Don't Make a Scene: True Grit (1969)

In his meditation on the 30 year anniversary of John Wayne's death, Roger Ebert mentioned that this was one of his favorite John Wayne scenes. Turns out it was one of the Duke's, too. "I guess that scene in 'True Grit' is about the best scene I ever did," Ebert reports him saying, when the critic brought it up. Maybe he was just being nice. All we have is his word. With John Wayne, that's good enough.

The Story: Kim Darby got it right.

Even though they cast a peculiar actress with a button-nose and afraid of horses, she knew how Mattie Ross was to be played just from the words of Charles Portis' novel: the stilted English that would tolerate no contraction, the hay-seed formality—Jane Austen in Kansas. By contrast, Reuben J. Cogburn is a slurring mess with cuss-words, busted plurals and un-present tenses. John Wayne followed it to the letter, but managed to still make it sound like John Wayne-speak, pilgrim—he didn't make it stiff, he made it sound natural.

It's a fine adaptation by black-listed scripter Marguerite Roberts (Wayne wanted the part, and made no waves about her script, calling it "The best western anyone's written in years"—he could be like that, unconsciously generous, surprising people) and Henry Hathaway's no-nonsense direction makes the thing lope along at a good pace, while taking advantage of some spectacular scenery. In the scene here, it looks to be studio back-drop, but it's pure Portis, with Wayne at his most gregarious.

And Wayne was a fine actor, don't fool yourself. He could blow away accomplished actors like Montgomery Clift right off the screen if he thought them unco-operative. He does a little bit of that strategy here, too: a lot of the scene is played with Wayne facing askance of the camera, drawing the audience in, making them come to him. But even though he found Kim Darby odd, he still worked with her—more than once examining this scene, I noticed Wayne pulling back when she pulled back, the two in an odd-see-saw of body-movement. He saw what she was doing, and acted with it, not agin' it.

But then Wayne, like a lot of Hollywood stars, had a great sense of body language, which he used to great effect, even more so than the odd rhythms and cadences he brought to his speeches. Here, he has to contend with the eye-patch, using it to comedic effect, the one good eye popping out in reaction every-so-often. And you can notice that he works his jaw a lot, left and right, showing that at least one part of "Rooster" Cogburn was slightly unhinged. I've been looking--he's jutted that jaw out in a lot of movies, but never to and fro. It's a subtle move on his part for this one character. And it already negates a lot of arguments to say that John Wayne could not be sub-tle.

But back to True Grit: it feels a shade too much like a Wayne western. That's usually what happened—Wayne was too big a personality, and too wily an actor not to dominate every scene he was in, though at times he could be generous. If the Mattie Ross character wasn't such an assertive odd duck (and Darby played her rather goose-like) Wayne would completely walk away with the picture. As it is, Rooster's affection for her is played up in the film ("By God," he says at one point, "she reminds me of me!"), so she's helped by that reflection.

Now, next week, we're going to compare and contrast this scene with how the material was handled in the 2010 version done by the Coen Brothers. As one would guess, it is different in staging, tone, and is suffused by the distinctive Coen Brothers...oddness. And more than a little...grit.

The Set-Up: The minuscule Mattie Ross Posse - consisting of Miss Ross (Kim Darby), Marshall Reuben J. "Rooster" Cogburn (John Wayne), and a Texas Ranger named LaBouef (Glen Campbell) - have just shed first blood against the Lucky Ned Pepper Gang, which had a hand in killing Mattie's father, as well as a "little" Texas Senator. Dead already are "Moon" (Dennis Hopper) and his brother Emmett Quincey (Jeremy Slate), and the three are staked out waiting to see if Ned (Robert Duvall) and his band of miscreants might make a stop-over. "Rooster" has just persuaded Mattie not to bring her too-big revolver along so "she won't shoot her foot off." It's time to reconnoiter, re-load and reminisce.

Action!

