User Reviews

By the time this episode aired on Maude, Bea Arthur had established herself first on All in the Family as Edith's feminist leaning cousin Maude and then on her own show, so popular a character she became. Bea Arthur later played a kind of version of herself on Golden Girls later on.

It was decided by producer Norman Lear that Maude just had to meet someone who was the antithesis of her beliefs who wasn't Carroll O'Connor as Archie Bunker. So in the first episode of season three of Maude, John Wayne makes an appearance at a party in Maude's town of Tuckahoe, New York.

You had to love it. Maude who was NEVER at a loss for words defending her beliefs is reduced to a tongue tied stammering idiot just by the mere presence of John Wayne. And the Duke says some of the things just calculated to outrage her. Had Archie Bunker said them to Maude, she'd have clobbered him with a frying pan. But when John Wayne says to her that it's all right for a woman to have a career just as long as she's got supper on the table for him when he arrives home from work, she just becomes a babbling idiot.

It's the power of celebrity, of being a movie star. Even a liberated woman like Maude Findlay isn't immune from it.

The episode was great fun, I hope some of the Duke's fans get to see it sometime.

Yes, Maude was reduced to babbling incoherence by John Wayne due to his celebrity but that was just part of it. She'd had a crush on him since her school days and try as she wanted, she couldn't keep it suppressed. She was outraged by his politics and his male chauvinism but at the end, she falls into his arms, unable to forget those afternoons that she ogled him from the back of a theater.

Maude was still a woman and no amount of feminism could obscure that she was subject to the same emotions as every school girl. Like the song, "Roses & Lollipops", they're all little girls fresh out of school and men and women forget that. Men forget that about themselves too and as a society, we're the losers for it.

This was apparently a promotional appearance for his latest movie, Brannigan. The Findley's conservative neighbor and friend, Arthur, is getting a visit from John Wayne (the explanation is a little vague on why), but a ceiling in Arthur's house colllapses and the Findley's end up hosting The Duke's visit. Hilarity ensues. Naturally, Maude wants to challange Wayne's conservative views, but she collapses like a cheap tent in a very disappointing conclusion in which John Wayne expresses shockingly misogynistic viewpoints.