12/29/2023 0 Comments True grit cast![]() This contrasts with the Indian Territory, a place of fear and freedom where Mattie will have her adventure with Cogburn and handsome Texas ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who joins them in the pursuit of Chaney, also wanted for the murder of a Texas politician. Now populated by men in dark business suits, it evokes the paintings of Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia recorder of emerging middle-class life, and represents the bourgeois world that's encroaching on the frontier. The courtroom in the 1969 film is bland, nondescript. It's here we first become aware of Roger Deakins's excellent photography. The same proves true of her relationship with the boozy Rooster Cogburn, whom she first addresses while he's closeted in a privy, and first meets when he appears in court explaining how he came to kill several men while bringing them to justice. In each case, she manages, amusingly and admirably, to drive a hard bargain. The Irish undertaker who has prepared her father's corpse, the proprietress of the hotel where she stays and a sly businessman she must deal with all attempt to take advantage of her age and what they think of as her inexperience. The Coens turn this into his having "lit out for the territory", a nod in the direction of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where the phrase occurs in the book's penultimate sentence.įort Smith is not a welcoming place. In the novel, the local sheriff describes Chaney as being "now over in the territory". Though within Judge Parker's jurisdiction, it is for many a no-go area and Mattie needs a man like Cogburn to take her there. Mattie discovers the wicked Chaney has moved into the Indian Territory, the lawless land that's now the state of Oklahoma. ![]() This reflects the film's gallows humour, realism and brutal social commentary. The first two condemned men deliver farewell speeches the third, an Indian, is interrupted during his first sentence by having the black sack pulled over his head and the hangman pulling the lever. Everyone speaks a formal English with no elisions and they delight in carefully rounded phrases and allusions.Īrriving on her mission at Fort Smith, the seat of the infamous "Hanging Judge" Isaac Charles Parker, she joins the happy crowd attending a triple hanging. This introduces her as controller of her own narrative and establishes the language of the King James Bible that she shares with those around her. Second, their film begins with her speaking the novel's opening paragraph as her father lies dead in the street at Fort Smith, the snow swirling around him as she declares her intention to revenge his blood. Her strong, dark eyebrows and carefully braided hair declare her earnestness. First, they've cast the 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld, who plays her as a tough frontier farm girl reared on the Protestant work ethic with a firm sense of right and wrong. His Cogburn had a big heart behind his marshal's star and a twinkle in his remaining eye, in his case the right, which may or may not have been making a political point. But he was always popular in westerns, and especially in True Grit, where he was perceived to be mocking the gruff frontier bully he'd been playing ever since his screen persona was reshaped for Howard Hawks's Red River. Although she was well played by the 21-year-old Kim Darby as a perky modern miss in the first film, the picture was dominated by Wayne.Ī controversial figure at the time, Wayne was loathed by many for his arrogant rightwing politics and the previous year his stridently patriotic The Green Berets had been picketed by anti-war protesters. ![]() In 1878, just 13 years after the civil war, she set out at the age of 14 to bring to justice the crooked hired hand Tom Chaney, who murdered her father in Fort Smith, Arkansas. Portis's novel, a demotic classic in the tradition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, is narrated by Mattie Ross, a prim, Presbyterian spinster looking back from the 1920s to the great adventure of her life. T he Coen brothers' excellent western True Grit is a second and rather different version of Charles Portis's novel, rather than a remake of the 1969 film that brought John Wayne an Oscar as the one-eyed bounty hunter Marshal Rooster Cogburn.
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