True Grit is a 1969 American western Technicolor film written by Marguerite Roberts, directed by Henry Hathaway, and starring John Wayne as U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn; Wayne won his only Academy Award for his performance in this film and reprised his role as Cogburn in the 1975 sequel Rooster Cogburn. Historians believe Rooster was based on Deputy U.S. Marshal Heck Thomas, who brought in some of the toughest outlaws. The picture is the first adaptation of Charles Portis' 1968 novel True Grit. The supporting cast features Glen Campbell, Kim Darby, Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper and Strother Martin.
Plot
Frank Ross (John Pickard) is murdered by his hired hand, Tom Chaney (Jeff Corey) in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Ross' daughter, Mattie (Kim Darby), hires aging U.S. Marshal Reuben "Rooster" J. Cogburn (John Wayne) to bring Chaney in. Mattie has heard that Cogburn has "true grit". She gives him a down payment to track and capture Chaney, who has taken up with "Lucky" Ned Pepper (Robert Duvall) in Indian Territory (Oklahoma).
A young Texas Ranger, La Boeuf (Glen Campbell), is also pursuing Chaney and joins forces with Cogburn, despite Mattie's protest. The two try to ditch Mattie, but she catches up and joins them.
After several days, the three discover two horse thieves named Emmett Quincy (Jeremy Slate) and Moon (Dennis Hopper) who are waiting for Ned Pepper at a remote dugout cabin. The trio overtake the cabin and Cogburn interrogates the thieves. Moon's leg is injured and Cogburn uses the injury as leverage to get information about Lucky Ned. To prevent Moon from talking too much Quincy stabs Moon, and Cogburn kills Quincy. Before Moon dies, he tells Cogburn that Pepper and his gang are due at the cabin that night. The trio lays a trap for them.
When Pepper and his men arrive, La Boeuf blows their cover by firing too soon and a firefight ensues, during which Cogburn and La Boeuf kill two of the gang but Pepper and the rest of his men escape. Cogburn, La Boeuf and Mattie make their way to McAlester's store with the dead bodies. Cogburn tries to persuade Mattie to stay at McAlester's, but she refuses.
The three resume their pursuit. Fetching water one morning, Mattie finds herself face-to-face with Chaney. She shoots, injuring Chaney and calling out to her partners. Pepper and his gang capture her, and Lucky Ned forces Cogburn and La Boeuf to abandon the girl. Pepper leaves Mattie in the care of Chaney, who has lost his horse. He promises he will send a horse back for Chaney, and that he will kill him if he harms Mattie.
Cogburn doubles back and attacks Pepper and his gang. La Boeuf finds Mattie and moves Chaney to an area he thinks is secure. La Boeuf and Mattie watch as a mounted Cogburn confronts Ned and his three gang members. Cogburn gives Pepper a choice between being killed right there or surrendering and being hanged in Fort Smith. Declining to surrender, Pepper insults Cogburn, who charges the four outlaws, guns blazing. He kills two of the gang and mortally wounds Pepper. In the fight, Ned has shot Rooster's horse, trapping Rooster's leg under him as he goes down. As the wounded Ned Pepper prepares to kill Rooster, La Boeuf makes a long shot with his Sharps Rifle, killing Pepper.
As La Boeuf and Mattie return to Pepper's camp, Chaney comes out from behind a tree and strikes La Boeuf in the head with a rock, fracturing his skull and knocking him unconscious. Mattie shoots Chaney in the arm but, driven back by the recoil, falls into a snake pit and breaks her arm. Cogburn arrives and shoots Chaney dead. As Cogburn descends into the pit on a rope to retrieve Mattie, she is bitten by a rattlesnake. The mortally injured La Boeuf helps them out of the pit. Once Rooster and Mattie have been rescued, La Boeuf dies.
Cogburn is forced to leave La Boeuf's body behind as they race to get help for Mattie at McAlester's on Mattie's pony. After stealing a buckboard, they arrive at their destination. There, an Indian doctor treats Mattie's snakebite and broken arm. She is in a bad way.
