(Marshal Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn peers across the field at the four outlaws he’s been pursuing.)
Ned Pepper (played by Robert Duvall): “What's your intention? Do you think one on four is a dogfall?”
Ned Pepper (played by Robert Duvall): “What's your intention? Do you think one on four is a dogfall?”
Rooster (played by John Wayne): “I mean to kill you in one minute, Ned. Or see you hanged in Fort Smith at Judge Parker's convenience. Which'll it be?"
Ned: “I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”
Rooster: “Fill your hands, you son of a bitch!”—True Grit (1969), screenplay by Marguerite Roberts, adapted from the novel by Charles Portis, directed by Henry Hathaway
We know how this one ends, don’t we? After all, this is a John Wayne movie.
Well, it is—and it isn’t.
True Grit, released on this date in 1969, came at the end of a decade in which the original film genre questioned and even subverted traditional American notions of virtue and heroism, in fare such as Once Upon a Time in the West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Wild Bunch. No true-blue Western hero—a straight-shooting marshal with no particular ax to grind except justice—could have passed muster in a nation increasingly sensitized to violence, race, and imperialism.
Indeed, Rooster Cogburn is a rusty Galahad if there ever was one to help teenage Mattie Ross on her obsessive quest to find the killers of her father. While not a beginning-to-end comedy like the James Garner vehicle of the same year, Support Your Local Sheriff!, True Grit has more than its share of offbeat frontier humor, rising naturally from ornery characters.
How much of this comes from the original Charles Portis novel vs. Marguerite Roberts’ adaptation, I don’t know. But the wry tone goes a long way toward depicting Cogburn as a far more realistic—i.e., human, warts and all—figure than the norm up until the Sixties.
We know how this one ends, don’t we? After all, this is a John Wayne movie.
Well, it is—and it isn’t.
True Grit, released on this date in 1969, came at the end of a decade in which the original film genre questioned and even subverted traditional American notions of virtue and heroism, in fare such as Once Upon a Time in the West, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and The Wild Bunch. No true-blue Western hero—a straight-shooting marshal with no particular ax to grind except justice—could have passed muster in a nation increasingly sensitized to violence, race, and imperialism.
Indeed, Rooster Cogburn is a rusty Galahad if there ever was one to help teenage Mattie Ross on her obsessive quest to find the killers of her father. While not a beginning-to-end comedy like the James Garner vehicle of the same year, Support Your Local Sheriff!, True Grit has more than its share of offbeat frontier humor, rising naturally from ornery characters.
How much of this comes from the original Charles Portis novel vs. Marguerite Roberts’ adaptation, I don’t know. But the wry tone goes a long way toward depicting Cogburn as a far more realistic—i.e., human, warts and all—figure than the norm up until the Sixties.
Cogburn is not only, as Ned notes accurately if insultingly, one-eyed and fat, but he’s also old and frequently drunk, to the initial disgust of Mattie. (In one of the film’s best scenes, a wildly intoxicated Rooster falls off his horse—yet doesn’t spill a single drop of his open whiskey bottle. Many guys I knew in high school wished they could have pulled off that neat trick!)
Like Mattie, film critics came around, much to their surprise, to regard Wayne with affection and even admiration for his work on this film. It took four decades for this most durable of Hollywood stars to establish his credibility with reviewers.
Like Mattie, film critics came around, much to their surprise, to regard Wayne with affection and even admiration for his work on this film. It took four decades for this most durable of Hollywood stars to establish his credibility with reviewers.
In his 2004 essay collection, Who the Hell’s in It, critic-turned-director-turned-actor Peter Bogdanovich wonders what took them so long, locating their longtime prejudice against this popular star in narrow notions of what acting really constitutes:
“The particular quality in a star that makes audiences instantly suspend their disbelief…is an achievement which normally goes so unnoticed that most people don’t even think of it as acting at all. To a lot of people, acting means fake accents and false noses, and a lot of emoting….John Wayne was at his best precisely when he was simply being what came to be called ‘John Wayne.’”
There are several other reasons—at least one associated with the seemingly Wayne style of acting discussed by Bogdanovich—that might account for why he was routinely dismissed by critics:
* Suppression of artifice—“I don’t act—I react,” Wayne was fond of saying. It’s not a very showy style, but it is true to the laconic speech of his frontier characters. Words don’t matter to them; action—usually coming from his fist or gun barrel—does.
* Modesty—Joseph Cotton puckishly titled his autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, but despite his recurring box-office success (and his almost-equal success with women), Wayne kept his ego firmly in place. In a fine piece for Huffington Post on “Why John Wayne Still Ranks Among Today’s Most Popular Stars,” John Farr points out that the man who rescued him from B-film purgatory, director John Ford, also—unfairly, given the amount of times he used him—needled the Duke endlessly about his lack of ability. Wayne’s own self-deprecating comments (e.g., “I play John Wayne in every part regardless of the character, and I've been doing okay, haven't I?”) did nothing to convince critics of his versatility, the quality they prized most in actors.
* Conservatism—Especially as the Sixties wore on, Wayne’s reactionary opinions—on the civil-rights movement, Native Americans, and what he believed was un-Americanism—rankled many reviewers. It all came to a head in 1968, when his flagwaving The Green Berets constituted a reel-to-reel brief for the Vietnam War. "After The Green Berets, I never thought I’d be able to take John Wayne seriously again," New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby noted—just before admitting that his mind had been changed by True Grit, pointing to Cogburn as the best role of Wayne’s long career.
