Henry Hathaway (1969)
We watched it on television last night as prep for the Coens’ remake, which we’re seeing today. The film is 128 minutes and, because it’s just one damned thing after another, seems longer, but it’s also a strange mixture of elements. The golden and verdant landscapes, photographed by Lucien Ballard, are beautiful but where is the action meant to be taking place? Rooster Cogburn – the one-eyed US marshal hired by young Mattie Ross to track down Tom Chaney, the hired hand who killed her father – has as a sidekick a Texas ranger called La Boeuf and makes jokes about ‘Texicans’. There are references to Indian Territory, though no sign of Indians, and to Little Rock, but the breathtaking mountain backdrops don’t make you think of Arkansas. Sally had the atlas out before the end but the mystery was solved by Wikipedia, which says the film, in spite of what the script tells us, was mostly shot in Colorado. The principals – the adolescent Mattie as much as the grizzled veteran Rooster – react to the many shootings that occur largely with equanimity. (There’s just one bit when Mattie weeps privately, at the loss of her beloved father.) This is oddly effective in suggesting a time (the 1880s) and place inured to mayhem though I’m not sure it’s what Henry Hathaway intended with this adaptation (by Marguerite Roberts) of Charles Portis’s 1968 novel. Hathaway seems more interested in making things wholesome, with Kim Darby as Mattie and Glen Campbell as La Boeuf, and baddies lacking in menace. The autumnal lustre of the visuals and the aging John Wayne in his Oscar-winning (sic) turn as Rooster both give the piece a vaguely elegiac quality. Elmer Bernstein’s enjoyable music, as well as being conventionally effective, includes conscious echoes of other western scores (The Big Country, The Magnificent Seven, probably others that I didn’t pick up).
The eye patch helps John Wayne. First, it halves the challenge of changing expression. Second, it does – on a small scale – what concealing make-up or a full-face mask has often done for actors: something to hide behind and free you. In Wayne’s case, there isn’t much acting talent to be released as a result of this liberation. What I think happens, though, is that it sharpens his awareness that he’s playing a character, even if he’s unable to create one much different from himself. The effect of John Wayne pretending to be John Wayne is not only virtual self-parody – it also results in a performance more vivid than usual. That’s damning with faint praise and Wayne is still often dreary. But there’s a kinship between Rooster Cogburn and Wayne as survivors: I can understand that meant a lot to many people, at a time when the Western was assumed to be on its last legs, even though it means little to me. With the cast around Wayne being killed off in the course the film, the quality of survival grows stronger. Sally admired how easily he sat on a horse, although he’d had plenty of practice by this late stage in his career.
As fourteen-year-old Mattie Ross, twenty-one-year-old Kim Darby is competent, conscientious and likeable but there’s little depth and less surprise in what she does. (Wikipedia claims that Mia Farrow had been going to play the role, which would have been an interesting follow-up to Rosemary’s Baby.) In the early scenes, before she put on trousers instead of a skirt, I liked Darby’s rather laboured movement: she made Mattie seem prematurely middle-aged. There are plenty of exchanges between her and Rooster which, if Darby had been convincing as a young teenager, would have come over as a lot more corny. In that respect, her maturity is a relief but it also robs the story of a good deal of its distinctiveness. Perhaps it’s remarkable enough that a female of any kind in this society behaves with Mattie’s self-possessed, dauntless determination but it feels wrong that, in her early dealings with officialdom after her father’s murder, no one expresses surprise at her youth. In spite of the rigours of her journey with Rooster and La Boeuf, Mattie continues to look surprisingly clean and tidy and that goes well with Kim Darby’s scrubbed neatness. Unlike anyone else in the film, Mattie speaks without contractions and Darby handles the lines skilfully. (I assumed this was a sign of Mattie’s school education and everyone else’s lack of it.)
If it’s not surprising, in retrospect anyway, that Kim Darby’s career didn’t take off on the back of True Grit, it would have been astonishing if Glen Campbell had gone on to regular acting work. (According to Wikipedia, John Wayne ‘hand picked’ Campbell for his role in the film – and there are other instances which make you think the casting was planned to make the star look relatively good.) In fact, Campbell earns his fee before the opening titles are over with his fine singing of the appealing title song (music by Elmer Bernstein, words by Don Black). He’s not bad in La Boeuf’s early scenes in the boarding house with Mattie but Campbell’s in trouble as soon as the action moves to the great outdoors. He’s not uninteresting to look at, thanks to his seeming a weird cross between two memorable screen characters of the period, Michael J Pollard’s C W Moss in Bonnie and Clyde and Jon Voight’s Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy. But Campbell is stiffly self-conscious and doesn’t know how to use his body; the confidence seems to drain out of him and, by the closing stages, the performance has sunk to the level of ones like Samantha Eggar’s in Doctor Dolittle: you lose any sense of what the character was meant to be. The style and standard of most of the acting mean that, when someone genuinely talented appears – Robert Duvall (as the gang leader, ‘Lucky’ Ned Pepper, an old adversary of Rooster) or Dennis Hopper (as a horse thief called Moon) – it throws the film briefly out of joint. Hopper is more dynamic in his death throes than any of the people who go on living. (It’s an amusing historical detail that True Grit appeared in the same year as Easy Rider – and Midnight Cowboy.) Jeff Corey is a surprisingly middle-aged Tom Chaney. The horses work very hard and there’s a good ginger cat that shares Rooster’s lodgings although its regular miaows sound a bit to order.
11 February 2011
