TRUE GRIT 1969

I have to make two things clear from the start: I am not a fan of westerns and I’m REALLY not a fan of John Wayne. Having firmly established that fact, I’m afraid I must also lay simultaneous claim to the patently contradictory declaration that True Grit — incontestably both a western and a John Wayne film — is one of my all-time favorite movies.

I've loved movies since I was a kid, but even then, there were only two kinds of films I didn't care for: westerns and war movies. Seeing as these genres exemplified virtually the entire John Wayne oeuvre, by the time True Grit appeared at the local movie house on a double bill with The Odd Couple back in 1969 (I was a big fan of Jack Lemmon), I was 12 years old and had yet to ever see a John Wayne movie. Well, as luck would have it, my first John Wayne movie was what I consider (then, and still to this day) his best. True Grit is an engagingly robust and entertaining western adventure that is satisfying in all the ways that a good, old-fashioned, "popcorn movie" should be.

John Wayne as Reuben "Rooster" Cogburn

Kim Darby as Mattie Ross

Glen Campbell as LaBoeuf

The by-now familiar story concerns the efforts of a headstrong girl (the appealingly androgynous Kim Darby, whose haircut here makes her look like a somewhat more masculine Justin Bieber) to bring to justice the murderer of her father. To assist her in her quest she enlists the aid of a boozy, trigger-happy U.S. Marshal named Rooster Cogburn (Wayne) and a chubby-cheeked Texas Ranger named LaBoeuf (the genial singing star Glen Campbell, whose acting style consists of scrunching up his face a lot).

So what was it about True Grit that made it different from the rest of the westerns that flooded the TV and movie screens back in the 1960s?

Well, for starters it has a great "quest" storyline...(something akin to a frontier The Wizard of Oz or prairie Alice in Wonderland) populated with colorful characters, crackling dialog, and centered on a young protagonist with whom a kid could both identify and root for. Its cinematography is fittingly crisp and offers up a storybook vision of the old west— all breathtaking mountain vistas and majestic trees. It has a sweeping Elmer Bernstein "Aaron Copland meets the Marlboro Man" score of rousing, orchestrated music that imbues every scene with the thrust of American myth. And, perhaps best of all, in its subtle integration of emancipated women, Indigenous Americans, African-Americans, and Chinese into the fabric of everyday western life, it is a refreshingly modern take on an over-exhausted genre.

Mattie Ross (toting her father's gun) tries to convince Marshal Cogburn that she means business.

The first time I saw True Grit it played out for me like a thrill-a-minute tall-tale told around a campfire at night. It engaged me from its first frames to its last, doling out equal parts thrills, laughs, and heart. To this day I can watch the film, aware of its artificiality and inauthenticity, yet powerless and unwilling to allow such trivial realities to mar the enjoyment I find in the likable characters, ofttimes hilarious dialog, and terrific performances. Much like 1965s Cat Ballou, True Grit is the perfect western for people who don't like westerns.

Rooster- "By God! She reminds me of me!"

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
Part of the charm of True Grit is its gentle send-up of the John Wayne myth. Outwardly the story of a young girl's pursuit of justice, running beneath the surface of True Grit is also a story about a man out of step with the times. In the tamed West of True Grit - a West of lawyers, evolving women's roles, and boarding houses that eschew spurs in the dining room, Rooster Cogburn is something of a dinosaur. A symbol of a lawless time that civilized townsfolk would be happy to put behind them. In the America of 1969 John Wayne was also a bit of a dinosaur. His ultra-conservative screen image, pro-war politics, and ofttimes moronic offscreen statements on racial issues alienated him from the very demographic that was emerging as the core movie-going audience of the New Hollywood era — the young, college-age crowd. After the gung-ho embarrassment that was his Vietnam-era war film The Green Berets (a 1968 movie I had the misfortune of watching several decades later), Wayne gets a chance at big-screen redemption in True Grit.

