Welcome to Film School! This is a column focused on movie history and all the stars, filmmakers, events, laws and, yes, movies that helped write it. Film School is a place to learn—no homework required.
Westerns never went away altogether. However, after the 1970s, for a long while, they became something of a novelty. Besides a brief uptick of popularity during the first half of the ‘90s, which yielded Dances with Wolves, Unforgiven, Tombstone and Legends of the Fall, there were years, decades even, when it appeared the genre had gone out of fashion, perhaps for good.
You could say, with sporadic exceptions, it was (forgive me) all quiet on the Western front.
Until the autumn and winter of 2007, that is. Suddenly, a new critically acclaimed Western was being released every few weeks: September had 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, November had No Country for Old Men, December There Will Be Blood. It’s still not clear why many of Hollywood’s top filmmakers decided to make Westerns all at the same time—put it down to the Volcano/Dante’s Peak effect!—but after many years of dormancy, the genre was well and truly back.
It was a competitive Oscars that year, with all four of those movies gaining multiple nominations, but the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men came out on top.
The Coen brothers love Westerns. Even the films of theirs that don’t fit neatly within the genre often contains many of its elements; the wide open spaces, the small towns where you can’t trust anyone, the bursts of bloody violence, the erratic gangs of weirdos who could turn on you or each other at the drop of a hat. At the time of writing, their 2018 anthology The Ballad of Buster Scruggs still remains the last film the brothers directed together—and that was because they had so many ideas for Westerns, they thought it made sense to put them all in the same movie .
Whereas both Buster Scruggs and No Country for Old Men were decidedly revisionist twists on the genre, in 2010, they released their take on one of the last classics from the golden era: True Grit.
Determined to avenge the death of her father, 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld), after some literal and figurative horse-trading, hires the meanest U.S. Marshal in all the land to track his murderer down: Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges). Also along for the ride is Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who’s tracking the murderer for a different killing. Though they begin their journey sharing plenty of distrust and resentment, as they get closer to their target, they form an unlikely family.
The Coens’ version of True Grit was the second to hit big screens—the first was directed by Henry Hathaway in 1969, and starred John Wayne as Rooster, Kim Darby as Mattie and country singer Glen Campbell as La Boeuf.
While on the press tour, the Coens tended to refer to their film as another adaptation of Charles Portis’ 1968 source novel, rather than a remake of the 1969 movie. Nevertheless, both films are strikingly similar. They both take much of their dialogue straight from Portis, and they retain the main plot beats and the essential dynamics between the three main characters. If they feel different, it’s in large part just because the Bridges/Damon/Steinfeld trio are, frankly, all stronger actors than their earlier counterparts (Campbell later joked, “I’d never acted in a movie before, and every time I see True Grit, I think my record’s still clean!”). Even when they diverged from Portis, the movies often went the same way—in the novel, Rooster is described as being in his 40s, whereas Wayne and Bridges were in their early 60s.
There are a few structural differences, however. The first film has a prologue in which we see the events that lead to Mattie’s father getting killed; the second dispatches with that in a brief voiceover, and adds an epilogue where Mattie looks back on the events from her childhood as a 40-year-old woman. The epilogue was taken from the Portis novel, and chimes with the brothers’ aim of shooting a faithful adaptation.
Yet one of the funniest scenes in the Coens’ version was their invention. Rooster and Mattie come across a man in the woods wrapped in the skin of a bear, who announces himself as a traveling dentist. They ask if he knows anywhere they could shelter for the night; he asks if they need any teeth pulled. This willingness to pause the action to indulge in a tangent of absurdist, somewhat gruesome humor (this is not a man anyone would want pulling their teeth) is classic Coen brothers.
Yet, though the actors who played him were very different, the place where the two movies diverge least is in their depictions of Rooster Cogburn.
John Wayne was coming to the end of a long career when he made True Grit. As we saw with Stagecoach, it took many years for him to become a movie star. Three decades later, he was a bonafide icon, as rough and tough and lived-in as a pair of old cowboy boots. He rarely had roles where he had to challenge himself anymore; he’d become more of a figurehead than a living, breathing man.
True Grit challenged him. “It’s sure as hell my first decent role in 20 years,” he said in a 1969 interview with Roger Ebert. “And my first chance to play a character role instead of John Wayne. Ordinarily they just stand me there and run everybody up against me.” As Rooster, he had to be tough and gooey at the same time; suggest a life hard lived and the capacity for shocking brutality, and yet a heart soft enough to be moved by the plight of this strange, resilient girl who enlists his services.
Jeff Bridges is terrific as Rooster—as warm, funny and believable as you’d expect from a man with such a naturally endearing presence and a varied career behind him. Wayne had far less working in his favor. He didn’t have as much of a range, and wasn’t known for warmth in the way Bridges is. He was aware the role was outside his comfort zone, and grateful to screenwriter Marguerite Roberts for tailoring the script to his strengths, even asking if she’d consider writing another screenplay, “with [him] in mind.” That never came to pass, but his surprisingly textured, tender performance as Cogburn would win Wayne the sole Oscar of his career.
Back to the 21st century. The Coens’ True Grit was popular with audiences and critics alike. That success coming so soon after the Western boom of 2007 seemed to accelerate the genre’s proliferation.
The 2010s were full of Westerns. There were more prestige features (The Homesman, The Revenant), there were acclaimed indies (Meeks’ Cutoff, The Rider, Slow West) and less acclaimed blockbusters (The Magnificent Seven, The Lone Ranger). There were animations (Rango), horror stories (Bone Tomahawk, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) and parodies (The Ridiculous Six). Quentin Tarantino directed two (The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained), and the Coens another one (the aforementioned The Ballad of Buster Scruggs). Directors from other shores produced some fascinating takes (The Sisters Brothers, Western).
And—as we can see in a cinematic summer that has included Westerns from popular actor-directors Kevin Costner and Viggo Mortensen—that trend has continued on into the 2020s.
Throughout its existence, the Western has gone through phases, moving from the traditional, to the revisionist, and beyond. Though it’s not as ubiquitous as it was in the ‘50s, it’s now as big a tent as it’s ever been, where classic tales like True Grit can sit comfortably beside more extravagant forms of genre experimentation. Whichever style they might adopt, in a cinematic landscape trending ever more towards the artificial, the Western’s focus on unvarnished, rugged humanity makes it a veritable breath of fresh air.
Next week: we begin a new summery series, looking at four very different French films all set by the sea.
Chloe Walker is a writer based in the UK. You can read her work at Culturefly, the BFI, Podcast Review, and Paste.