Mid-Life Cowboy

You’ve got to hand it John Wayne that a guy 67 years old, who’d spent at least 40 of those years on a six-pack-a-day smoking habit, and already sick with an eventually-fatal case of stomach cancer would still be kicking himself over losing out on a prime role. That’s the legend behind the oddball 70s movies McQ (1974) and Brannigan (1975) apparently the product of Wayne’s remorse over passing on the script to Dirty Harry and knowing what a loose-cannon crypto-fascist can do for a personal brand. One of these films succeeds much more than the other (at cultic John Wayne legacy-building, at least. Neither was particularly commercially or culturally impactful), but they’re both fascinating case studies in Wayneology.

In McQ, it’s painfully apparent that 67-year-old John Wayne is no 40-year-old Clint Eastwood. Dirty Harry is a great movie, and Eastwood is a perfect Dirty Harry. He’s strong but willowy, ageless, beautiful, vaguely androgynous. The pure incarnation of an unfeeling and all-seeing law (for those who haven’t seen DH in a while, or ever, it contains multiple scenes in which Harry Callahan is so distracted by looking in people’s windows that he fucks up some kind of law task. The lawman as voyeuristic perv is the freaking text of the movie!). Seeing John Wayne hobble around Seattle as the titular character is just depressing, a fact not helped by director John Sturges’s strange fixation with shots of Wayne walking through doors out of scenes, alone, and shot from behind. Sturges did great work with an also pretty old Spencer Tracy in the classic Bad Day At Black Rock, but a Q&A session with supporting player Clu Gulager reveals that, well, he may not have been trying that hard.

McQ is a pretty generic police thriller. There’s the dead partner, McQ handing in his badge and gun, a sleazy shipping magnate, corruption in the police department, etc. To be fair, that handing-in-your-badge-and-gun scene is actually pretty funny, if only because the hapless sergeant McQ throws his stuff at reacts like McQ is a puppy who just started pissing on his desk. McQ drives around a lot, and Wayne’s scowls during car chases like he’s midway through a heart-attack. Everyone else in this movie is also old, so much so it’ll make you, yourself, feel closer to the grave. In another movie this might be a treatment of aging, retirement, and irrelevance. McQ can’t muster up enough spirit to be about anything at all.

It’s not all dreck. There’s some nice photography, especially of Seattle’s rarely seen blue/green color pallette. There’s a car chase at the end that feels, in the best possible way, like they went to the prettiest beach they could find and just drove cars all over it. In an obvious attempt to bite Harry‘s magnum gimmick, McQ buys a Mac-10 machine gun about halfway through the movie, and seeing an actor most known for his six-shooter work gun down baddies with an SMG is kind of perversely entertaining, but other than that there’s not much here.

Brannigan on the other hand, is a study of what you can do with this kind of movie if you want to have a little fun with it. Though made later than McQ, canny shooting makes Wayne seem five years younger. Introduced kicking a door down (not open, down. like literally off it’s hinges) and delivering a one-liner, Jim Brannigan is the curmudgeonly, badass Chicago cop you always want to see but rarely get in such undiluted form. After busting a counterfeiter, Brannigan is taken straight from crime scene to O’Hare, handed a suitcase by his put-upon CO, and shipped straight to London, where vaguely mob-affiliated bad guy Ben Larkin is hiding from the law and about to make the jump to South America.

Where McQ is sloggy and familiar, Brannigan is fleet, creative, and most of all funny. The plot is complicated when Larkin is kidnapped by some British goons, who want to ransom him from his slimy accountant, but really what you’re here for is a slobs vs. snobs comedy in which Brannigan shows those limeys how to do police work, Chicago-style. There’s a car-chase with a jump over London bridge, a hitman who tries to kill Brannigan with an exploding toilet, and a blonde lady-cop Brannigan has a strangely flirty, paternal relationship with. The real highlight here though is a bar fight scene that lasts about as long as the famous They Live fight, and rises to levels that can only be described as Pythonesque. I promise you that an elderly John Wayne beating the crap out of a bunch of British stereotypes while barely moving is exactly as fun as that sounds.

Wayne is as fun to watch here as he is in any of his classic Westerns, and the camera worships him. Douglas Hickox, a director I know nothing about, takes the admirable tactic of pretending that this is the third or fourth, Brannigan Goes London instalment of the much beloved Brannigan series, and it pays off in spades. The movie almost convinces you that you know Brannigan, you love Brannigan, and goddammit, here’s Brannigan!

Wayne would go back to westerns for the last two movies of his career before dying of Stomach Cancer in 1978, and its easy to understand why he wanted to round things out with something familiar. But after one misfire, Wayne finds his groove and a director who could work with his limitations. Maybe not for introductory Wayneology students, but advanced scholars should could write term papers on the string of Brannigan movies they could have made if only they’d started in, oh, 1963.