True Grit (1969)

There is a moment in True Grit when a fourteen-year-old girl named Mattie Ross walks into a Fort Smith undertaker's parlor and negotiates the price of her murdered father's coffin down to a sum she finds acceptable. She does this without raising her voice, without a chaperone, and without apology. For 1969, this is a startling piece of business, and it is the closest the picture ever comes to a statement about anything. Mattie drives the plot, out-argues the men who underestimate her, and hires the drunken marshal she requires. A modern production would make a great deal of this. This one simply lets it happen, which is its own quiet strength.

Henry Hathaway directs the whole affair as a fairy tale dressed in trail dust, and John Wayne, wearing an eyepatch and a belly, gives the performance that finally won him an Academy Award. The film concerns bounty money, a hanged man's reward, and the pursuit of a killer into Indian Territory, which it treats as a location rather than a subject. The cast is uniformly white, the romance is absent, and the moral universe is the plain, unsentimental one of the oaters that came before it. Nobody lectures. Nobody reforms. Rooster Cogburn ends the film leaping a fence to prove a girl wrong about his age, and that is the entire thesis.

We are asked to classify such pictures, and the classification here is mercifully brief. The film carries a determined young woman at its center, and it carries her without fanfare, which is not the same as carrying a message. The remaining categories find nothing to work with, and we shall not invent it for them. This is a traditional Western, sturdy and unhurried, content to tell its story and go home. After a long season of films that explain themselves to the audience twice, there is something restful about one that does not.