The Sons Of Katie Elder 2012 re-sleeve-The four rowdy sons of
Katie Elder return home for her funeral and to avenge her death.;
The Man Who Liberty Valance 2012 re-A tenderfoot becomes a
hero after shooting a bad man, but the was really fired by
his friend.; True Grit - Resleeve-A one-eyed whiskey-swigging
U.S. Marshal risks his life to help a young woman complete her
westward trek. John Wayne won an Academy Award for Best Actor.
From .co.uk
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True Grit
A wonderful/rueful running gag in El Dorado involves the Edgar
Allan Poe line "Ride, boldly ride" being mangled by toupee-wearer
John Wayne (
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into "Ride, baldy, ride." Two years later, in True Grit, Wayne
put the joke in italics by donning an eyepatch and several inches
of girth to play cantankerous territorial marshal Rooster
Cogburn. Critics belatedly noticed that he could be a marvelously
entertaining actor, and Hollywood finally gave him the O
they'd failed to nominate him for in Red River, She Wore a Yellow
Ribbon, The Quiet Man, The Searchers, et al. But make no mistake:
True Grit is a splendid movie, with lovingly textured
storytelling and sturdy characters, Henry Hathaway's finest
high-country action set-pieces, intoxicatingly ornate frontier
language, and a couple of formidable bad guys (Jeff Corey's Tom
Cheney and Robert Duvall's "Lucky" Ned Pepper). It's a compliment
to say that, from a technical standpoint, the movie could have
been made any time in Hathaway's 40-year career, yet its feeling
for the reality of violence ceded no ground to The Wild Bunch,
released around the same time. Still, the film's most sublime
passage falls between bursts of play: Rooster sitting on a
hilltop at night recounting his life story, as John Wayne
metamorphoses ineluctably into W.C. Fields. --Richard T. Jameson
The Sons of Katie Elder
John Wayne recovered from his first bout with cancer to appear
in this 1965 film as the brother of Dean Martin, Earl Holliman,
and Michael Anderson Jr. All four characters are wandering souls
prone to trouble, but after the funeral of their frontier mother,
they set out to avenge her death. Directed by Henry Hathaway
(Wayne's director on True Grit), the film moves like a
conventional, latter-day Western, with good performances from
Wayne and Martin, who'd already costarred with the Duke in Howard
Hawks's Rio Bravo. Nice support from Dennis Hopper (who had a
legendary conflict with Hathaway on this film), Strother Martin,
and George Kennedy. --Tom Keogh
The Man Who Liberty Valance
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That's more
than the code of a newspaperman in The Man Who Liberty
Valance; it's practically the operating credo of director John
Ford, the most honoured of American filmmakers. In this late film
from a long career, Ford looks at the civilising of an Old West
town, Shin, through the sad memories of settlers looking
back. In the town's wide-open youth, two-fisted Westerner John
Wayne and tenderfoot newcomer James Stewart clash over a woman
(Vera Miles) but ultimately unite against the notorious outlaw
Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). Ford's nostalgia for the past is
tempered by his stark approach, unusual for the visual poet of
Stagecoach and The Searchers. The two heavyweights, Wayne and
Stewart, are good together, with Wayne the embodiment of rugged
individualism and Stewart the idealistic prophet of the
civilisation that will eventually tame the Wild West. This may be
the saddest Western ever made, closer to an elegy than an action
movie, and as cleanly beautiful as its central symbol, the cactus
rose. --Robert Horton