Henry Hathaway
Il Grinta

1969 is the year of "Easy Rider," a film symbolic of counterculture and—with its minimal budget—a challenge to the big film industry, a movie intriguingly directed and acted by the same Dennis Hopper who (in a much less significant role) we also find in "True Grit." The presence of this actor in both films highlights the schizophrenia of a production universe living through a rift that can no longer be healed. The audience's success of the film with John Wayne is the swan song of a western cinema that now has to step aside for new authors, new themes, new faces: 1970 indeed sees the arrival on screens of "Soldier Blue" (by Ralph Nelson, with Candice Bergen) and "Little Big Man" (by Penn, with Dustin Hoffman), while in 1971, Robert Altman delivers "McCabe and Mrs. Miller."

The seventies would belong to these new protagonists, but in 1969 two seasoned veterans like Henry Hathaway and John Wayne could still dominate an uncertain horizon. And the underlying idea was this: to propose the portrait of an old giant, perhaps too big, too sincere and brutal, too little respectful of the rules for the times he lived in. The project fit perfectly with the mythical Wayne, who thought that his characters should be like this: examples of manly virtue and courage, people who personally take on the defense of justice, but, of course, without wasting more time than necessary and without hesitating to resort to swift means. When there's no director of Hathaway's caliber, this material becomes the bombastic yet forgettable "Chisum" (1970) by McLaglen, but "True Grit" is a film of a completely different caliber for its irony, intelligence, richness of ideas (not surprisingly, it was the prototype upon which Italians Berardi and Milazzo based one of the most beautiful adventures of their western comic book, "Ken Parker").

The key to the uniqueness of True Grit lies in the ironic and seemingly anti-heroic presentation of the protagonist, described as a brutal, semi-alcoholic old man, a frontier man who ends up taking orders from a stubborn little girl. And he is also one-eyed. Upon initial appearances, "Rooster" Cogburn (the protagonist) almost seems to embody a parody of the western hero, for instance when he discovers a mouse in the house where he lives. In a drunken stupor, the protagonist sketches a "peaceful" arrest attempt of the intruder but is subsequently obliged to resort to force by shooting the little animal with a revolver shot. If the real intent of the film were desecration, probably the shot would have missed, but Cogburn hits his target on the first try, despite being drunk.

And indeed the story shows us that the character portrayed by Wayne is a capable, determined, courageous lawman, the kind of tough hero America felt it needed (coincidentally, the following year sees the Oscar triumph of "Patton" and the year after that of "The French Connection"). Curiously, this western apology for the American vigilante came from the pen of a screenwriter, Marguerite Roberts, who was once expelled from Hollywood because she ended up on the blacklist of the House Un-American Activities Committee. Wayne, who was a staunch supporter of the lists, was not swayed by the advice of those who discouraged him from lending himself to interpret the work of a "blacklisted" writer. He plunged, as usual, into the venture without reservations, and was rewarded with an Oscar victory and great and deserved public success, which erased the controversies and failures of the recent years (especially for the highly contested "The Green Berets" of 1968).