OVP: True Grit (1969)

Film: True Grit (1969)

Stars: John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Jeremy Slate, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: 2 nominations/1 win (Best Actor-John Wayne*, Original Song-"True Grit")

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2023 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the Golden Age western, and the stars who made it one of the most enduring legacies of Classical Hollywood.  This month, our focus is on John Wayne: click here to learn more about Mr. Wayne (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

We talked a lot about John Wayne's career renaissance last week, with a focus on how Wayne was able to make some of the best movies of his career in the late 1950's & early 1960's by skewering or playing with the mold of his career.  That didn't, however, get him Hollywood's top prize.  Despite being a near constant presence in Best Picture nominees like Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, The Alamo, and How the West Was Won, Wayne was only ever cited for acting once prior to 1969, for his work in 1949's Sands of Iwo Jima (he lost to Broderick Crawford).  By 1969, it was clear that Wayne was starting to age, and the system that had made him a legend had collapsed.  True Grit, a massive hit in a year where traditional Hollywood fare was bombing while New Hollywood pictures were resonating with audiences, was a last gasp chance to give Wayne an Oscar, and AMPAS took it.  It is amusing to me that John Wayne, the conservative embodiment of a past generation, won his only Oscar on the same night as Midnight Cowboy, the lone X-rated film to ever win an Academy Award (a film that he probably hated).  Even the Duke knew he was getting this as a career achievement award more than anything else.  As a visibly moved Wayne accepted his statue from Barbra Streisand, he said "if I'd know that, I'd have put that patch on 35 years earlier"...understanding that it was perhaps the 35 years & not the eyepatch that had gotten him to that stage after decades of trying to reach it.

(Spoilers Ahead) True Grit is not really the tale of Wayne's Rooster Cogburn, but of Mattie Ross (Darby), a young girl who is attempting to avenge the death of her father Frank Ross, who was killed by a man named Tom Chaney (Corey).  She looks for someone to bring him in, picking Cogburn to track down Chaney, and offers to pay him, but with the proviso that she wants to come with him, sporting her father's gun along the way.  Initially he refuses, despite needing the money, and tries to abandon her at one point, but after she fords a river (in an impressive show of strength for Darby & the horse), she is allowed to join, along with La Bouef (Campbell), a handsome but dim-witted man who is familiar with Chaney.  Along the way, they meet a number of men connected to Chaney, including small parts played by Dennis Hopper & Robert Duvall quite early in both of their careers (this would've been the same year that Hopper was becoming a household name in Easy Rider), but eventually find Chaney & kill him, though in the process Mattie is injured and La Bouef killed.  The film ends with Mattie promising that she'll bury Rooster Cogburn in her family plot, meaning he now finally has a family of his own.

The movie, I'm sorry to say, is not good.  I didn't like the remake of this by the Coen Brothers, but by comparison that is better, largely because Hailee Steinfeld is not super annoying in that movie.  Darby's Mattie Ross, as I said, is the true central character of the film, but like most parts portraying children at the time (in real life, Darby would've been 21 when this movie was filmed), she is defiant and stringent in this role, and doesn't really have any sense of humanity.  There's a running joke about her wanting to refer everyone to her lawyer that goes nowhere, to the point where you aren't entirely sure it's supposed to be a joke by the film's end.  Darby left me cold.

The same could be said for Wayne, though in a different way.  As you might've been able to guess four weeks into our look at Wayne, despite the actor's complicated politics, I'm a fan.  Wayne had a sturdiness in his pictures that I find really watchable, and when he's great, he is really something to behold.  Given this won an Oscar for Best Actor, I was hoping for one of those special moments from Wayne, but I didn't get it.  This isn't bad, necessarily, but it's not good enough for an Oscar nomination.  John Wayne deserved an Academy Award at some point in his career, and so I'm glad he got one, but when we get to this year in the Oscar Viewing Project, don't expect to see Wayne's name show up-there were considerably better choices.  The film is pretty much a standard-issue Wayne western, not special in any way except for the title song, beautifully sung by one of my favorite singers (his costar Glen Campbell), which swells and is lovingly used throughout the film's score, and would become synonymous with Wayne in the decades that followed.