Word: roosters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...
...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...
...this time to seduce Fidelman from his wife -and from art. Beppo is a truly queer dens ex machina; yet Malamud clearly intends him for the role. It is Beppo, in fact, who finally gives Fidelman the word on his "painter's progress": "After twenty years if the rooster hasn't crowed she should know she's a hen." And it is Beppo who points instructively to the future: "If you can't invent art, invent life...
...Harts were simply learning what it is like to be a family receiving an Aid to Families with Dependent Children allowance (about 25? per person per meal). Mrs. Hart discovered that the family fare ran heavily to beans, cheap vegetables and bread, with an occasional tough old rooster for the stew pot. "I can see how people would just take the entire amount," said she, "and buy a bottle and blot the whole thing...