This 15-Year-Old Western Remake Was Closer To The Book Than The Original

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1969’s Western True Grit was an iconic role for long-time on-screen gunslinger John Wayne. He played a character largely against type and received wide praise for his performance as Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn. The film is based on a book by Charles Portis that follows a young girl seeking to avenge her father’s death with the assistance of hired guns. The reputation of the original film and its legendary status kept it from being touched by a remake for decades. But in 2010, Joel and Ethan Coen tried their hand at re-imagining the classic with great success.

Part of what made the reboot so successful was its attempt not to recreate the original but to turn back to the source material. And what audiences got is a version of the story that may not seem like anything visually or stylistically like the 1969 film, but one that is actually somewhat more true to the book than Wayne’s. Thankfully, neither version suffers from either divergence or faithfulness. And each are stellar takes on the Western genre in their own right.

The Original True Grit Earned John Wayne His First Academy Award

No doubt, Portis’ novel would possibly be considered “woke” by naysayers by today’s standards with a 14 year-old-girl as its main protagonist. Mattie Ross is the main character, and she’s on a mission to hunt down and bring to justice a man named Tom Chaney. The man responsible for killing her father. An older Mattie narrates the novel, stating, “I was just fourteen 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.” She chooses Rooster Cogburn to execute her plan because he is someone she believes has “true grit.” She also meets LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger with a warrant for Chaney’s arrest for an unrelated incident — although the two don’t get along, he joins her party with Cogburn.

True Grit was first published in 1968 as a serialized novel in the Saturday Evening Post, after which a full version was published. It didn’t take long for Paramount Pictures to acquire the rights to the film as a vehicle for John Wayne. Actress Kim Darby was cast as Mattie, and singer Glen Campbell as LaBeouf. Campbell would go on to sing the title song of the film — which would be nominated for an Academy Award. Elvis Presley was originally chosen for LaBoeuf, but when his agent (Colonel Tom Parker) demanded top billing, Campbell was cast. Campbell had no prior acting experience, to which Wayne replied: “I’ll drag you through it.”

Up until this point in his career, Wayne had yet to win an Oscar. He’d been in the acting business since 1927. Although a great number of his roles were Westerns, Wayne also appeared in war films like The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), The Wings of Eagles (1957) — a biopic of real-life naval aviator Frank “Spig” Wead — and The Green Berets (1968). But he was not above tackling more sensitive roles, such as Sean Thornton in The Quiet Man (1952), in which he plays a retired boxer who retreats to Ireland after a fatal fight. Wayne had been nominated twice for an Oscar prior to True Grit. Both Sands of Iwo Jima and his performance as Davy Crockett in The Alamo (1960) had earned him recognition prior.

At the 1970 Oscars, Wayne was presented the Best Actor award by Barbra Streisand. Wayne was up against fellow titans (both current and future) Richard Burton, Dustin Hoffman, Peter O’Toole, and Jon Voight. During his acceptance speech, an emotional Wayne remarked, “Wow… if I’d have known that, I’d have put that patch on 35 years earlier.” Referring to the eye patch Cogburn wears throughout the film. Wayne was 62 when he received the award, and he’d pass away just 10 years later at the age of 72. His final film was The Shootist (1976) — fittingly, also a Western.

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2010’s True Grit Contained Elements Truer to the Book Than the 1969 Original

Viewers who enjoyed the original may have balked when it was announced the Coen Brothers were remaking True Grit. Even when the movie was announced, it was stated that the filmmakers’ intent was to produce something much closer to the novel than the first. The goal was to “tell the tale from the girl’s P.O.V.,” just as in the book where Mattie serves as narrator. In a way, this made much more sense than a simple remake for the sake of a remake. And the Coen Brothers have such an original and unique style, it’s hard to imagine they would have produced anything resembling the original. This made them a near-perfect choice to examine and explore this story once again.

Much of what the Coen’s wanted to bring back into the story was the humor. Said Ethan of Portis’ novel, “I think it’s much funnier than the movie was so I think, unfortunately, they lost a lot of humor in both the situations and in her voice. It also ends differently than the movie did. You see the main character — the little girl — 25 years later when she’s an adult.” And it’s not just the ending that changes. Mattie– in both the book and the 2010 film — loses an arm after her close-to-fatal snake bite. She also intends to visit Cogburn in her adulthood, only to find out he’s died before she’s able to reach him. Something which was not in the original film, similar to LaBeouf surviving through the end of the story.

The Coen’s also believed the 1969 film was traditional whereas the book is not. Joel commented, “I don’t actually remember the movie too well, but I do remember it as being much more of a standard Western, and the book is just an oddity. It’s a very odd book.” And as a showcase for Wayne, it does mimic many of his previous works in Westerns both visually and with the beats it hits. Even if Wayne is playing against type in comparison to his prior roles. Ethan added, “Another way in which it’s a little bit different from the [1969] movie — and maybe this is just because of the time the movie was made — is that it’s a lot tougher and more violent than the movie reflects. Which is part of what’s interesting about it.” A certain level of violence, sometimes to a comical level, tends to be present in the Coens’ films. So, that wasn’t entirely unexpected.

John Wayne Starred in a Sequel to True Grit Alongside Katharine Hepburn

Although the Coen Brothers were the first to remake True Grit, they weren’t the first to attempt to revisit the material. A sequel, Rooster Cogburn, starring Wayne and Katharine Hepburn, was released in 1970. It was an entirely original screenplay, not based on any writing by Portis except his original novel. It was not as well-received as True Grit. Critic Roger Ebert gave it 1/4 stars, stating, “Well, the chemistry’s there at times [between Wayne and Hepburn]. But when it does work, it’s largely because of the sheer acting craft of the two of them. The dialog they’re given is so consciously arch, so filled with subtle little recognitions of who the two actors are, that we never care about the story, and it never gets told.” Still, it manages to hold a 70% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes despite the 45% critic rating.

A TV movie True Grit: A Further Adventure starring Warren Oates as Rooster Cogburn and Lisa Pelikan as Mattie Ross aired in 1978 — and was quickly forgotten. But the good outweighs the bad when it comes to the overall cinematic legacy of True Grit. And how one book has managed to produce two vastly different but equally interesting Westerns.

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