True Grit (1969) Review

A fourteen-year-old girl arrives in Fort Smith to collect her murdered father’s body and his possessions. She negotiates the return of his horses, hires the meanest marshal available, and refuses to be left behind.

The 8 is for a film carried by two performances and a piece of casting that could easily have gone wrong. Kim Darby was twenty-one playing fourteen and plays Mattie as somebody with no interest in being liked, which is exactly right.

The deductions are for the middle, which meanders, and for Glen Campbell, who was cast for the soundtrack and is visibly out of his depth alongside two people doing serious work. The title song is pleasant and belongs to a different and considerably softer film than the one it has ended up being attached to at the front and back of this one.

Mattie Ross Is the Protagonist

The film belongs to a fourteen-year-old and the genre almost never permits that. She negotiates, litigates, threatens lawsuits, quotes scripture and out-argues every adult she encounters.

The horse trading scene is the best writing in it and lasts about five minutes. She recovers money her father is owed from a man who did nothing wrong, purely by being more relentless than he is prepared to be, and the film plays it as a fight she wins.

Charles Portis wrote the novel in her voice as an old woman remembering, and the formal register survives into the film. Nobody uses contractions, everybody speaks in complete sentences, and it should sound stilted and instead sounds like a specific place and time.

Kim Darby plays her without a trace of charm. Mattie is humorless, correct, unimpressed and physically unafraid, and the performance refuses every opportunity to make her adorable, which is what makes the ending land.

The river crossing is where the character is settled. Refused passage on the ferry, she puts her horse into the water and swims it across in front of two men who have just told her she cannot come, and neither of them says anything about it afterward. She does not argue her way in, she simply arrives.

Wayne Is Willing to Be Ridiculous

Rooster Cogburn is overweight, drunk by midday, living in the back of a store with a cat, and giving court testimony that establishes he has killed twenty-three men and is vague about several of them.

The courtroom sequence is where the performance is made. He is cross-examined about whether the men he shot were facing him, contradicts himself, gets irritated, and the film lets him look like a liar in front of a judge.

Wayne at sixty-two had spent forty years being the most authoritative man in every frame and this is him consenting to be laughed at. The falling off a horse, the eye patch business, the arguing with a child about a dead man’s boots.

That is why the last sequence works. When he puts the reins in his teeth and rides at four men across a meadow, the audience has spent two hours watching somebody who should not be able to do it.

Robert Duvall and Dennis Hopper are both in it early in their careers and both are better than the material requires. Duvall’s Ned Pepper is the only man in the film who frightens Rooster, and the exchange between them before the charge is two professionals acknowledging each other before one of them has to die.

The Meadow

Four men on one side, one man on the other, a wide open space, and a short exchange before it starts. It is the most quoted moment Wayne ever filmed and it is about ninety seconds long.

The staging is simple and unfussy. Henry Hathaway shoots it in wide masters with the geography absolutely clear, no cutting for excitement, and the distance between the two sides visible throughout.

What makes it land is the arithmetic. He is outnumbered four to one, he is old and drunk, and he charges anyway with both hands occupied, which is either courage or a man who has decided he does not much mind either way.

The film then undercuts it immediately, which is the correct instinct. He is unhorsed, pinned, and saved by the person he has spent the film dismissing, and the heroism does not go unpunished.

The exchange before it is what makes the charge possible. Ned Pepper tells him he is a one-eyed fat man, Rooster tells him to fill his hand, and the insult is accurate and the reply is not a denial. He agrees with the assessment, out loud, in front of everybody, and comes across the meadow anyway.

What the Coens Did Differently

The 2010 version is closer to the book, colder, and considerably better looking, and the comparison is worth making because they are genuinely different films from the same material.

This one is warmer and more sentimental, with a score that tells you how to feel and an ending that softens the novel’s considerably harder conclusion. It is also funnier and more comfortable to spend two hours inside.

Portis wrote an old woman looking back with no self-pity and a missing arm, and the 1969 film removes almost all of that. What it keeps is the relationship, and the relationship is the reason the film has lasted.

Neither version is definitive. This one has Wayne consenting to be undignified and a fourteen-year-old who refuses to be charming, and those two things together are enough.

The 2010 film also has the better final ten minutes and this one has the better middle. Hathaway lets scenes run at the speed of people travelling together, and the Coens are more interested in the language, which produces two films that are strongest at opposite ends.

The Ending It Chose

Mattie shows Rooster a plot in her family cemetery and tells him there is room for him in it. He accepts, complains, and jumps a fence on a horse to prove he still can.

It is sentimental and it is earned, which are not the same thing. The film has spent two hours establishing that neither of these people has anybody, and the offer of a burial plot is the least romantic possible way to say so.

The novel’s ending is harder and better and this one is defensible. What the film wants is for the audience to leave believing these two saw each other again, and Portis is explicit that they did not.

Wayne won the Academy Award for it, forty years into a career, for a performance built on being willing to look bad. He said afterward that he should have put an eye patch on thirty-five years earlier.

The ride to the doctor is the sequence that earns the burial plot. He rides a horse to death getting her to help, then takes another at gunpoint, carrying a child who has been bitten, and none of it is filmed as heroism. It is filmed as a man refusing to arrive too late twice in one lifetime.

Should you watch True Grit?

Yes, and then watch the 2010 one. This is the warmer version, with a fourteen-year-old who refuses to be charming, an old man who consents to be laughed at for two hours, and ninety seconds in a meadow that justify the whole enterprise.

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