The One-Eyed Man Is King

By FRANK RICH
NYT

A month before John Wayne won the 1969 Best Actor Oscar for “True Grit,” Richard Nixon wrote him a “Dear Duke” fan letter from the Oval Office: “I saw it in the W.H. with my family and for once we agree with the critics — you were great!” Some four decades later, his rave was echoed by another Republican warrior, this time in praise of the “True Grit” remake with Jeff Bridges in the role of the old, fat, hard-drinking, half-blind 19th-century United States marshal Rooster Cogburn. Shortly after New Year’s, Liz Cheney told The Times that her parents saw “True Grit” at the Teton Theater in Jackson, Wyo., and gave it “two thumbs up.”

The double-barreled success of “True Grit,” then and now, spreads well beyond those conservative gunslingers. In our current winter of high domestic anxiety, as in the politically tumultuous American summer of 1969, it is a hit with the national mass audience and elite critics alike. The new version is doing as well in New York and Los Angeles as in red Cheneyland.

That “True Grit” still works is first a testament to the beauty of the remake, as directed by the Coen brothers, and to the enduring power of both films’ source, a 1968 novel by Charles Portis that refracted a Western yarn through a scintillating and original comic voice. But the latest “True Grit” juggernaut also has something to say about Americans yearning at a trying juncture in our history — much as it did the first time around.

The original film opened at Radio City Music Hall on July 3, 1969, the same day that antiwar protestors incited a melee at the adjoining Rockefeller Center, shutting down Fifth Avenue. In that climate, the movie’s success was hardly foreordained. The previous year, “The Green Berets,” Wayne’s jingoistic Vietnam potboiler, had divided audiences, been ridiculed by the press and shunned by the Oscars. The Western, like the war movie, was seen as a dying genre, usurped by darker and ever more violent takes on frontier mythology like the 1967 “Bonnie and Clyde” and “The Wild Bunch,” which opened just a week before “True Grit.” July of ’69 would also bring “Easy Rider,” the iconic ’60s dope-and-biker movie in which Dennis Hopper, who played a villain in “True Grit,” would reinvent himself as an era’s archetypal cultural antihero. The “Easy Rider” ad copy ran: “A man went looking for America. And couldn’t find it anywhere.”

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