John Wayne's right eye, outacting Glen Campbell

In True Grit John Wayne gives a bravely self-deprecating performance, allowing himself to be called a fat, slovenly, kill-happy, sexist drunk by most of the cast for a good deal of the picture. His machismo is met and bested in nearly every scene by the resourceful Kim Darby, and even Glen Campbell, while not really anybody's idea of a western hero, cuts a more dashing figure of youth and vitality. This subtle peeling away of the anachronistic myth of the Great White Frontiersman has the not-undesired effect of making Wayne into a more sympathetic and appealing character.

Rooster meets his match.

Indeed, Wayne has so much abuse heaped on his head in the film that by the time of the climactic gun battle where he single-handedly takes on four desperadoes while wielding a pistol, a rifle, and holding his horse's reins in his teeth; the audience is practically on its feet cheering, happy to see a moment of old-school Wayne in this sea of late'60s western revisionism.

"No grit? Rooster Cogburn? Not much!"

PERFORMANCES

I've never held with the accepted belief that John Wayne so overpowers the film that the story shifts focus from Darby's Mattie Ross to Wayne's Rooster Cogburn the moment he appears. I'm sure that's what Wayne fans experience, but as good as Wayne is (and he's VERY good. I can't imagine how he made that one eye so expressive!) the under-appreciated and very talented Kim Darby is the main reason I like the film so much.

Her performance is surprisingly strong and she holds the narrative thread together by investing her character's single-minded indomitability with a deep sense of loss and pugnacious vulnerability. Just watch how she matches the energy and skill of veterans like Wayne and Strother Martin in their scenes together. Much like Mattie Ross, Darby refuses to be shunted off to the sidelines by the seasoned, all-male cast, and brilliantly holds her own. Her gutsy yet gentle portrayal also serves to smooth over and humanize all the macho gunplay and violence that often becomes so repetitious and tiresome in westerns.

Lightening failed to strike twice for Darby and Campell who were reteamed a year later in Norwood, a forgotten film also based on a Charles Portis novel and adapted by Marguerite Roberts.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
For a city boy like me, a western couldn't look more like a western than True Grit. A huge departure from the B&W TV westerns of the day, all of which seemed to use the same fake-looking studio backlot town, True Grit's use of spectacular, eye-popping natural locations adds both a visual lushness and a heroic scope.
With traditional western mythology at the core of the narrative, director Henry Hathaway treats the locations as though they are characters in the story. Not only do the mountains and streams provide colorful backdrop, but each scene that plays out in front of one of these magnificent landscapes seems to pay homage to decades of western (movie) tradition. And for those purists who would balk at the Colorado Rockies standing in for the plains of Arkansas and Oklahoma...who really expects to find documentary authenticity in a movie where we're asked to believe four hardened gunmen all manage to miss hitting a sizable target like Rooster Cogburn in a four-against-one faceoff?

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Movies are a visual medium to be sure, but there's nothing like a well-written story. The source novel by Charles Portis is a great bit of folkloric storytelling brought to vivid life on the screen by Marguerite Roberts. The dialog, the characters, and even the simple structure of the plot are perfection itself. So many films today suffer from over-plotting. Ruled by an audience's short attention span, they trip themselves up with A, B & even C storylines; subplots piled upon subplots, and with all this, they still never make much sense. Here you have a direct narrative with three acts, rising action, character arc, sentimentality, heroism, and probably one of the most satisfyingly-resolved conclusions of a western ever put to film. Great storytelling, great moviemaking.

