True Grit (2010)
Directed by Joel Coen
Following the murder of her father by a hired hand, a 14-year-old farm girl sets out to capture the killer. To aid her, she hires the toughest U.S. Marshal she can find—a man with 'true grit'—Reuben J. 'Rooster' Cogburn.
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35 films that influenced True Grit
What critics say influenced True Grit
That is, until they realize that the Wayne movies Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Charles Portis's perfect little novel most evoke are John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Now, forty-one years after the original was made, my distaste for “True Grit” runs deeper, mostly as a function of studying the history of the Southwest over the past year or so in conjunction with a research project about the Comanche Indians, who were the “bad guys” in many a classic Western, including Wayne’s “The Searchers”.
She is a genuine, Old Testament heroine, as dogged in her mission to find the killer of a family member as Wayne's Ethan Edwards was in a similar fable of revenge, John Ford's more magnificent, troubling and haunting The Searchers.
The Duke’s G-rated “True Grit” — which won its star an Oscar even as the X-rated “Midnight Cowboy” was crowned Best Picture — was the last shotgun blast of the old Hollywood as it expired with a defiant roar at the hippies, the druggies and the ironists.
That is, until they realize that the Wayne movies Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Charles Portis's perfect little novel most evoke are John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Despite that award, it was not a great performance by Wayne who was a far better actor when under the direction of John Ford in classics such as Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Is Bridges going to reprise Bogey's Oscar-winning role of Charlie Allnut in a Coen Brothers' version of The African Queen?
“Besides, he blighted his title after sequelizing the original for which this picture is so named in an unwarranted and unwise attempt to remake The African Queen with Katharine Hepburn amidst cowboys rather than slugs.
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When it was announced that Joel and Ethan Coen were set to remake John Wayne’s greatest movie, “True Grit,” it heralded a culture clash of the titans, as if U2 were to hold a jam-off with Beethoven, or Annie Leibovitz were a finalist against Renoir in “Portraiture With the Stars.”
REVIEW | Western Competence: The Coens Play It Safe With "True Grit"…
Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen had never made a genuine Western before they made 2010's "True Grit."
It’s been well documented the the Coen Brothers’ take on True Grit isn’t a remake of the 1969 film that won John Wayne his only Academy Award but rather a more faithful adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel.
True Grit does, and some Coen brothers fans may think that makes it pandering or lightweight.
Oscar winner Bridges, whose Cogburn is the righteous version of the unstoppable killer in the Coens’ Oscar winner “No Country for Old Men,” puts his own stamp on Marshal Cogburn, and in one hilarious scene, channels not the iconic Wayne but the great Lee Marvin of “Cat Ballou” (1965).
These represent major plusses for the new film, as screen newcomer Hailee Steinfeld makes an excellent Mattie and Matt Damon, from the moment of his laconic boots-on-a-porch rail entrance designed to recall Henry Fonda in “My Darling Clementine,” puts any thoughts of Glen Campbell immediately to rest.
First, there's the earlier title song sung by Glen Campbell, which was singularly mundane and dated, and Elmer Bernstein's musical score, which worked harder to sound like Jerome Moross's theme for "The Big Country" than it did to evoke the spirit of the West.
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But in many ways, Henry Hathaway's film was already old-fashioned by the standards of late-'60s Western storytelling (made all the more apparent when Sam Peckinpah's bloody "The Wild Bunch" opened one week later in June 1969), and is therefore ripe for retelling.
Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch opened a few weeks before True Grit, sounding a bloody valediction for the western.
Despite, or perhaps because of, Wayne?s clownish performance, True Grit I was the comfortingly ?normal? middle-American Western of its season, opening at Radio City in time for July Fourth, a week after The Wild Bunch splattered screens with war-movie carnage and a few months before Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid insouciantly trashed the genre?s remaining moral pretensions.
Yes, the Coens have engaged in remakes before (“The Ladykillers,” and, arguably, “Miller’s Crossing,” a version of Dashiell Hammett’s “The Glass Key”), and they’ve made a number of noirish films that feel like they could have been dressed as westerns without much alteration (including “Blood Simple,” “Raising Arizona,” “Fargo” and “No Country for Old Men”).