Forty years later, Wayne’s performance has aged beautifully, because it’s easier to see now how much acting there really is in it. At the same time, he’s an irresistible rascal whose one-eyed squint becomes a wink of valor. Killing bad guys isn’t just his mission - it’s the major thing that’s keeping him alive. In one of the key scenes that’s more or less duplicated in the Coen brothers version (though to far less emotional effect), he talks about his past, including his wrecked marriage, and we see that he’s the sort of “noble” loner who’s really a broken-down, half-dead codger. Wayne’s Rooster lives by a code, all right, but the movie suggests that he’s trapped by it as well. He had come to be seen as the macho cartoon version of himself: the arms-out swagger, the slow-motion molasses drawl, the toughness that never wavered. And this reinforced the notion that Wayne, though he remained the most larger-than-life of all Hollywood movie stars, was never, in the fullest sense, an actor. All that came through, really, was the propaganda. But what made The Green Berets, as a corrective to Hollywood liberalism, so infamous and despised is that it was such a didactically wooden combat movie. He was a saber-rattling conservative who, only the year before, in 1968, had pushed his pro-Vietnam hawkishness to the nth degree in the jarringly jingoistic The Green Berets. He’d become the living embodiment of the Old Values. At the time, a lot of folks under a certain age felt that it was almost their duty to hate John Wayne. By the late ’60s, movies were in the middle of a revolution, and they had a new audience, known (it now sounds so quaint) as the Film Generation. There’s a reason that a great many people still don’t hold Wayne’s cornball-crusty performance in very high esteem. At times, it borders on being a scene-for-scene, line-for-line gloss on it. But if, like me, you’ve never read the novel (and I would guesstimate that 97 percent of the people who saw True Grit over the weekend have not), then after all the remake? what remake?! spin, you might be startled to see how close the movie really does come to the 1969 version. The Coens, making their publicity rounds, have talked and talked about how they went back to Charles Portis’ original novel, which was published in 1968. OMG, I used the R-word! - I called True Grit a “remake.” The vulgarity, the lowbrow cluelessness on my part! From the outset, you see, the directorial and studio spin on this movie has been to insist that it’s a completely different animal from the deeply sentimental 1969 when-fresh-faced-teenybopper-met-grizzled-old-marshal fable of popular vengeance. Yet it’s a remake of a famous and, indeed, iconic Hollywood movie - one that, while not quite a “classic,” remains a robust and beloved end-of-the-studio-system-era Western. The film may not have won the Coens their most rapturous reviews (though the critics were largely enthusiastic), and it’s hardly their best or most defining work. Image Credit: Everett Collection Lorey SebastianIt doesn’t take rocket science to see why True Grit enjoyed the biggest opening weekend of any Coen brothers movie to date.
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