New Movies: Law and Ardor Candidate

For most of his career, John Wayne has walked through westerns as a stalwart named McCord or Chance—men who are merely synonyms for John Wayne. It comes as a pleasant surprise to see him vanish into the part of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. In the Charles Portis novel, a 14-year-old girl, Mattie Ross, narrated her adventures in the 1880s while tracking down her father's murderer with the aid of Cogburn, an aging federal marshal. The book was parodic frontier realism, a Frederic Remington painting with the colors put in by numbers: courageous red, sky blue, lily white and Zane gray.

The public's affection for the bestseller was pallid compared with Wayne's. The Duke offered to buy the screen rights for $300,000. "I knew right away that Rooster Cogburn was a character that fit my pistol," he said. "He even felt the same way about life. He did not believe in pampering wrongdoers." Eventually, Producer Hal Wallis outbid Wayne—but Wallis provided an appropriately happy ending by hiring the superstar to play the role.

At the Children's Rate. As in the book, Rooster is "an old one-eyed jasper built along the lines of Grover Cleveland." Full of booze and passion for justice, he sees himself as a law and ardor candidate. His politics are symbolized by the itchy trigger finger, and his judicial philosophy is summed up in a tidy homily: "You can't serve papers on a rat." Grousing around a courthouse, he comes on Mattie (Kim Darby), a girl as flat and solid as an oak board. She talks Rooster into giving her his children's rate for catching killers.

The two of them light out for In dian territory in pursuit of the evil Tom Chaney, her dad's murderer, who is riding with the dreadful Ned Pepper gang. Mattie and Rooster are joined by La Boeuf (Glen Campbell). That makes five eyes altogether, and woe to the criminal that tries to evade them. The dastardly Chaney can contrive to shoot Rooster and bash in La Boeuf's head and trap Mattie in a rattlesnake pit. But doom hangs over him. What devil, after all, could even hope to best good Christians who possess true grit—the 19th century version of soul?

On the printed page, the studiously naive dialogue contributed to an authentic period piece. Spoken onscreen, such lines as "I will not bandy words with a drunkard" tend to clutter the air like gnats. Kim Darby seems too far past puberty to be the original Mattie, and Glen Campbell proves the ideal cowboy to chase a wooden Indian. Even so, a conspiracy is afoot to make the picture succeed. Director Henry Hathaway, 71, knits the yarn into a perfect size 46 extra long for Wayne.

Congealed Grin. Subtle characterization has never been the Duke's long suit. Instead, he and Hathaway create an antique through a series of gestures and symbols—a grin that congeals into a mask of hate, a plodding gait that belies the deadly hands, a primitive mind that can only understand an idea or a society by turning it over and looking at the underside. In the end they come up with a flawless portrait of a flawed man who is as simple, as forceful—and as dangerous—as Mattie's cap-and-ball Colt pistol.