True Grit (Original)
A Respect Oscar in many ways is both a good and a bad thing: It recognizes an actor who’s never won and probably will never get another shot at it for an amazing body of work, yet it’s usually for a performance that may not necessarily be his best. Thus is the case with John Wayne and this 1969 film that saw him one time get up at the Academy Awards podium, for while it was nice to see him honored, it was FAR from his best performance (though he was good). That achievement would be his untouchable, unforgettable Ethan Edwards from John Ford’s The Searchers. Nonetheless, the Rooster Cogburn role he had here definitely had its moments, even if much of it came off like another day at the office for The Duke. Playing a drunken U.S. Marshall commandeered by a teenage girl to hunt down the man who killed her father, Wayne gets a few good introspective moments and a couple of decent bits of badassery even as he struggles with the inferior directing and acting talents of his co-stars. Kim Darby as the teenage girl comes off as annoying, petulant, and one note, instead of the strong-willed, determined young woman she was obviously meant to be, and Glen Campbell as the Texas Ranger they team up with tries to bring a cocky swagger to his performance, but ultimately comes up with a grinning yet wooden turn that indicated that he shouldn’t quit his day job as a musician. The rest of the supporting cast is good though, and makes the most of their screen time, from Robert Duvall as an outlaw leader to Dennis Hopper as an ill-fated squealer to the always fun Strother Martin as an auctioneer who gets taken for a ride, this group certainly makes the film worth watching at times. What doesn’t stand out is the direction by Henry Hathaway which is heavy-handed and allows for an uneven tone between winking humor and deadly seriousness, all the way up to the ham-fisted, very anticlimactic showdown at the end. All of which begs the question, did John Wayne singularly DESERVE the Oscar for what is unquestionably one of his more average films, or was he really good enough to beat out Richard Burton (who never won and to whom Wayne told straight out deserved to) as well as Hoffman and Voight in Midnight Cowboy? That answer is probably best left up to the individual film buffs out there who can honestly say they’ve watched all the films in play that year, but in this humble reviewer’s opinion, perhaps the best answer is that he was good enough, even if the movie for which he won for wasn’t exactly the greatest…
5/10