Posted on 12/31/2010 12:28:39 PM PST by Kaslin
"True Grit" is a tale whose time had come and gone. It's the good fortune of a new generation that its time has come again. The novel by Charles Portis, which sold only about 25,000 copies between 2007 and 2009, has been bought by 10,000 new readers since the new version of the movie opened this month.
In an age when twittering conversation is limited to 140 characters, where children become chubby couch potatoes changing channels with a remote control or playing war games moving fantasy soldiers around on a screen, Mattie Ross is an authentic heroine -- lean, mean, articulate and downright inspirational at the toughened age of 14.
Old codgers who loved the 1969 movie for the character of Rooster Cogburn as portrayed by John Wayne will be disappointed by Jeff Bridges as Rooster. He plays the raspy drunk with too much spillover from his role in "Crazy Heart" -- but the character of Mattie is much improved. This time, we get to hear Mattie's voice as the older woman, a spinster recalling the great adventure of her youth. The cadences and perceptions in her speech are richer and more mature because they're often lifted word for word from the novel.
The Coen brothers made the movie first of all because it suited their sensibility of a Western unusual in its mix of ruthlessness with rectitude, irony with sentiment, satire with dead seriousness, and all in the service of delineating the black, white and gray coloring of good and evil. They wanted kids to like it, too. Unlike most of their graphically violent other movies, "True Grit" got a PG-13 rating.
The novel reads like a memoir. Charles Portis' crisp Southern idiom, poetic cadences, sense of place and specificity of detail lends verisimilitude in a tale from the vanishing American frontier. The novel was once required reading in American literature classes, taught along with "Huckleberry Finn" and "Tom Sawyer," where it belongs. Mattie, however, is made of sterner stuff than Mark Twain's creative children. She has been described as "Ahab's little sister" for her unrelenting pursuit of her father's killer. Tom Chaney, "a short man with cruel features," is her Moby Dick.
Mattie's character draws everyone in close with the opening of her story as remembered a half-century on:
"People do not give it credence that a 14-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood, but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just 14 years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money, plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band."
The novel got lost somewhere in the past two decades as America moved into the post-literate age, reduced to a period piece. Readers lost an appreciation for Mattie's voice and her deadpan perceptions that are rife with comic understatement and ripe with universal insight. The moving prose (and the moving picture) show how Mattie's Presbyterian primness combined with Rooster's ruthlessness inevitably prevail. Duty and discipline ultimately fence in disorder by imposing justice, one way or another. "True grit" is the stuff of courage, preserving a fertile seedbed for the next generation as the Wild West is diminished to a rodeo spectator sport.
In the theater where I watched this latest version of "True Grit," I was struck by the sight of families there to watch it together -- children, parents, grandparents and friends of different generations. The adventure story has that kind of sweeping appeal, and the story is even more exciting in the written word. Americans once grew up on literature like this.
Rooster Cogburn is politically incorrect and revels in it, a "one-eyed fat man" who takes pride in his Confederate service and in having ridden with William Clarke Quantrill, the notorious border guerrilla. Rooster loves to pull a cork and rides into battle with reins between his teeth, blasting away with both guns. Spiderman he is not.
Mattie Ross grows up to be a one-armed spinster and a small-town banker in "Dardanelle, Yell County, Arkansas," who would sneer at the suggestion that she is "physically challenged." She is instead "a woman with brains and a frank tongue," but "feminist" doesn't apply either. She loves her church and her bank, expresses Scripture and platitudes of Presbyterian piety with black humor, and triumphs as a woman we can all admire. The new movie should revive the literary attention the book deserves.
I have my copy right here, complete with a blub across the bottom plugging the "SMASH UNIVERSAL MOVIE STARRING JOHN WAYNE AND KATHARINE HEPBURN"... First Printing, February, 1969 (must've been referring to the Signet paperback version).
I pull it off the shelf and read it once every few years, and as time passed, I have increasingly wished they had stuck to the book closer when making the first movie version. I despise Hollywood more than ever and have weaned myself from the habit - even the desire - to go out and see a movie, but I may check out the new version of True Grit anyway.
Mr. niteowl77
I enjoyed the original True Grit with John Wayne and have watched several times on TV, but I have no intention to watch the remake
Did you see the original with John Wayne and Kim Darby?
Great reply
***Might as well try to remake Casablanca. There is no point to it.****
Might as well vent my spleen as to why I HATE the John Wayne verison!
1. Glen Campbell can not act!
2.Kim Darby is too old for her part. She was already playing adult roles in other films.
3.John Wayne ceased acting after THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALENCE. The rest of his westerns were a version of McLintock, a parody of himself. He telegraphed all his moves while playing a funny drunk, not a SOT. He just changed his shirt from red to blue in some of them. his last real acting role was THE SHOOTIST. I wonder how Randolph Scott would have done it! Wayne’s movies before 1962 were great!
4.The outlaws looked like they had just come from the barber. None of the dirt or hair on someone on the lam from Judge Parker’s noose. Not a tick or chigger bite on them!
