True Grit

<b>Preeminent film historian Thomas Doherty explores the blockbuster 1969 film adaptation of the Charles Portis novel </b><i>True Grit</i><b>, which stars John Wayne in his only Oscar-winning performance.</b> <br/> <br/> The year 1969 was a tipping point for Hollywood cinema and a good year for Westerns. In 1968 the censorious Production Code was eliminated. American cinema responded immediately with a spree of theretofore unseen and unimaginable transgressions—one of which arrived in Henry Hathaway’s adaptation of Charles Portis’s best-selling novel <i>True Grit</i>. <i>True Grit </i>featured blunt language (“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!”) and bloody imagery that would not have been permissible just a couple of years earlier. <br/> <br/> Thomas Doherty, one of the foremost film historians writing today, walks readers through Charles Portis’s source novel and its adaptation for the screen, the role of women in a genre often considered antithetical to their presence, and the figure of John Wayne, the Western icon whose public stance as a spokesman for the political right was merging with and complicating his screen persona. While noting its continued appeal for modern audiences, he presents <i>True Grit </i>as a pure product of its time, on the cusp of the Old and New Hollywoods, containing elements of both.