"True Grit" (1969): review

L to R: Glen Campbell (LaBoeuf), John Wayne (Rooster Cogburn), Kim Darby (Mattie Ross)

It's a bit weird to see the Coen brothers' 2010 version of "True Grit" first, then to go back and watch the 1969 version with John Wayne (which I may actually have seen first, maybe on commercial TV, years and years ago), but you live life as you live it. I still remember how my buddy Steve and I walked into a weird, David Lynchian theater in Luray, Virginia, back in 2010; we were late to the start of the remake, and we may have been the only two guys in the theater. The screen was tiny, more like a big-screen TV, and hung way up high. The front of our particular cinema had suits of medieval armor guarding the screen, which merely added to the unreality of the whole experience. I saw John Wayne's version—for which he won an Oscar—in the comfort of my tiny studio apartment here in Seoul a few days ago.

1969's "True Grit," directed by Henry Hathaway, stars John Wayne, Kim Darby, country singer Glen Campbell (who sings the movie's opening song, which got nominated for an Oscar), Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, and Jeff Corey. After watching this movie, I can say with confidence that the Coen brothers' version largely follows all of the story beats of the original film, with some changes, including at least one major change regarding the fate of a central character. Both versions of the movie are based on the 1968 Charles Portis novel True Grit. I can't remember whether I ever read the novel, so I'll be making no movie/novel comparisons in this review. I can, however, begin with a summary of the story.

Mattie Ross (Darby) is a young, assertive, mentally gifted teenager in Yell County, Arkansas, who helps her father Frank Ross (John Pickard) with his accounting. Frank has hired a ne'er-do-well named Tom Chaney (Corey), who has a habit of getting violently drunk and blaming others for his problems. During one drunken bender, Chaney shoots Ross dead, then flees, and this motivates Mattie to go looking for a marshal who can help Mattie to exact justice: she wants nothing less than to see Chaney swing for the death of her father. Mattie finds old, ornery, hard-drinking US Marshal Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn (apparently based on a real-life marshal of the period), a man reputed to have "true grit." It seems Chaney has, since going into hiding, taken up with a gang led by Ned Pepper (Duvall), whom Rooster knows well for having shot Pepper in the upper lip a while back. A Texas Marshal named LaBoeuf (pronounced "luh-BEEF") joins the pair because he's been pursuing Tom Chaney as well, but he claims Chaney's real name is Theron Chelmsford, and he's killed both a dog and a senator, among other crimes. Conflict develops when LaBoeuf wants to take Chaney to Texas for justice while Mattie wants him properly hanged in Arkansas, where she lives. In the end, the trio catches up with Ned Pepper's gang, and a lot of people end up dead, including Chaney, Pepper, LaBoeuf, and Cogburn's faithful horse Bo. Mattie and Cogburn had started off disliking each other, but by the end of the story, Mattie—who knows Rooster has no family—has offered to have him buried in her family plot as a sign of how close to him she now feels. After she teases Rooster about being too old and fat to jump a four-rail fence, Rooster tells Mattie to visit sometime, then tears off toward the fence, deftly leaping it on his new steed.

I don't want to waste time going over the two movie versions of this story point by point. Each has its own virtues; John Wayne won an Oscar for his performance, which was typically and iconically John Wayne-y. His Rooster is a crabby drunk prone to the occasional pratfall from off his horse; one noticeable difference between Wayne's version and Jeff Bridges's version is that Wayne's version has a patch over his left eye, but Bridges's version has a patch over his right eye. Most surprising to me was the death of LaBoeuf in the 1969 movie; in the Coen brothers' version, LaBoeuf bites his own tongue almost all the way off but lives, presumably to the end of the story. And in the old version, Mattie gets bitten by a rattlesnake but survives intact; in the 2010 version, she loses her arm. The 1969 movie contains some moments we might consider politically incorrect, especially from Glen Campbell's LaBoeuf: early in the movie, he confesses to thinking about stealing a kiss from Mattie (supposedly fourteen, but Kim Darby was twenty-one and married in 1969); later on, he spanks her using a branch as a switch. Even by the standards of the feminist Sixties, you'd think it'd be a little creepy to have a male character essentially leering at a teenaged girl one moment, then treating her like a wayward child the next. That sort of inner conflict has uncomfortable implications.

It was strange to see such a young Dennis Hopper (in the role of the ill-fated Moon; I didn't recognize him at first, then it very slowly clicked), and when I saw Jeff Corey as Tom Chaney, I recognized him for all the work he'd done in science fiction ("The Outer Limits," "Star Trek," "Babylon 5," etc.). I guess all of these actors had to start somewhere. It was also strange to find out that Kim Darby and John Wayne reportedly disliked each other so much that, between takes, they would go to their separate seats or trailers and just not talk to each other. On screen, they seem to have a decent chemistry. That's acting, I guess.

Overall, the 1969 version of "True Grit" was a good watch: the cinematography captured the gorgeous landscapes and watercourses (I can't vouch for the accuracy of the location shooting); John Wayne was a wonderful, fleshed-out Rooster Cogburn; the movie's editing and pacing never really slackened despite the presence of tropes that we would nowadays consider hackneyed. My one complaint might be that the orchestral soundtrack tried too hard to sound like 1960's "The Magnificent Seven"; I got the impression that a lot of Westerns of the era also sounded that way, riding on the coattails of "Seven." (This is one reason why Clint Eastwood's "spaghetti" Westerns, with their radically different-sounding soundtracks, are so much more appealing to me.) Derivative music aside, "True Grit" is a must-see for John Wayne fans, and if, like me, you saw the Coen brothers' film first, well, travel back in time a few decades and give this movie a watch.