True Grit (1969 film) Robert Duvall, Dennis Hopper, Jeff Corey and Strother Martin. The title song, sung by Campbell, was also Oscar-nominated. "True Grit" was adapted again in 2010, starring Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, and Hailee Steinfeld. Frank Ross is murdered by his hired hand, Tom Chaney. Ross's young daughter, Mattie, travels to Fort Smith, Arkansas, where she hires aging U.S. Marshal Reuben "Rooster" J. Cogburn to bring Chaney in, raising his fee by shrewdly horse trading with Colonel Stonehill. Mattie has heard that Cogburn has "true grit." She gives him a payment to track and capture Chaney, who has taken up with outlaw
True Grit (1969 film) he has a restaurant, his wife Nola leaves him because of his degenerate friends, and has a clumsy son named Horace), calling it "about the best scene I ever did." Garry Wills notes in his book, "John Wayne's America: The Politics of Celebrity", that Wayne's performance as Rooster Cogburn bears close resemblance to the way Wallace Beery portrayed similar characters in the 1930s and 1940s, an inspired if surprising choice on Wayne's part. Wills comments that it's difficult for one actor to imitate another for the entire length of a movie and that the Beery mannerisms temporarily recede during the