Mattie Ross: Why do you keep that one chamber empty?
Rooster Cogburn: So, I won't shoot my foot off!
Rooster: Corn-dodger?
Mattie: Light a match and let me see it first.
Rooster: What for?
Mattie: Well, some of 'em got blood on 'em.
Rooster: Well, we ain't lightin' no matches.
Mattie: Well, I don't want any. What'd you do before you became a peace officer?
Rooster: Oh, just about everything...'cept keep school.
Mattie: How'd you lose your eye?
Rooster: 'Was in the war.
Rooster: The Lone Jack. Little scrap outside o' Kansas City.
Mattie: What'd you do after the war?
Rooster: I robbed me a federal paymaster and went to Cairo, Illinois, an' bought an eatin' place there called The Green Frog, an' married a grass widow.
Rooster: ...Place had a billiard table.
Mattie: You never told me you had a wife.
Rooster: Oh, I didn't have her long. My friends was a pack o' river rats, an' she didn't crave their so-ciety, so she up and left me and went back to her first husband who was clerkin' in a hardware store in Paducah.
Rooster: "Goodbye, Reuben" she says. "The love o' decency does not abide in you." That's a de-vorced woman talkin' for ya...'bout decency.
Rooster: Well, I told her. I said, "Goodbye, Nola. I hope that nail-selling bastard makes you happy this time."
Mattie: Did you have any children?
Rooster: Hm. There was a boy. Nola taken him with her. He never liked me anyway.
Rooster: A clumsier child you'll never see than Horace. I bet he broke 40 cup.
Mattie: Never did get you for stealing that money.
Rooster: Well, I didn't consider it "stealin'"
Mattie: Didn't belong to ya!
Rooster: I needed a road stake! It was like that little high-interest bank in New Mexico. Needed a road stake and there it was! I never...robbed no citizen, taken a man's watch!
Mattie: It's all stealing.
Rooster: That's the position those New Mexicans took! I had to flee for my life!! Bo was a young colt, then. No horse could...run him into the ground.
Rooster: When that posse thinned out, I...I turned ol' Bo around, an' takin' them reins in my teeth, I charged them boys, firing two Navy sixes. They musta all been married men that loved their families...
Rooster: ...'cause they scattered an' run for home.
Mattie: You don't have any family, do ya? Except Chin Lee and that lazy cat.
Rooster: Oh, General...Price don't belong to me. Cats don't belong to nobody. He just rooms with me! 'Course I depend on him.
Rooster: Well, uh,...baby sister, you better try an' get some sleep. I'll wake ya up...when they...get here.
Mattie curls up and sleeps. Rooster checks his rifle again, scans the horizon, looks down at Mattie and smiles. He eats a corn-dodger, blood or no.

True Grit

Words by Charles Portis and Marguerite Roberts

Pictures by Lucien Ballard and Henry Hathaway

 

True Grit is available on DVD and Blu-Ray from Paramount Home Video.

Dune: Part 2

Lead Them to Paradise

or

You Can't Have a Messiah Without a Mess at the Beginning.

 

"God created Arrakis to train the faithful"

from "The Wisdom of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

When last we left Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet), he and his Mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson) were the last survivors of an attack on their new home on Arrakis by the House Harkonnen, in order to win back the all-important spice-mining business, around which the very Universe itself depends. 

The first film ended with Paul's pivotal killing of the Fremen Jamis—his first real doubter of the Arrakis indigenous tribe—in order to become part of their number and learn their ways, and Dune: Part 2 begins almost immediately after that act.

It is clear—even without a viewing of his continuation—that writer-director Denis Villeneuve dearly loves Frank Herbert's story, and, as a result, it's more faithful than the previous versions (the story is so dense, with plots, sub-plots, and arcana that is was dubbed "unfilmable"), certainly in regards to the ways of Arrakis' inhabitants, the Fremen and their relationships with water and the predatory sand-worms—the "Shai-Hulud"—while also delving a bit more into the ways of the manipulative Bene Gesserit sisterhood, of which Jessica is a part.*

So, along with the blistering action sequences, the vast desert vistas, and the Leni Riefenstahl-styled troop formations, we get a bit more of the sociology of the Fremen, their belief systems, their legends...and that, though they may be monolithic, they are not as homogeneous in their ways as in prior depictions. These Fremen actually have personalities, as opposed to the stoic stalwarts they've been portrayed as before. 

