In l969, John Wayne was a craggy 6l years old, having survived his first cancer surgery four years earlier. During his six decades acting career, he had never won the Oscar®, yet True Grit (1969) was the movie that finally brought him the statuette. The story goes that novelist Charles Portis had put his story up for bids. So determined was Wayne to play the role of Sheriff Rooster Cogburn that he himself bid $300,000 on the rights, but found himself outbid by producer Hal Wallis.

Wallis' original idea was to cast Mia Farrow in the role of Mattie Ross. When first approached, Farrow was eager to take the part and enthusiastically accepted. However, Robert Mitchum, Farrow's co-star in the British production Secret Ceremony (1968), advised her not to work with director Hathaway under any circumstances. Intimidated by the stories of Hathaway's martinet behavior on the set, Farrow insisted that Wallis replace him with Roman Polanski (who would have made a decidedly different True Grit). Instead, Wallis discovered Kim Darby while watching TV one night and decided she was the perfect Mattie Ross.

Hathaway and Wayne had worked together on a number of films before, but his dictatorial style rubbed his younger stars the wrong way. Tired of seeing the director berate Glen Campbell in front of cast and crew, Robert Duvall forced a confrontation one day. The two men had a heated exchange with each other until the air cleared and they managed to come to terms.

Interestingly, arch-conservative Wayne had no qualms about working with a screenplay written by leftist Marguerite Williams, a victim of the Fifties blacklist. Likewise, Wayne's co-star Jeff Corey had been unable to work for many years after the Hollywood Red Scare due to his political past. Despite this, the Duke looked at True Grit as a film that embodied solid American values, and undoubtedly felt himself perfect in the lead role.

True Grit proved to be a box office hit, partly due to The Duke's presence and the compelling but unobtrusive direction of Henry Hathaway. Director of photography Lucien Ballard used his camera to capture magnificent vistas of the movie's Colorado and California locations and the supporting cast - including a young Dennis Hopper - was top notch. The movie, though, is all John Wayne's. If ever there was a role that was made for John Wayne, it was that of Rooster Cogburn. The climactic scene where Cogburn rides across a plain towards the outlaws, guns blazing and reins held in his teeth, immortalizes Wayne as the archetypal Western hero. Wayne himself had the last laugh at the Academy Awards that year. When presented the Oscar® by Barbra Streisand, Wayne, brushing back tears, said "Wow! If I'd known that, I'd have put that patch on thirty-five years earlier."

Producer: Paul Nathan, Hal B. Wallis
Director: Henry Hathaway
Screenplay: Marguerite Roberts
Production Design: Walter Tyler
Cinematography: Lucien Ballard
Costume Design: Dorothy Jeakins
Film Editing: Warren Low
Original Music: Elmer Bernstein
Cast: John Wayne (Reuben J."Rooster" Cogburn), Glen Campbell (LA Boeuf), Kim Darby (Mattie Ross), Jeremy Slate (Emmett Quincy), Robert Duvall (Ned Pepper).
C-128m. Letterboxed. Closed captioning.

by Jerry Renshaw