True Grit on Screen and on Page

 True Grit theatrical trailer, 1969.

 True Grit theatrical trailer, 2010.

Above are two trailers for True Grit, one for the 1969 version directed by Henry Hathaway and starring John Wayne, and one for the 2010 version directed by Joel and Ethan Coen and starring Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld. There are a few differences between the trailers that are worth noticing, because they give us an idea of how each film approached the story differently, and how both films differed from Portis’s book. And it's worth noting that a movie trailer is meant to sell the movie in the span of a couple of minutes-- so the editors of a trailer usually choose and focus one quality of the movie, sometimes at the expense of featuring important scenes or characters.

Landscape
What struck me initially about the 1969 trailer is that the movie was clearly not filmed in Arkansas or Oklahoma-- especially in the scenes in which Rooster and LaBoeuf are facing off against Ned Pepper’s gang, it’s clear that they’re in higher mountains than can be found as far east as the Arkansas/Oklahoma area (notice the yellow Aspen trees behind them). IMDB tells me that the movie was filmed mainly in Colorado. On the other hand, the 2010 version was filmed in Texas-- a flatter and drier landscape than the Colorado rockies.

I’m dwelling on the location because it’s an important aspect of True Grit. Mattie tells us about snow, river bottoms, cliffs, and caves in east Oklahoma--aspects of the land that are sometimes important plot points (consider the far-away shot that LaBoeuf makes at the end of True Grit, or the cave that Mattie falls in). The locations of both movies raises an interesting question: Where do we imagine a western taking place? As we discussed in class, Mattie, Rooster, and LaBoeuf are occupying a frontier space. By translating this book to the screen, filmmakers had to decide what contemporary audiences (in 1969 and in the current moment) think of when they think of an American frontier.

All the Pretty Horses and It Came from Del Rio are books even more obsessed with landscape-- both authors spend time describing the space through which their characters travel. It’s worth noticing how landscape does or doesn’t shape our “feeling” of the frontier in both books.

Of course, movie making is more complicated than just choosing the best place to film-- it’s expensive to make a movie, so crews often go where it’s most financially viable. Still, neither movie was made in, say, the suburbs of Pittsburgh-- so the question remains: where in the U.S. does a frontier-like landscape still exist? Since the 2010 version was filmed in Texas, and since 20th century Texas is the subject of the next two books we’ll read, it’s worth keeping in mind how the Mexico/US border might still look or feel like a frontier to popular imagination.

True Grit theatrical teaser trailer, 2010.

Rooster vs. Mattie
Finally, I want to point out that Mattie’s voice is hardly heard in either trailer. When John Wayne starred in True Grit in 1969, he was an extremely famous and beloved star of westerns. (In fact, he won an Academy Award for the role of Rooster Cogburn-- a way for the Academy and Hollywood to acknowledge his decades of success playing different cowboy heroes.) So it makes sense that the 1969 movie was Rooster-focused-- because John Wayne’s name would sell tickets and because he was talented enough to do a lot with the role of Rooster. Similarly, the Coen brothers have worked with Jeff Bridges before (if you’ve never seen The Big Lebowski, please do so)-- so perhaps the Rooster-centric 2010 trailer also makes sense.

But when you’re thinking about film adaptations, it’s always good to notice what is lost in translation from book to screen. We spend all of True Grit in Mattie’s narration, so she is our guide to the whole story. There is some narration from Mattie in the 2010 film version of True Grit (see the teaser trailer above for an example of this). But does the loss of narration make Mattie a secondary character? In other words, do we lose our focus on and interest in Mattie when she’s no longer telling us the story? Since we’ve spent time talking about how Portis chooses to write the narration of True Grit, this is a question worth keeping in mind as we read books that make drastically different narrative choices.

-Elizabeth