Some time later, Mattie's attorney, J. Noble Daggett (John Fiedler) meets Cogburn in Fort Smith. He pays Cogburn a reward for Chaney's capture. He also declines a bet with Cogburn, who offers to wager the reward money that Mattie will recover just fine.
In the epilogue, Mattie, arm in a sling, is recovered and at home. She promises Cogburn he will be buried next to her in the Ross family plot after his death. Cogburn reluctantly accepts her offer and leaves, jumping over a fence with his new horse to disprove her good-natured jab that he was too old and fat to clear a four rail fence, and rides off into the valley below.
Cast
- John Wayne as Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn
- Kim Darby as Mattie Ross
- Glen Campbell as La Boeuf
- Jeremy Slate as Emmett Quincy
- Robert Duvall as Lucky Ned Pepper
- Dennis Hopper as Moon
- Strother Martin as Col. G. Stonehill
- Jeff Corey as Tom Chaney
- Donald Woods as Barlow
- John Fiedler as Lawyer Daggett
- James Westerfield as Judge Parker
- John Doucette as Sheriff
- Donald Woods as Barlow
- Edith Atwater as Mrs. Floyd
- Carlos Rivas as Dirty Bob
- Isabel Boniface as Mrs. Bagby
- H.W. Gim as Chen Lee
- Ginger Cat as General Sterling Price (uncredited)
- John Pickard as Frank Ross
- Elizabeth Harrower as Mrs. Ross
- Ken Renard as Yarnell
- Jay Silverheels as Condemned Man at Hanging
- Hank Worden as Undertaker
- Ron Soble as Captain Boots Finch
- Alfred Ryder as Goudy
- Jay Ripley as Harold Parmalee
- Kenneth Becker as Farrell Parmalee
- Wilford Brimley as Minor Role (uncredited)
- Leo Alton as Boarding House Guest (uncredited)
- Forrest Burns as Courtroom Spectator (uncredited)
- Gene Coogan as Boarding House Guest (uncredited)
- Myron Healey as Deputy at Prisoner Unloading (uncredited)
- Boyd 'Red' Morgan as Red (Ferryman) (uncredited)
- James McEachin as Judge Parker's Bailiff (uncredited)
- Dennis McMullen as Bailiff (uncredited)
- Robin Morse as Bit Part (uncredited)
- Stuart Randll as McAlester (uncredited)
- Connie Sawyer as Talkative Woman at Hanging (uncredited)
- Jeffrey Sayre as Courtroom Spectator (uncredited)
- Jay Silverheels as Condemned Man at Hanging (uncredited)
- Dean Smith as Minor Role (uncredited)
- Vince St. Cyr as Gaspargoo (uncredited)
- Max Wagner as Courtroom Spectator (uncredited)
- Guy Wilkerson as The Hangman (uncredited)
- Chalky Williams as Courtroom Spectator (uncredited)
Darby, Campbell and Duvall are the last surviving primary cast members.
Production
Filming took place mainly in Ouray County, Colorado, in the vicinity of Ridgway (now the home of the True Grit Cafe), around the town of Montrose (Montrose County), and the town of Ouray. (The script maintains the novel's references to place names in Arkansas and Oklahoma, in dramatic contrast to the Colorado topography.) The courtroom scenes were filmed at Ouray County Courthouse in Ouray.
The scenes that take place at the "dugout" and along the creek where Pierce and Moon are killed, as well as the scene where Rooster carries Mattie on her horse Little Blackie after the snakebite, were filmed at Hot Creek on the east side of the Sierra Nevada near the town of Mammoth Lakes, California. Mount Morrison and Laurel Mountain form the backdrop above the creek. This location was also used in North to Alaska. Filming was done from September to December 1968.
Mia Farrow was originally cast as Mattie and was keen on the role. However, prior to filming she made a film in England with Robert Mitchum, who advised her not to work with director Henry Hathaway because he was "cantankerous." Farrow asked producer Hal B. Wallis to replace Hathaway with Roman Polanski, who had directed Farrow in Rosemary's Baby, but Wallis refused. Farrow quit the role, which was then offered to Sondra Locke and Tuesday Weld, both of whom turned it down. John Wayne met Karen Carpenter at a talent show he was hosting and recommended her for the part, though the producers decided against it because she had no acting experience. Wayne had also lobbied for his daughter Aissa to win the part. After considering Sally Field, the role went to Kim Darby.
