrity was pretty much the same in every movie, whether it was in The Big Trail 1930 or in The Shootist nearly five decades later.
But even by his own highly traditional standards, there is a scene in one of Wayne’s movies that hasn’t aged particularly well. It doesn’t have to do with glorifying indefensible foreign wars or stereotyping Native Americans as savage criminals. It has to do with marriage.
In the 1963 western satire McLintock!, Wayne plays wealthy rancher George Washington McLintock who acts as the unelected head of state in his area. This means wrangling fellow ranchers, corrupt government officials, Native American tribes, farmers, local shopkeepers, and the homeless. He has a lot on his plate, but nothing is as vexing as his wife Kate (Maureen O’Hara), who left him for apparently no reason to return East and enjoy a more comfortable life. When she returns to seek custody of their daughter, they renew their old marital warring.
O’Hara was one of Wayne’s most frequent co-stars, having appeared opposite him in Rio Grande, The Quiet Man, and The Wings of Eagles. The Irish native was known for her striking red hair and spirited portrayals of gutsy women. When paired with Wayne, she always gave as good as she got, but in McLintock!, the screenwriters and director Andrew V McLaglen decided to push everything several notches over the limit.
At the end of the movie, Kate reveals that she left GW because she thought he was having an affair, so he chases her through town, throws her over his knee, and spanks her in front of the town. Naturally, this leads to a sappy reconciliation.
Writing about the scene in her memoir, O’Hara remembered that, despite the light tone of the film, the spanking was anything but. It was, she recorded, “completely authentic”, and Wayne had carried it out with “such gusto” that she “had bruises for a week”.
Setting aside Wayne’s credentials as a method actor, the scene in question has not aged well. Perhaps the filmmakers were hoping that, since the story was loosely based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, viewers would see it as an outrageous slapstick twist on an otherwise unassailable tale of love and conflict from the eminent Bard. But even the greatest Shakespearean directors have struggled to reinterpret the play in a way that isn’t repulsively sexist, so adding an even more misogynistic spin might not have been the cleverest of moves.
Still, the scene was deemed to be so hilarious by the filmmakers that it was put on the poster for the film. That same year, Betty Friedan kicked off Second Wave Feminism with her book The Feminine Mystique.
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