Movie DVD A wonderful/rueful running gag in El Dorado involves the Edgar Allan Poe line “Ride, boldly ride” being mangled by toupee-wearer Wayne into “Ride, baldy, ride.” Two years later, in True Grit, Wayne put the joke in italics by donning an eyepatch and several inches of girth to play cantankerous territorial marshal Rooster Cogburn. Critics belatedly noticed that he could be a marvelously entertaining actor, and Hollywood finally gave him the Oscar they’d failed to nominate him for in Red River, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, et al. But make no mistake: True Grit is a splendid movie, with lovingly textured storytelling and sturdy characters, Henry Hathaway’s finest high-country action set-pieces, intoxicatingly ornate frontier language, and a couple of formidable bad guys (Jeff Corey’s Tom Cheney and Robert Duvall’s “Lucky” Ned Pepper). It’s a compliment to say that, from a technical standpoint, the movie could have been made any time in Hathaway’s 40-year career, yet its feeling for the reality of violence ceded no ground to The Wild Bunch, released around the same time. Still, the film’s most sublime passage falls between bursts of gunplay: Rooster sitting on a hilltop at night recounting his life story, as John Wayne metamorphoses ineluctably into W.C. Fields. –Richard T. Jameson
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January 25, 2006
#1
I have many of Duke’s classics in my library and enjoy them each and every time they are played. This is not one to add to my library.
January 25, 2006
#2
came damaged but not found as it was over 30days before I viewed it.
January 25, 2006
#3
the only thing that keeps this movie from getting one star is the fact that john wayne is in it, and the terrific band of actors who play the outlaws. the downfall of this movie is the character played by kim darby. she is supposed to be a 14 year old girl in the old west and yet she some how seems to bully everyone she meets to do exactly what she wants them to do. the whole sequence with the horse trader in town is the perfect example. there is no way all these men living on the western frontier would let a little girl push them around no matter how good her lawyer supposedly is. the biggest travisty is the way she pushes around john wayne’s character. he is supposed to be such a big bad marshall that half the time he can’t bring back his prisoners alive yet he bows to this little girls every whim. i’ll agree with eariler reviewers that the last act is great and the band of outlaws with dennis hopper and robert duvall are great but it’s not enough to save the movie from kim darby’s character mattie ross.
January 26, 2006
#4
The only good role Kim Darby ever had was in Better Off Dead. I would not say this was a good western, or even a good John Wayne movie for that matter; because of the prudish little prima donna girl that occupies the majority of the scenes. Kim Darby had the leading role in it, not John Wayne; and even with anticipating his arrival onscreen a half-hour into it, I became so bothered by Mattie Ross’s (Kim Darby) repugnant character that I almost gave up on it. Anyone who has seen it will know what I mean. She must have said a variation on the murderer’s name, “Tom Chaney”, around fifty times in the film. Watch one of Wayne’s better films.
January 26, 2006
#5
the dialogue actually sucks, so staged and so unnatural. and the girl is such an unlikable, annoying, plain-to-death person, fed with lot of adult sentences that were so unnatural and so…john wayne looked totally spent and old in this movie, but he played well. this western looked a bit pretentious and all the dialogue and the soundtrack are so disturbingly annoying.