True Grit

It was in El Dorado that Wayne ruefully admitted his reflexes weren't quite what they were. Here, amiably sending up his own image, he plays a way-worn, one-eyed, drink-hardened marshal who would rather stay at home with his cat and the aged Chinaman who looks after him and lets him cheat at cards, but who is shamed out on to the trail by a teenage girl bent on avenging her murdered father, even if she has to do it herself. He gets his man in the end, of course, but only at the expense of a series of humiliations climaxed when, instead of hurling herself into his arms as a grateful heroine should, the tenderfoot girl (beautifully played by Kim Darby) sweetly tells him that when he dies she will make sure he is buried alongside her own dear father. Lazily directed by Hathaway, it's pleasant enough, if rather too self-consciously coy. Peckinpah did it so much better in Ride the High Country.