Elvis Presley was the original choice for LaBoeuf but the producers turned him down when his agent demanded top-billing over both Wayne and Darby. Glen Campbell was then cast instead. Wayne began lobbying for the part of Rooster Cogburn after reading the novel by Charles Portis.
Wayne called Marguerite Roberts' script "the best script he had ever read," and was instrumental in getting her script approved and credited to her name as Roberts had been blacklisted for alleged leftist affiliations years before. This came in spite of Wayne's own right-wing ideals. He particularly liked the scene with Darby where Rooster tells Mattie about his life in Illinois (where he has a restaurant, his wife Nola leaves him because of his degenerate friends, and has a clumsy son named Horace), calling it "about the best scene I ever did." Garry Wills notes in his book, John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity, that Wayne's performance as Rooster Cogburn bears close similarities to the way Wallace Beery portrayed characters in the 1930s and 1940s, an inspired if surprising choice on Wayne's part. Wills comments that it's difficult for one actor to imitate another for the entire length of a movie and that the Beery mannerisms temporarily recede during the aforementioned scene in which Cogburn discusses his wife and child.
Veteran John Wayne stunt-double Chuck Hayward does the stunt in the meadow, where "Bo" goes down, on his long time horse Twinkle Toes. In the last scene, Mattie gives Rooster her father's gun. She comments that he's gotten a tall horse, as she expected he would. He notes that his new horse can jump a four-rail fence. Then she admonishes him, "You're too old and fat to be jumping horses." Rooster responds with a smile, saying, "Well, come see a fat old man sometime," and jumps his new horse over a fence. Although many of Wayne's stunts over the years were done by Hayward and Chuck Roberson, it is Wayne on Twinkle Toes going over the fence. Darby's stunts were done by Polly Burson.
The horse shown during the final scene (before he jumps the fence on Twinkle Toes) of True Grit was Dollor, a two-year-old (in 1969) chestnut Quarter horse gelding, Dollor ('Ole Dollor) had been Wayne's favorite horse for 10 years. Wayne fell in love with the horse, which would carry him through several more Westerns, including his final movie, The Shootist. Wayne had Dollor written into the script of The Shootist because of his love for the horse; it was a condition for him working on the project. Wayne would not let anyone else ride the horse, the lone exception being Robert Wagner, who rode the horse in a segment of the Hart to Hart television show, after Wayne's death.
Reception
The cast and crew were initially skeptical about the film. John Wayne, in particular, was disappointed with the finished result. He hated Kim Darby's performance, saying that they hardly spoke off-camera and that she behaved inappropriately on the set. For his part, Henry Hathaway hated the casting and performance of Glen Campbell, whom he felt had been pushed on him by the studio to get a hit with the film's title song. Both Wayne and Hathaway had difficulties with Robert Duvall, with the director having constant shouting matches with his supporting actor and Duvall and Wayne nearly coming to blows.
The film earned an estimated $11.5 million in rentals at the North American box office during its first year of release. As of May 2014, the film maintains a rating of 90% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 48 reviews.
Awards and nominations
John Wayne won a Golden Globe and the Academy Award for Best Actor. Upon accepting his Oscar, Wayne said, "Wow! If I'd known that, I'd have put that patch on 35 years earlier." The title song, by composer Elmer Bernstein and lyricist Don Black, and sung by Glen Campbell, who co-starred in the movie, received nominations for both the Academy Award for Best Song and the Golden Globe.
