For most of his career, John Wayne has walked through westerns as a stalwart named McCord or Chancemen who are merely synonyms for John Wayne. It comes as a pleasant surprise to see him vanish into the part of Rooster Cogburn in True Grit. In the Charles Portis novel, a 14-year-old girl, Mattie Ross, narrated her adventures in the 1880s while tracking down her father's murderer with the aid of Cogburn, an aging federal marshal. The book was parodic frontier realism, a Frederic Remington painting with the colors put in by numbers:...
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