A major hypocrisy—or, if you want to be charitable, contradiction or paradox—existed in Wayne: an actor who invariably played heroic roles shunned military service when it mattered in World War II. Wayne never contested his deferments based on age and family status or actively pushed to enlist, though other stars (e.g., Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, Wayne Morris) did so, often at great cost to their careers.
And yet the American public forgave him, with theater owners naming him among the top 10 box-office stars for an unheard-of 25 straight years. He might have been even more popular with those who worked with him, where his unpretentiousness, humor, and generosity in sharing tricks with other actors.
Some final words on courage—an inevitability, given Wayne’s attraction to this quality in his characters, as well as the title of his Oscar-winning film. While Rooster represented something of a parody of his traditional character (as he wisecracked when he won his Oscar, “If I'd known what I know now, I'd put a patch on my eye thirty five years ago"), the actor still displayed the essential physical bravery of a hero. And in the movie’s final image, director Henry Hathaway froze the frame with Wayne high in the saddle—a classic equestrian shot.
Though he showed little courage in facing up to his military obligations, Wayne was exemplary in confronting the disease that finally killed him. Nearly five years before the release of True Grit, he’d had a cancerous left lung removed—then announced to the world that he’d “licked the Big C.” The admission was unusual at the time, because actors afflicted with cancer had then often found themselves unemployable.
“The particular quality in a star that makes audiences instantly suspend their disbelief…is an achievement which normally goes so unnoticed that most people don’t even think of it as acting at all. To a lot of people, acting means fake accents and false noses, and a lot of emoting….John Wayne was at his best precisely when he was simply being what came to be called ‘John Wayne.’”
There are several other reasons—at least one associated with the seemingly Wayne style of acting discussed by Bogdanovich—that might account for why he was routinely dismissed by critics:
* Suppression of artifice—“I don’t act—I react,” Wayne was fond of saying. It’s not a very showy style, but it is true to the laconic speech of his frontier characters. Words don’t matter to them; action—usually coming from his fist or gun barrel—does.
* Modesty—Joseph Cotton puckishly titled his autobiography Vanity Will Get You Somewhere, but despite his recurring box-office success (and his almost-equal success with women), Wayne kept his ego firmly in place. In a fine piece for Huffington Post on “Why John Wayne Still Ranks Among Today’s Most Popular Stars,” John Farr points out that the man who rescued him from B-film purgatory, director John Ford, also—unfairly, given the amount of times he used him—needled the Duke endlessly about his lack of ability. Wayne’s own self-deprecating comments (e.g., “I play John Wayne in every part regardless of the character, and I've been doing okay, haven't I?”) did nothing to convince critics of his versatility, the quality they prized most in actors.
* Conservatism—Especially as the Sixties wore on, Wayne’s reactionary opinions—on the civil-rights movement, Native Americans, and what he believed was un-Americanism—rankled many reviewers. It all came to a head in 1968, when his flagwaving The Green Berets constituted a reel-to-reel brief for the Vietnam War. "After The Green Berets, I never thought I’d be able to take John Wayne seriously again," New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby noted—just before admitting that his mind had been changed by True Grit, pointing to Cogburn as the best role of Wayne’s long career.
A major hypocrisy—or, if you want to be charitable, contradiction or paradox—existed in Wayne: an actor who invariably played heroic roles shunned military service when it mattered in World War II. Wayne never contested his deferments based on age and family status or actively pushed to enlist, though other stars (e.g., Henry Fonda, Robert Montgomery, Wayne Morris) did so, often at great cost to their careers.
And yet the American public forgave him, with theater owners naming him among the top 10 box-office stars for an unheard-of 25 straight years. He might have been even more popular with those who worked with him, where his unpretentiousness, humor, and generosity in sharing tricks with other actors.
Some final words on courage—an inevitability, given Wayne’s attraction to this quality in his characters, as well as the title of his Oscar-winning film. While Rooster represented something of a parody of his traditional character (as he wisecracked when he won his Oscar, “If I'd known what I know now, I'd put a patch on my eye thirty five years ago"), the actor still displayed the essential physical bravery of a hero. And in the movie’s final image, director Henry Hathaway froze the frame with Wayne high in the saddle—a classic equestrian shot.
Though he showed little courage in facing up to his military obligations, Wayne was exemplary in confronting the disease that finally killed him. Nearly five years before the release of True Grit, he’d had a cancerous left lung removed—then announced to the world that he’d “licked the Big C.” The admission was unusual at the time, because actors afflicted with cancer had then often found themselves unemployable.
His last film, The Shootist, had unmistakable personal overtones because the predicament of his gunman character—a cancer diagnosis—was so like his own.
Ten years to the day that True Grit was released, John Wayne succumbed to stomach cancer—or, as John Ford might say, “went West.” Today, the John Wayne Cancer Institute at St. John’s Health Center works to find a cure for the disease that Wayne battled with the most powerful weapons in his personal arsenal: humor, grace and dignity.
Ten years to the day that True Grit was released, John Wayne succumbed to stomach cancer—or, as John Ford might say, “went West.” Today, the John Wayne Cancer Institute at St. John’s Health Center works to find a cure for the disease that Wayne battled with the most powerful weapons in his personal arsenal: humor, grace and dignity.
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