Consummate character actor Strother Martin is memorable in his scenes as the exasperated auctioneer who has one too many encounters with the headstrong Mattie Ross

You have to look far to find a more menacing western villain than Robert Duvall as "Lucky" Ned Pepper

I have not yet seen the Coen brothers' 2010 remake, but I am very much looking forward to the DVD release. As stated, I think the source novel is foolproof, and any film which claims to hew closely to it is on a winning track from the get-go. I generally tend not to be too fond of remakes, but in this case, I am eager to see these great characters interpreted by a new generation of actors and interpreted perhaps with a new sensibility. The original True Grit will always be special to me and irreplaceable in my memories, but it does come with a lot of baggage (not only the John Wayne issue but the casting of the then-immensely popular Glen Campbell was blatant stunt-casting and an obvious box-office bid). It's been a while now and I think it's high time I see another western...who cares if it's the same one?

"Well, come see a fat old man sometime!"

Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2011

8 WOMEN (8 FEMMES) 2002

Every now and then, if you're lucky, you come across a film that so nails your particular tastes and fancies that it feels as though someone had snuck into your dreams and extracted a fragment of your psyche. Take George Cukor's The Women, cross it with Agatha Christie, throw in a dash of Les Demoiselles de Rochefort, and you get 8 Women: an intoxicatingly charming cinematic confection aimed directly at the heart of a nostalgia-prone film fantasist like me.

This Gallic homage to the days of the Hollywood "woman's picture" stars a galaxy of France's greatest actresses in a musical comedy murder mystery that doesn't just tease camp, but envelopes it in a loving embrace.

Danielle Darrieux: Would she kill her husband just because he was too perfect?

Catherine Deneuve: Would she kill her husband just to run off with a lover?

Isabelle Huppert: Would she kill a man just because he resisted her advances?

Fanny Ardant: Would she kill a man just for money?

Emmanuelle Beart: Would she kill her employer?

Virginie Ledoyen: Would she kill the man who betrayed her?

Ludivine Sagnier: Would she kill to protect someone?

Fermine Richard: Would she kill to hide a secret?

It's the Christmas season, and the time is the mid-to-early1950s. Eight wildly divergent women, each with at least one skeleton in the closet and a traditionally dark secret to hide, are trapped by a blizzard in an isolated chateau in the French countryside. The sole male resident of the household has been discovered with a knife sticking out of his back, and it is up to the women to discover, through bouts of hysteria, temperament, deceptions, and revelations, the identity of the culprit. 

It comes as no surprise to me that this household of relatives, rivals, in-laws, and paramours should harbor more secrets than a game of "Clue." But what IS surprising is how this movie (directed by Francois Ozon and adapted from a play by Robert Thomas) so artfully and playfully balances the at-odds genres of musical, melodrama, and mystery. In fact, it's utterly shocking. 

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I am just crazy about the way this film looks. The phrase "eye candy" was invented for movies like this. Sporting art direction seemingly inspired by an exploded petit four factory and a color palette taken from a drag queen's makeup case, 8 Women is one sumptuous viewing experience. The rich, hyper-vibrancy of the cinematography intentionally harkens back to the 50s Technicolor melodramas of Ross Hunter and Douglas Sirk, while the tailored, color-specific costuming recalls the glory days of Edith Head and the Hollywood studio system. A system that demanded that stars look like stars no matter the requirements of the script. 

Deneuve & Beart face off...and look fabulous doing so!

And speaking of stars...WOW! You can seriously overdose on glamour and all-around gorgeousness here. I mean, the sight of Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant on screen at the same time is enough to make a person's eyes fall right out of their head. Ranging in ages from 21 (Sagnier) to 84 (Darrieux), it's striking to see that the smooth, unlined prettiness of the younger stars can't hold a candle to the kind of sensual beauty that age and experience add to a woman's face.

Ardant & Deneuve in the cat-fight of the century!

PERFORMANCES
It shouldn't be the cinema anomaly that it is, but one of the more satisfying things about 8 Women is that after taking the trouble to assemble a first-class cast of iconic French actresses, Ozon actually shows off each to her best advantage and allows them to play to their strengths. Consequently, the entire cast is consistently firing on all cylinders and the film fairly crackles with electricity and star quality in each scene. (My head still aches from the lost, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of 70s icons Robert DeNiro, Barbra Streisand, and Dustin Hoffman teamed for...Meet the Fockers???? Heaven wept!)

