True Grit (1969) Review
8/10
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. That’s exactly right.
This film cares so little whether you like its heroes, and that’s what wins me over. A stubborn kid and a drunk, overweight marshal spend two hours insulting each other, and by the meadow I’m completely on their side. I’d rate it higher if the middle didn’t sag and if Glen Campbell weren’t parked between two actors doing all the work.
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’s 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’s prepared to be, and the film plays it as a fight she wins. The horse trading is the funniest scene in the film to me. Watching Mattie grind a grown trader down with nothing but paperwork and nerve is a pleasure, and it tells you she’s going to win every argument that follows. Charles Portis wrote the novel in her voice as an old woman remembering, and the formal tone 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. That’s what makes the ending work. 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 can’t come, and neither of them says anything about it afterward. She doesn’t argue her way in, she simply arrives.
A young protagonist works when the story refuses to make them endearing. Competence and stubbornness carry a reader further than charm, and charm in a child character reads as an author asking for affection. Give them a specific goal and let them pursue it without apology. The formal dialogue is doing real work. A consistent speech tone that nobody in the reader’s world uses establishes a place more efficiently than any amount of description.
Let her win an argument early. The horse trading scene tells the audience exactly how difficult this person is. That means every later refusal to send her home is believable.
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’s killed twenty-three men and is vague about several of them. The courtroom sequence makes the performance. He’s 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. I love watching Wayne let himself be a bum here. I think it takes more nerve for a star of his size to look like a liar in a courtroom than to win a gunfight, and he plays it with obvious relish.
That’s 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 shouldn’t 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’s the most quoted moment Wayne ever filmed and it’s 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 work is the arithmetic. He’s outnumbered four to one, he’s old and drunk, and he charges anyway with both hands occupied. That’s either courage or a man who has decided he doesn’t much mind either way. Then, immediately, the film undercuts it. That’s the correct instinct. He’s unhorsed, pinned, and saved by the person he’s spent the film dismissing, and the heroism doesn’t go unpunished.
The exchange before it’s what makes the charge possible. Ned Pepper tells him he’s a one-eyed fat man, Rooster tells him to fill his hand, and the insult is accurate and the reply isn’t a denial. He agrees with the assessment, out loud, in front of everybody, and comes across the meadow anyway.
The meadow is the reason I rate this film as high as I do. Ninety seconds of an old man agreeing he’s a one-eyed fat man and charging anyway moves me, and it pays for every saggy stretch it takes to get there.
Establish incapacity for two hours and a single competent act becomes enormous. The charge works because the audience has watched him fall off things. The reverse never works. A character established as capable performing a capable act is an event with no meaning attached.
Undercut the heroism immediately afterward. Letting the gesture be partly a failure keeps it human and stops the story from tipping into a pose. Shoot it plainly. Clear geography and no cutting tricks make an audience believe an action that fast editing would make them doubt.
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’re 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’s 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 Coens’ 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 traveling together, and the Coens are more interested in the language. That 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’s room for him in it. He accepts, complains, and jumps a fence on a horse to prove he still can.
It’s sentimental and it’s earned. They aren’t 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 didn’t.
I’ll take the softer ending here anyway. Portis is right, and I know it, but after two hours with these two I want the fence jump, and the film earns it. 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 justifies 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 the film shoots none of it as heroism. It shoots it as a man refusing to arrive too late twice in one lifetime.
Withholding earns sentiment. Two hours of two people insulting each other makes a burial plot offer more moving than any declaration would. The test is whether the warm moment costs the characters something to say.
Choose your ending knowing what it forecloses. A reunion promised is comfortable, and the harder version, where neither sees the other again, is what the reader will remember.
Note that the actor is rewarded for the same thing the character is. Wayne consented to be undignified, Rooster consents to be ridiculous, and both are given a moment of grace for it.
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 and an old man who consents to be laughed at for two hours, and I enjoy its company more than the Coens’. It gets an 8 because the middle drifts and Glen Campbell sits in the saddle like a man waiting for his cue to sing, but those ninety seconds in the meadow pay for a lot.
