Ten lustrums on… “Rooster Cogburn” (1975)

By Scott Ross

“Being around you pleases me.” — Rooster Cogburn to Eula Goodnight

A wholly unnecessary sequel to True Grit done for what I assume were entirely mercenary reasons — the producer, Hal Wallis, had made too much money on Grit to leave it alone — and with maximal borrowings from elsewhere but which has many compensations, not least of which is the once-surprising teaming of John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn. It wasn’t the wide divergence of their respective politics that made such a partnership unlikely so much as the public perception of each: The flinty Yankee-patrician feminism of Hepburn vs. the relaxed Western working-class machismo of Wayne, neither of whose core audience would presumably cross over to the other. Yet Rooster Cogburn was a hit, and that implausible pairing provided a great deal of pleasure to a large number of moviegoers. Although the plot involving Hepburn’s character, Eula Goodnight, is a direct steal from The African Queen, even unto a perilous encounter with river rapids and the antagonistic yoking of Goodnight with Cogburn essentially reprises both the Hepburn-Bogart pairing in Queen and the Rooster-Mattie Ross dynamic that fuels True Grit. Indeed, the pursuit of a ruthless killer (played, in this case, by Richard Jordan) is nearly identical in each. Where the fugitive in True Grit has killed Mattie’s rancher father, Jordan here is responsible for the death of Eula’s minister father (as opposed to Hepburn’s minister-brother, essentially killed by the Germans in The African Queen.) The screenplay was largely the work of Wallis’ wife, the actress Martha Hyer, with input first from Wallis, later from Hepburn* and Wayne, and including a polish by Charles Portis, the gifted novelist who had written True Grit, the final script attributed to “Martin Julien,” a nom de plume. The movie often feels cobbled together, and that many screenwriters is seldom a good thing; still, if Rooster Cogburn is a mess, it’s a highly entertaining mess.

First, there is the mouth-watering Technicolor photography by Harry Stradling, Jr. The picture was shot in Oregon in the autumn (and with two 67-year old over-the-title stars acting in those chilly conditions, no less) and while it looks no more like Arkansas than Colorado did in True Grit, the verdant quality of the location scenery, and Stradling’s luminous framing of it, are so beautiful they occasionally overwhelm the senses. Second, there is the intelligence of the crazy-quilt screenplay, and its abundance of humor, particularly between Cogburn and Eula, which fuel one’s enjoyment. Third (or, perhaps, considering their importance, first) there are the performances by Wayne and Hepburn, two old pros lending to this project everything they did well, reveling in each other’s company, and pretty obviously having a wonderful time. Eula isn’t quite as flinty and judgmental as Rose Sayer in The African Queen — just as religious as Rose, she’s less of a genteel termagant, and her sense of humor is more developed. Although this may be a necessity of the speed with which the story unfolds, Eula warms toward and largely accepts Cogburn and his vulgar frailties much more quickly than Rose does with Bogart’s Charlie Allnut, just as Rooster bends faster to Eula’s fearless qualities than he did to Mattie’s. (He doesn’t witness it, but there’s a remarkable sequence in which the villain’s gang tries to terrify Eula by shooting at her feet while she prays and she doesn’t even flinch at the shots that sums up the woman’s personal courage.) While Cogburn is as resistant to Eula’s companionship on his mission to bring in the outlaw Hawk (Jordan) as he was to Mattie’s joining his quest in True Grit, he softens sooner towards her, although he never becomes a softie. (Well, he wouldn’t, would he, even if he wasn’t being played by John Wayne?)