 Anyhow, all the actresses in 8 Women are a joy. Super serious Isabelle Huppert proves to be a wonderfully wacky comedienne; Fanny Ardant, heat personified, is intelligent and earthy; Deneuve wittily sends up her own icy screen image; and French legend Danielle Darrieux has a marvelous way with a reaction shot. You really have to watch the film at least twice: once for the subtitles and plot, a second time just to watch the faces. Possibly even a third time, just to pick up all the inside film references (like Emmanuelle Beart's maid costume - down to the kinky, lace-up boots - paying homage to Jeanne Moreau in Bunuel's Diary of a Chambermaid, or Ledoyen's Audrey Hepburn bangs).

Spinster aunt Augustine's response to being asked why she was up at 3am cleaning her comb!

The previously wheelchair-bound, sympathy-milking grandmama suddenly reveals she can walk.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
More difficult than catching lightning in a bottle (and twice as foolhardy) is to attempt to create intentional camp. Camp is a cultural phenomenon easily identified but notoriously resistant to commodification. At its worst, it's like a comic who ruins the punchline by cracking up at his own joke. At its best, it feels like something that comes from a place of gentle affection and nostalgia. The stylistic excesses of 8 Women are so funny because it's so clear that the director is so fond of them.

Each of the actresses is given her own musical number. Here the exquisite Fanny Ardant channels Rita Hayworth

THE STUFF OF DREAMS
Old-style Hollywood films were peerless at using the hyper-reality of the cinema to emphasize real-life issues. All manner of otherwise objectionable material was made digestible if the leading lady was suffering in mink and her surroundings were plush.

8 Women is not out to make any big social statements, but there are a great many smart, feminist underpinnings behind the ingeniousness of taking the structurally rigid genre of the murder mystery and having that serve as the environment in which repressive gender roles of the 1950s are stylistically juxtaposed with the artifice of old-fashioned Hollywood. A perfect melding of style and content.

The late, great Romy Schneider makes a surprise appearance as the 9th woman.

In this age of remake mania, it's impossible to watch 8 Women and not fantasize about who might be cast in an American remake. My mind goes to the actresses I grew up with: Jane Fonda, Faye Dunaway, Jacqueline Bisset, and Julie Christie. Unfortunately, I suspect that the brain-numbing awfulness that was the 2008 remake of The Women (the film Ozon initially wanted to do) may have forever killed any interest in an American version of this utterly beguiling, utterly original film.

On the plus side, my enjoyment of 8 Women at least sparked an interest in seeing these great actresses in other films. A decision that introduced me to a 35-year-old Danielle Darrieux in Max Ophul's masterful The Earrings of Madame de...,  and Catherine Deneuve in Truffaut's sentimental The Last Metro, among others. Seeing all of these actresses in the many different roles they've played over the years only makes me appreciate more the depth and breadth of talent they bring to 8 Women, and grateful for how this film pays such loving tribute to them.

Copyright © Ken Anderson  2009 - 2011

SHADOW OF A DOUBT 1943

Decades before David Lynch turned his twisted lens on small-town perversity in the masterfully weird Blue Velvet, Alfred Hitchcock had already taken what I consider to be the definitive look at the pernicious effect of evil on small town life in Shadow of a Doubt. You can keep your Psycho, Vertigo, and Rear Window — classics all— but for me, there isn't a Hitchcock film that compares with Shadow of a Doubt.

Hitchcock to the left : Holding all the Aces

As a thriller, it has a simplicity of plot that is near-irresistible: A beloved uncle with a dark secret (Joseph Cotten) visits his family in a small northern California town. A secretive, closed-off person whose misanthropic nature contrasts starkly with the open friendliness he displays to insinuate himself into the lives of his distant family and the townsfolk. It isn't long before Charlie reveals himself to be a true figure of evil; his presence threatening to disrupt the conventional lives around him. His true nature also initiates a shattering coming-of-age for his adoring niece (Teresa Wright).

