Watching the Detectives: John Wayne is McQ
Stan Boyle, a friend of Lon McQ’s, is found badly wounded and the veteran cop is convinced local villain Manny Santiago is behind it, so he goes looking for a little payback. When he’s chastised by his superior, Ed Kosterman (Eddie Albert), for assaulting Santiago, McQ quits the force and searches for evidence that will prove Santiago was behind the murder (Boyle dies in hospital), but he discovers far more than he bargained for.
A John Wayne film directed by John Sturges is an exciting prospect but sadly the finished article failed to live up to its potential. Had they made a western together instead of a modern-day thriller things might have been different but Wayne is too old, too fat, and too out of his element in McQ for it to really work. Wayne’s westerns of the ‘70s had him, for the most part at least, aging gracefully, with his roles in Big Jake, The Cowboys, and The Shootist fitting the actor perfectly. Yet both the contemporary films he made that decade, this and Brannigan, have him playing a cop, when a man his age would have been pensioned off. Brannigan is the more fun of the two, it at least knows it’s silly and plays on that, but McQ plays it straight and is much the worse for it.