^{You can’t tell it from this still, but Wayne and Hepburn have a great time together in the movie.}

A portion of the strong fellow-feeling these two exhibit toward each other may be chalked up to a shared maturity. Mattie Ross didn’t just irritate Rooster Cogburn; she annoyed every adult she came in contact with. She was the wise child with a backbone of tungsten, which while in many ways admirable can be a trial to an older person. Eula, especially as Hepburn plays her (and despite her religious bent) is womanly in a way Mattie never is, or becomes. Once she’s taken the full measure of her foil, she begins to admire his good qualities and to enjoy his rough company. She’s not flirtatious, but friendly, in a way that could invite some romantic complications if either could see their way to it; when the two part at the end, you feel a pang of genuine regret. Wayne of course had already honed Cogburn, in 1969, and knew what he was doing. He seems pleased to bring the one-eyed old reprobate back for a last hurrah, and his rich humor is in full bloom. At his age, and with his experience in movies, Wayne seldom did too much, pushed too hard or spoke too loudly. He leaves room, not only for Hepburn, but for Eula’s young Native charge Wolf (Richard Romancito), toward whom he behaves in a fatherly way… and both of them wisely give Eula a wide berth.

Stuart Millar, who was better known as a producer, directed crisply, and knew, as the scriptwriters did, when to pause the action to emphasize a human-scale scene between interesting actors. These include, in addition to Wayne and Hepburn, Anthony Zerbe as Breed, a tracker with no loyalties; John McIntire as a frontier judge as exasperated with Cogburn’s methods as he is good-naturedly accepting of his uncouth company; and Strother Martin, who had two of the best (and funniest) scenes in True Grit, as a ferryboatman with the impossible name of Shanghai McCoy. Only the redoubtable Richard Jordan runs aground with his remarkably unsubtle, scenery-ingesting characterization of Hawk; he was on record later as saying he had contempt for the movie, which he thought would be a flop no one but Wayne and Hepburn’s fans would see, but that’s a hell of a reason for an actor that good to give a performance this bad. Laurence Rosenthal’s score, although it both imitates Elmer Bernstein’s True Grit music and invokes Aaron Copland (always a test for composers confronting a Western) is nevertheless pleasing. He wrote a good, if Bernsteinesque, main theme, and his scoring of the massacre at the missionary outpost is hair-raising. At just under 40 minutes, Rosenthal’s score also has the virtue of knowing when to shut up, a part of the craft that has seemingly been lost in the last 30 years of film scoring.

I missed Rooster Cogburn when it was released at Christmastime in 1975 (I was 14, obviously unable to drive yet, and the recipient of a very small weekly allowance) but was given the Signet paperback of the screenplay in my stocking that year, and one of its aspects that amused me was Cogburn discovering the definition of the word “lustrum,” which was also new to me, and the way he repeats this addition to his vocabulary late in the movie. The picture is by no means a classic, of the Western genre or any other, but being around Wayne and Hepburn pleases us; with both of them gone the movie they co-starred in has attained a sort of golden aura, and serves as a reminder of what’s been lost in the headlong rush to replicate last year’s remake of the previous summer’s big hit from an idiot comic book. Nearly ten lustrums on, even Rooster Cogburn‘s many borrowings seem less irksome than mildly regrettable… and with this much on the screen to enjoy, almost negligible.

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*Hepburn, who had been slated to star in her old friend and frequent director George Cukor’s movie of the Graham Greene Travels with My Aunt, took such a strong hand in the revision of Jay Presson Allen’s script that both Cukor and Allen afterward said she should have gotten screenwriting credit. Doubtless she deserved a similar nod for Rooster Cogburn, and I wonder how much of the general wit and intelligence of the dialogue is due to her, and to Portis.

Speaking of Cukor, I have to get this off my chest: When the picture was in general release Hepburn wrote an appreciation of Wayne for TV Guide that, considering her long friendships and collaborations with Cukor, and with Garson Kanin, contains one of the most graceless acts of backhanded viciousness I’ve ever read. Describing Wayne’s physique she noted: “No backside — a rarity in these gay times.” Why did she, very likely a closeted Lesbian herself, feel the need to be that catty toward homosexual men in print? And what the hell did she mean by “no backside” anyway? Look at Wayne’s big butt in nearly every picture he was ever in and then tell me he lacked definition in that area. Was Hepburn blind as well as nasty?

Text copyright 2024 by Scott Ross