Differences from the novel
Unlike the book, the movie doesn’t introduce Mattie as an old woman telling a story of her childhood, but instead begins and ends in late 1880, when Mattie is 14. In the book, Mattie remains the central character throughout; in the movie Rooster Cogburn gets an equal share of the limelight. The film also downplays the novel's biblical tone and adds a hint of romance between Mattie and La Boeuf. La Boeuf also does not die in the novel, but survives his head injury. Another significant difference from Portis' tale is that Mattie has her arm amputated as a result of the rattlesnake attack, in contrast to the final scene in the film where Mattie is seen with only a sling on her armâ€"indicating that she is recovering from the snake bites and intact physically. The novel's conclusion makes the reader aware that the story has been recounted by Mattie as an elderly, one-armed woman who never married. Also in the book, Mattie shoots Chaney in the head with her Dragoon but he survives until Rooster hits him with the butt of his rifle and he falls into the pit. In the movie, Rooster shoots Chaney.
In the book and both this movie and the 2010 film version, Mattie's Colt Dragoon misfires at a critical moment. The book explains this as, while drunk, Rooster used it to shoot a rat. Mattie insisted he re-load the two chambers fired, which he did, while still drunk, using defective old caps from a box under his bed. In the 1969 film, Rooster shoots the rat with his own Peacemaker, removing the reloading scene. Thus, during the scene where the Dragoon misfires it is unfairly portrayed as an unreliable weapon. However, during the graveyard scene at the end of the movie, when Mattie presents Rooster with the Dragoon as a gift, he states "It almost got you killed when it misfired once." to which she responds "That is because you loaded it wrong when you were in a state of drunkenness." When or why he reloaded it is not explained, but the misfire itself is.
In the book, Tom Chaney was a young man; Mattie guessed his age to be around 25. Jeff Corey, who played Chaney in the movie, was 55 at the time. In the movie, La Boeuf claims to have a girl in Texas who would "look with favor" on his capture of Tom Chaney. In the book, La Boeuf made no mention of a girlfriend; his motive for capturing Chaney was purely financial.
In the book the store Rooster goes to regularly is called Bagby's. In the movie it's called McAllister's.
In the book, Rooster Cogburn had a mustache and did not wear an eye patch, though he had only one eye. In his fight with Ned Pepper, he wielded two Navy six-shooters. In the movie, Wayne carried a six-shooter in his left hand and his Winchester Model 1892 large-loop rifle in the other (the rifle is anachronistic, being introduced 12 years after the setting of the movie). The character of Rooster was supposed to be around 40 in the novel; in the film, he was played by 61-year-old Wayne.
In the book, Mattie has her arm amputated due to the snakebite and break. Rooster pays her a visit while she is recovering from the procedure, but she is too sedated to remember. She tries to meet him 25 years later while he is traveling in a wild west show but he passes away a few days before they can meet. She has his remains exhumed and re-interred in her family plot.
Also, the film's Colorado location and mountain scenery are in sharp contrast to the script's references to place names in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Further, the film is set in autumn, while the book clearly sets the story in winter, with snow on the ground outside the dugout where Quincy and Moon awaited Pepper's gang. In the book, when Mattie falls into the snake pit her left arm is broken; in the movie it is her right arm. In the book she faces a ball of snakes which are disturbed in their winter quarters when Chaney falls on them. In the film Mattie faces a single rattlesnake.
Sequels and other film versions
A film sequel, Rooster Cogburn, was made in 1975, with Wayne reprising his role and Katharine Hepburn as an elderly spinster, Eula Goodnight, who teams up with him. The plot has been described as a rehash of the original True Grit with elements of the Bogart-Hepburn film The African Queen. A further made-for-television sequel entitled True Grit: A Further Adventure appeared in 1978, starring Warren Oates as Rooster Cogburn and Lisa Pelikan as Mattie Ross and featuring subsequent adventures of the valiant pair.
In 2010, Joel and Ethan Coen directed another adaptation of the novel. Their adaptation focuses more on Mattie's point of view, as in the novel, and is more faithful to its Oklahoma setting. Hailee Steinfeld portrays Mattie Ross, Jeff Bridges plays Rooster Cogburn, and the cast also includes Matt Damon as La Boeuf and Josh Brolin as Tom Chaney.
See also
- John Wayne filmography
Notes
External links
- True Grit at the Internet Movie Database
- True Grit at the TCM Movie Database
- True Grit at AllMovie
- True Grit at the American Film Institute Catalog
- True Grit at Rotten Tomatoes
- "The Real Story True Grit". Smithsonian Channel.com.Â