Santa Rosa, California

If you can imagine Vincente Minnelli's small-town valentine, Meet Me in St. Louis crossed with Orson Welles' noirish thriller The Stranger, then you have a pretty good idea of what a delightfully sinister mélange Hitchcock concocts in Shadow of a Doubt. (Both Thornton Wilder of Our Town and Sally Benson of Meet Me in St. Louis worked on the script for Shadow of a Doubt).

Teresa Wright as Charlotte Newton

Joseph Cotten as Charlie Oakley

Macdonald Carey as Det. Jack Graham

Patricia Collinge as Emma Newton

Henry Travers as Joseph Newton

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM
I've always been impressed by Alfred Hitchcock's ability to balance humor and terror in his films. It always seemed like such a dangerous risk to take...potentially sacrificing mood or suspense for the sake of interjecting some bit of levity...but his films always carry it off. Almost always. The humor in Frenzy and Family Plot verges on the painful.
In Shadow of a Doubt the humor on display is of the gentle type derived exclusively from the characters. To great effect, Joseph Cotten's self-serious, misanthropic sociopath (how's that for a description? Reminds me of Wood Allen's line: "I'd call him a sadistic, sodomistic necrophile, but that would be beating a dead horse.") is contrasted with the practical and sweet Teresa Wright and her decidedly dotty family. Each is lovably offbeat in some very real way, and their harmless eccentricity lends them an endearing vulnerability in the face of Cotten's poisonous view of mankind.

"Really Poppa, you'd think Momma had never SEEN a phone! She makes no allowance for science. 
She thinks she has to cover the distance by sheer lung power!"

The Newton Family: If cast today, the parents look too much like grandparents

PERFORMANCES
I've always liked how Joseph Cotten never seemed to be too taken with his own good looks. He played both villains and romantic leads with such a refreshing lack of ego that even his monsters were likable.

Charlie- "The whole world's a joke to me."

As good as the entire cast of Shadow of a Doubt is, it's the work of Teresa Wright that towers over the rest. A stage-trained actress Oscar nominated for her first three film roles, Wright gives one of those performances that makes the film unimaginable without her. She is a wonderfully natural presence in the film, very contemporary in her acting style and apparently incapable of having a false moment on the screen. I can't think of another actress from this era who exudes such a down-to-earth quality. While so many of her contemporaries spoke in that stagy, mid-Atlantic dialect that telegraphed "acting!" Wright seemed not to be playacting at all. Her performance under Hitchcock's direction is one of her strongest.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY
Years before he would succumb to stylistic self-consciousness, Shadow of a Doubt shows Hitchcock in full control of his gifts as a master storyteller. The film is sharp and compact and zips by at an entertaining and very suspenseful 108 minutes. Indeed, in this era where a film like Sex and the City 2 can eat up more than two hours with a virtually non-existent plot, or Quentin Tarantino can actually lose his way when confronted with a running time of less than 2 ½ hours (Death Proof is like the work of a gifted 10 year-old let loose with a camera), Shadow of a Doubt looks like nothing short of a miracle. There isn't a wasted frame, superfluous scene, or self-indulgent moment in this tightly-structured film that economically achieves its desired effect without skimping on character development or plot detail.

The almost psychic connection between Charlie and his niece Charlotte (Little Charlie), rendered cinematically.

Uncle Charlie- "We're old friends, Charlie. More than that. We're like twins."   

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

My absolute favorite parts of Shadow of a Doubt are the scenes chronicling Teresa Wright's mounting disillusion with her idealized uncle, Joseph Cotten. The psychological authenticity of her behavior and reactions are so keenly observed and subtly performed. It's marvelous to me that the screenwriters had the sense and took the time to really let Wright's awakening to her uncle's true nature be an integral part of the film's second half.

