admin
John Wayne was one of the biggest movie stars in the history of the medium, but because he reigned during the 1940s, 1950s, and some of the 1960s, he was not a beneficiary of franchise filmmaking. This was a blessing, as it allowed the star to entrust his coarse brand of heroism to great filmmakers like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Don Siegel, all of whom were free to tweak his persona within reason while not being yoked to an ongoing narrative arc that forced them to color inside pre-determined lines. Look at it this way: instead of Wayne and Ford making a series of Ringo Kid movies after the success of 1939’s “Stagecoach,” they were able to re-team on original stories like “Fort Apache,” “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon,” and “The Searchers,” which challenged the Duke to play different kinds of hard men facing different kinds of dilemmas.
When Wayne finally won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1969 for “True Grit,” his portrayal of alcoholic U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn felt like a career summation. Cogburn is well past his prime in the film, but when the chips are down he is still as lethal a man as exists in the West. Given that the film was a box office smash, and Marguerite Roberts’ adaptation of Charles Portis’ novel eschewed the melancholy ending in favor of an upbeat finale, legendary producer Hal B. Wallis figured a sequel was in order. Sequels had grown more common in the 1970s, and were about to become more prevalent in the 1980s, so why not give moviegoers a second helping of this character they loved so much the first time out? Since Wayne was struggling to connect with audiences during the New Hollywood era, it seemed like a good deal for all involved.
The Rooster-verse was short-lived.
John Wayne and Katharine Hepburn got stranded on a barren trail in Rooster Cogburn
While Paramount distributed “True Grit,” the rights to Wallis’ proposed sequel, “Rooster Cogburn” (an original screenplay inspired by Portis’ character), were set up at Universal. Wallis hired his wife, actor Martha Hyer, to write the screenplay (under the pseudonym Martin Julien), and brought longtime producer Stuart Millar onboard as director. Most importantly, he landed Katharine Hepburn to co-star with Wayne as spinster Miss Eula Goodnight, who comes along with Cogburn on a mission to recover a stolen shipment of nitroglycerin.
With Wayne and Hepburn quarreling throughout, while gradually coming to respect one another, “Rooster Cogburn” plays as a riff on John Huston’s World War I adventure “The African Queen” (which paired Hepburn with Humphrey Bogart). It’s an effective formula, but between Millar’s sluggish direction and Hyer’s ho-hum banter, the stars consistently struggle to make the movie watchable. When “Rooster Cogburn” grossed a disappointing $18 million on a $10 million budget, the boozing U.S. Marshal’s film journey appeared to be over.
Perhaps a television series would better suit Wayne’s Rooster?
True Grit: A Further Adventure traveled not very far
Though it’s unlikely Wayne would’ve been interested in taking on a television series, his rapidly declining health made his decision for him. Don Siegel’s 1976 Western “The Shootist” would be the Duke’s final film (he died three years later), which freed up the role for a different kind of genre icon, Warren Oates, to place his spin on it.
ABC’s “True Grit: A Further Adventure” aired on the network in 1978 as a made-for-television that, if popular, would’ve been turned into a series. Alas, not enough viewers tuned in, which spelled doom for Oates’ take on Cogburn. The show would’ve used the story of “True Grit” as its backbone, with Lisa Pelikan’s teenager Mattie Ross trying her best to get the marshal back on the straight and narrow. This is probably for the best, as Oates was a heavy drinker himself and might not have been cut out for the rigors of shooting a full season of television (he died of a heart attack at age 53 in 1982).
This proved to be the end of the Rooster-verse, though you might be aware that Joel and Ethan Coen took a crack at Portis’ novel in 2010 and wound up with an instant classic featuring knockout performances from Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and, best of all, Hailee Steinfeld. Fortunately, the Coens and Bridges have expressed zero interest in revisiting the character of Rooster Cogburn.
