After 40 years in films, John Wayne finally won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn, a fat, over-the-hill, one-eyed, drunken marshal.
Based on a novel by Charles Portis, True Grit is supposed to be a story about a 14-year-old girl called Mattie Ross (Kim Darby) from Yell County, Arkansas, who hires a lawman to find her father’s killer. Tom Chaney (Jeff Corey). In reality, this is a film about John Wayne – and it’s a delight.
Cogburn joins forces with a young, good looking Texas Ranger named La Boeuf (singer Glen Campbell), who is also pursuing Chaney on a murder charge and the trio head out for Indian territory to confront a dozen crooks of various hues of wickedness and weirdness.
Wayne assumed the character of the one-eyed marshal again in Rooster Cogburn in 1975 with Katharine Hepburn.
Rooster Cogburn
John Wayne
Mattie Ross
Kim Darby
La Boeuf
Glen Campbell
Ned Pepper
Robert Duvall
Emmett Quincy
Jeremy Slate
Tom Chaney
Jeff Corey
Moon
Dennis Hopper
Goudy
Alfred Ryder
Col. G. Stonehill
Strother Martin
Capt. Boots Finch
Ron Soble
Lawyer Daggett
John Fielder
Judge Parker
James Westerfield
Sheriff
John Doucette
Barlow
Donald Woods
Mrs Floyd
Edith Atwater
Dirty Bob
Carlos Rivas
Mrs Bagby
Isabel Boniface
Chen Lee
H.W. Gim
Frank Ross
John Pickard
Mrs Ross
Elizabeth Harrower
Yarnell
Ken Renard
Harold Parmalee
Jay Ripley
Farrell Parmalee
Kenneth Becker
Director
Henry Hathaway