Word: grit
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TRUE GRIT. John Wayne, 62, gallops off into his sunset years as Rooster Cogburn, a one-eyed federal marshal with an indiscriminate passion for justice, bullets and booze. The rest of the cast are only props to support The Duke in his best performance in a decade...
...True Grit does have to redeeming factors and they are large enough to demand mention. John Wayne gives an absolutely magnificent performance as Rooster Cogburn, the old marshal. His characterization is a modification of the familiar Wayne walking through the action unperturbed, but is so subtle and full of things peculiar to Cogburn that one is forced to marvel at the ability of an actor to take and archtype and mold it to fit a particular situation...
...other prime virtue of True Grit is the photography of Lucien Ballard. Having, I suppose, nothing better to do than play games, Ballard has created incredible patterns of color and light for every shot in the picture. Were it not for the overriding unbearable quality of Maddy Ross one could well sit back and enjoy pretty pictures for all the two and a half hours that Truse Grit runs...
...pretty patterns which Ballard was allowed to establish in True Grit are absent in The Wild Bunch since, unlike the Hathaway film, Sam Peckinpah has directed half to three-quarters of this epic in close-shot. The major exception to this rule of composition comes in the slow-motion orgies of violence which punctuate the film at various crucial points...
...style of The Wild Bunch is one which I have found myself opposed to almost as much as the set of values implied in True Grit, but here Peckinpah has forced a reevaluation. For once all those close-ups work...