Everything is Suspect: Charlotte watches her uncle's powerful hands twisting a napkin.

Filmmakers today, afraid of losing the short attention-span of their audience, never seem to understand that unless you devote enough time to the psychology of your characters, no degree of plot twists or action scenes can generate interest in the outcome of a film. The most gripping moments from Shadow of a Doubt come from the scenes where the loss of idealism in Wright's character is something we can literally see. The defeated body language, the hardening of the voice, the way you can tell that she mourns for her previous state of ignorance. It's a masterful performance.

I love how Wright's once-free physicality around Charlie gradually grows awkward, and how she can't seem to stand looking at him. There are these great fleeting moments when you can see her studying him when he's not looking, searching for a betraying trace of the evil she knows is there but somehow missed.
The post-library dinner table scene is, from a psychological standpoint, one of the most emotionally true, discomfiting scenes of mounting family discord in modern cinema. It's in this scene that Teresa Wright really shines. Scarcely an actress today could handle the complexities of that scene (Ok, maybe Natalie Portman or Cate Blanchett...).

Charlotte notices a mysterious inscription inside of a ring her uncle just gave her.

As I've stated, Teresa Wright gives a stellar performance here, but kudos go to the team of writers who were smart enough to mine the dramatic possibilities in a young girl being forced to confront the ugliness of the real world. They could have played up the police/manhunt angle for the obvious action potential, but the film benefits greatly from keeping its focus on what the characters are going through rather than the chase and the procedurals of police work.

Though the term is bandied about a lot these days, Shadow of a Doubt has a deserved reputation as a Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece. A solid entertainment and suspenseful drama, but what resonates for me is that at its core it is a cunningly perceptive treatise on nostalgia and the romanticism of the past.

Charlie: "I keep remembering those things. The old things. Everybody was sweet and pretty then, the whole world. A wonderful world. Not like the world today. Not like the world now. It was great to be young then."

These words, spoken by a character embittered by what he sees as the corruption of good around him, are no truer then than they are now. Every age thinks the age past is the ultimate age of innocence. If you look on YouTube you can even read comments by people lamenting the state of the world today and denoting the '70s, '80s, and even the '90s as a "kinder, gentler time." As a man past middle-age, I find myself caught in that inevitable "curmudgeon zone" where everything about the world today seems somehow inferior (as is evident from my comments about contemporary filmmakers) and my past seems endlessly cheerier and innocent. Now mind you, the innocent and cheerier time I look back at with such rose-colored glasses are the '70s. And we all KNOW that the '70s were anything but innocent.
But that's what I mean, the world of the past is always soothing to our minds and we go to great lengths to recreate it as we wish to remember it. No matter how far from the truth it may be.

Hume Cronyn (right) making his film debut as a neighbor obsessed with the details of crime and murder.

The small-town life depicted in Shadow of a Doubt is a vision of America that never existed except in our minds and perhaps on our TV screens and in our movies. It takes a special kind of myopia to be able to (or need to) see the world in such a narrow fashion. To paraphrase Dickens, history has always been a combination of the best of times and the worst of times. The world is never all good, nor is it all evil. Shadow of a Doubt artistically shakes us out of our fantasies and reminds us that remaining in a state of ignorance is not the same as remaining in a state of innocence. Charlotte Newton has her eyes opened to some of the darkness that exists in the world, but seeing the world as it is, not as we wish it to be, is just a part of growing up.

On Uncle Charlie's twisted opinion of the world: "It's not quite as bad as all that, 
but sometimes it needs a lot of watching. It seems to go crazy every now and then."

And wasn't it Norman Bates in "Psycho" who said, "We all go a little mad sometimes" ?

Something Wicked This Way Comes:
Uncle Charlie arrives.

Copyright © Ken Anderson