5.The Country. Oklahoma is NOT the Rocky Mountains or Sierra Nevada mountains. The new TG looks like Oklahoma in winter!
6.The saddles look modern. The new TRUE GRIT has authentic saddles.
7. Did I mention Glen Campbell really really could not act!
There! I feel better after carrying this load around for 41 years!
Being a John Wayne fanatic, I was upset when I first learned of this remake. With great trepidation I interrupted our Hawaii vacation and took my 20 yr old son to see it Wednesday. I left with only four words in my brain:
1-BestMovieOfTheYearOscar
2-BestActorOscar
3-BestSupportingActressOscar
4-BestScriptEver
(Of course I’m not holding my breath for Hollywood to give it any awards.)
The new True Grit is sufficiently different (and “updated”) that the original True Grit is not diminished in any way. Its just that they are both exxxxxcellent movies.
OK, I need to deal with this.
First: Glen Campbell cannot act. True. But at this time all John Wayne/Henry Hathaway/John Ford films featured a pop star as co-star. It was a convention. It certainly doesn’t upset one of my favorite Westerns: Rio Bravo. Get used to it.
2. Kim Darby is not too old. In acting, most actresses MUST be older to play younger parts. The problem with Ms. Darby is that she wasn’t strong enough - or charismatic enough - to stand up against actors like Wayne, Strother Martin, etc. She just didn’t have the talent to overcome these great, great actors. But in her quieter scenes, she’s not half bad.
John Wayne never ceased acting. You are buying into a cliche. He was a wonderful actor who died with his boots on. Educate yourself.
If you think Dennis Hopper just came from a barber, you need to check out an eye doctor.
I know nothing about saddles - but I know what I like.
The novel is complex - very hard on the Indians and hard on the white man. Custer is a hero in the novel - something most people would not know since his bravery and military smarts have been denigrated and suppressed.
Have you read its sequel? I have it and am slowly working myself through it.
I too am working my way through the sequel, doesn't quite have that something the original had.
One of my favorite parts of Little Big Man was the Prolog, ...by a Man of Letters. It is a perfect portrait of a modern lib writer when faced with a real man. Too funny. I am also a Western history fanatic and Little Big Man is the most authentic Western novel I have ever read, bar none. I even have some of the authentic source material that it was based upon and Berger nails the Old West like no other writer.
did you see the remake?
for a few pennies to netflix, if I have the time, I will chance it.
You forgot Dennis Hopper...
he died good.
(btw Bob Duval was excellent....Jeff Corey perfomance was yeomanlike...and creepy little John Fielder as Lawyer Dagget was....well he played creepy little John Fielder....loved him as Jack the Ripper on a Star Trek episode....)
Just playing off the stereotype of the illiterate conservative.
I average three books a week and have for 50 years, and liberals who find this out and that I am conservative frequently express shock and confusion.
my favorite Wayne vehicles were in his fading years...True Grit and the Shootist are 2 of my favorites.
but there is one from the 1950s that I consider his best.
The Searchers.
The prologue is absolutely hysterical - I remember poor Jack Crabb’s landlady puts on an Indian headdress and romps around. So silly!
I didn’t want to say it - but the sequel is hard-going.
Bridges has been a hot mess in his last three movies ~
Men Who Stare at Goats, Crazy Heart & now this.
I liked all the actors in the new True Grit except for Bridges’ long-hair-maggot-infested Rooster Cogburn.
He stinks.
John Wayne never ceased acting. You are buying into a cliche. He was a wonderful actor who died with his boots on. Educate yourself.
Well educated in John Ford Westerns and RED RIVER, Wayne’s best ever!
His later movies became “potboilers”. I saw them all at the theater when they came out. No acting required, just jack up the horse and drive a new script under it, or a revamped script for RIO BRAVO-EL DORADO-RIO LOBO.
You want a movie with the REAL old west falvor? See Charlton Heston in WILL PENNY or Lee Marvin in MONTE WALSH.
When RIO LOBO first opened in Tulsa, OK (At the Garnett Theater) I saw people get up and leave half way through as this was just a remake of RIO BRAVO-EL DORADO with a civil war lead in.
Sorry! I missed the irony.
I find this “Old Codgers” statement highly insulting. I am 56 and can still do whatever I did when I was 21... most of it better. Jeff Bridges is a good actor... he is neither great nor is he an icon such as John Wayne. Bridges can no more fill the Duke's shoes as Rooster Cogburn, than Angelina Jolie could fill the shoes of Vivian Leigh (in her reprised role as Scarlett O'Hara). The Big Lebowski does the Duke... not in any reality on this plane.
LLS
***but there is one from the 1950s that I consider his best.
The Searchers.***
One of John Wayne’s best along with HONDO! Another good one by John Ford is TWO RODE TOGETHER with Jimmy Stewart.
Libbie! We just disagreed on another post (political, of course!) but we are in complete alignment on this. I’m 56, too. Hardly an “old codger.”
I thought it was better than the original. Now I’ll probably go to hell for dissing the Duke. :-)
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