The murderer is known to be one of the victim’s employees (played by Jeff Corey, among the many familiar and great character actors in the cast), but locating and capturing him proves tricky because of his alliances with other criminals. In the Henry Hathaway-directed adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel, the eyepatched lawman is enlisted by spirited young Mattie Ross (Kim Darby, a bit older than needed here, but still enjoyable) to help find her father’s killer. Wayne would continue working for several more years until his death, but he didn’t really get another part that fully equaled the impact of Cogburn (though he reprised the character in a sequel). Tales of the Old West were being phased out for more modern stories, in both plotting and execution, and “True Grit” turned out to be a sort of victory lap for an actor and a category that had served audiences well for decades.
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CAST OF TRUE GRIT MOVIE
The screen icon said in his Oscar acceptance speech that he would have done the part long before if he’d known that award would result for him, but 1969 was ideal for the classic Western “True Grit” - now streaming on Paramount+ - since it came when the movie industry was making a major thematic shift. Richard T.Rooster Cogburn was the right role at the right time for John Wayne. Still, the film's most sublime passage falls between bursts of gunplay: Rooster sitting on a hilltop at night recounting his life story, as John Wayne metamorphoses ineluctably into W.C.
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It's a compliment to say that, from a technical standpoint, the movie could have been made any time in Hathaway's 40-year career, yet its feeling for the reality of violence ceded no ground to The Wild Bunch, released around the same time. But make no mistake: True Grit is a splendid movie, with lovingly textured storytelling and sturdy characters, Henry Hathaway's finest high-country action set-pieces, intoxicatingly ornate frontier language, and a couple of formidable bad guys (Jeff Corey's Tom Cheney and Robert Duvall's "Lucky" Ned Pepper). Critics belatedly noticed that he could be a marvelously entertaining actor, and Hollywood finally gave him the Oscar they'd failed to nominate him for in Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, et al. Laughter and tears punctuate the wild action in this extraordinary Western which features performances by Robert Duvall and Strother Martin.Ī wonderful/rueful running gag in El Dorado involves the Edgar Allan Poe line "Ride, boldly ride" being mangled by toupee-wearer Wayne into "Ride, baldy, ride." Two years later, in True Grit, Wayne put the joke in italics by donning an eyepatch and several inches of girth to play cantankerous territorial marshal Rooster Cogburn. And the situation goes from troubled to disastrous when an inexperienced but enthusiastic Texas Ranger (Glen Campbell) joins the party. When Cogburn's employer insists on accompanying the old gunfighter, sparks fly. The cantankerous Rooster is hired by a headstrong young girl (Kim Darby) to find the man who murdered her father and fled with the family savings.
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for his larger-than-life performance as the drunken, uncouth and totally fearless one-eyed U.S. In 1970, John Wayne won an Academy Award.