That's good. And it gives them a chance to shine (seeing as how they dominate this second act), and provide rich characters for Javier Bardem and Zendaya to play around with, rather than as merely devoted followers to be led. Bardem's Stilgar is shown to be a bit of a romantic zealot, but with enough years to still be suspicious of the legends coming true, while Zendaya's Chani distrusts the prophecies, knowing full well that giving in to a messianic leader is just another form of slavery.

Those are good concepts, part of a couple of the dualities that Dune: Part 2 leans in on—dualities which Herbert chose not to spell out, but merely allowed to percolate as sub-text. And it shows that Villeneuve is confident enough in his work that he complicates it even more than the original author did.

So, there was quite a death-toll among the A-listers in the first Dune, so, right off the studio logos, we start being introduced to the new cast-members, starting with Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan, daughter of the Emperor Shaddam IV (Christopher Walken, and it's nice that composer Han Zimmer didn't give him any background music with cow-bells), as the Princess notices the Emperor's ruminating silence over the death of Duke Leto Atreides in the previous film; she is the chronicler of the tale, and it's a good thing because there's quite a lot of catching up to do.

We also get to meet Feyd-Rautha (Austin Butler, proving he's not a one-trick-pony depending on his looks) the Baron Harkonnen's younger, more psychotic son, who is Paul's final test, and, as well, a character no one's bothered with before, Lady Margot Fenring (Léa Seydoux) who's deep in the depth's of the Bene Gesserit conspiracy.

"I'd wish you the (best of luck), but it seems you've won your battle."

Then, there's one character, who's always problematic—Paul's sister Alia (yeah, I'm not going to tell you), the last child of Duke Leto Atreides. Villeneuve eliminates the two year gap that Herbert inserted into the book, so we don't get to see a walking talking two year old, instead we see the child in Jessica's womb, talking to both mother and brother through her thoughts. Okay, weird, but not as weird as it could have been.

A lot of set up here, much like you could say Dune was merely the set-up for Part 2 (which is accurate, but there was so much of worth in the first one that it wouldn't be a fair assessment). It is nearly three hours of non-stop posturing, gritty action and a soundtrack you can feel in your ribs, with all sides circling around each other for a big pay-off that is, justifiably, a little melancholic. Think of The Godfather meeting "Game of Thrones". It certainly does the book justice, and although "Dune" devotees may quibble with a couple of changes—no two year gap, so no Alia and no Guild and the changes to Chani (which I'll get to in a second)--one can't deny that this is as close to movie-form as we're going to get. It's amazing. It's fantastic. It's a must-see. Simple as that for being as complex as that.

And I want to see where they go with the next one ("Next one?" Yeah...author Herbert wrote a few books!). They've done a very logical, character-driven change to the character of Chani...to the betterment, I'd say, as I've always had an uneasiness about her character, previously. It will add a complication, and a personal element to the road ahead (if they follow Herbert's road-map) and if Villeneuve is willing to already muddy the...er.. sand and stir things a bit, I'm all for it.

It's one of those movies that I can recommend without hesitation, and those are few and far between. And I'd love to be able to eavesdrop some of the post-viewing discussions. 

 

For me, being a fan of the book (and a couple of the others), it's nice to be able to look at these two films back-to-back and say that we finally have a "Dune" adaptation, we don't have to make excuses for.

He was warrior and mystic, ogre and saint, the fox and the innocent, chivalrous, ruthless, less than a god, more than a man was. There is no measuring Muad'Dib's motives by ordinary standards. In the moment of his triumph, he saw the death prepared for him, yet he accepted the treachery. Can you say he did this out of a sense of justice? Whose justice, then? Remember, we speak now of the Muad'Dib who ordered battle drums made from his enemies' skins, the Muad'Dib who denied the conventions of his ducal past with a wave of the hand, saying merely: "I am the Kwisatz Haderach. That is reason enough."

--from "Arrakis Awakening" by the Princess Irulan

 

* In fact, the only thing Villeneuve ignores is the Spice Guild, particularly its Navigators, spice-mutated humans who have attained the power to "bend space" and thus travel between worlds, a necessary component in a story about commerce, and the resources needed to maintain them for power.