Post by joekiddlouischama on Mar 25, 2021 10:21:57 GMT
Was giving a young woman such an active part considered a new type of realism at the time? The Wild Bunch (1969) came out the same year; was that more "realistic"?
Movies are all fantasies. "Realism" is a game played with the audience: give them something new, suppress the old. For a while, but everything old is new again. Decades later, each attempt seems "dated" in its own way.
In this case the perfectly clean, expertly coiffed hair care just kills me. The clothes are all pretty neat too. The film was for a time when audiences wanted it that way.
The Wild Bunch may or may not have been more realistic, but its "sensibility" was much more realistic, which I sense is the point that you are making. As you indicate, realism in film is ultimately a sensibility, especially for its moment. The fact that True Grit came out during the same year as The Wild Bunch, though, highlights how Western movies internationally and Hollywood movies in general almost operated in two distinct, parallel universes in the mid-to-late 1960s. The Wild Bunch represented newfangled mores and manners and the violent turbulence of the times. True Grit, meanwhile, reflected a traditional sensibility and market that still proved hugely profitable yet almost existed out of time. Aside from Wayne's age and increased girth, there is little reason why the same movie could not have come out in 1959, something that certainly could not have been said about The Wild Bunch. And in that sense, the disparate nature of these two Westerns reflected the alien splits in the genre and the American film industry generally during that mid-to-late sixties period. When a movie tried to blend the two sensibilities in an effort to tap both audiences (the more modernistic and the more traditional), the results proved awkward, as in another Western (of sorts) from 1969, the polygamous musical Paint Your Wagon, costarring Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood, and Jean Seberg.
The assertiveness, feistiness, and indignant nature of the Darby character in True Grit may seem like an ode toward the burgeoning feminist revival of the time, but I feel that it actually represents retro-girlish spunk, the kind of prairie spirit that could be found in an earlier generation of films and that would prove palatable to 1969's more traditional audiences. Either way, you raise some compelling, thoughtful concerns.