A movie that gets John Wayne his only Best Actor Oscar is a must watch, to see how this could have happened. The Duke, known more for his powerful screen presence than his sensitivity as an actor, beat a field that included luminaries like Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton to get his hand on the coveted award. The film however throws up nothing spectacular to suggest that he deserved it.
The plot revolves around Mattie Ross, a conscientious and morally upright young girl who has set out to avenge the murder of her father at the hands of his farm hand, a man with a murderous past, who is now absconding in
This was the decade of the spaghetti western and there is nothing new in this film that is a departure from a typical western plot. The same simple story, trigger happy law breakers and enforcers with scant respect for human life, salons, ghost towns, horses and the works. Henry Hathaway’s direction does not invest much time in exploring the difference between Ross and Cogburn’s approach to life and barring one, does not give us the real moments when two different people discover things about each other and learn from each other’s perspectives.
John Wayne delivers a trademark performance, filled with tough talk, the swagger, only this time with an eye patch. The other eye does widen on a couple of occasions, but there are no shades in his performance that would tell you that he is a man who had a regular life, wanted regular things, but that didn’t work out and he has become thus. There is a particular action sequence that stands out, an old style knight vs. knight confrontation with The Duke firing a revolver in one hand and a rifle in the other and charging the bad guys on his horse. Kim Darby does a good job of portraying the young and stubborn Mattie Ross. The talented Robert Duvall is wasted as a one dimensional hoodlum.
‘True Grit’s claim to fame would be that it got
