LOS ANGELES - “True Grit,” the new movie about retribution, may also settle some old business in the film world.

A western with Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon and Josh Brolin in leading roles, the new “True Grit” is adapted by Joel and Ethan Coen from the 1968 novel of the same title by Charles Portis. It is a revenge story - with heart - telling of young Mattie Ross, played by Hailee Steinfeld. She hires a gritty federal marshal, Rooster Cogburn, played by Mr. Bridges, to pursue her father’s killer (Mr. Brolin as the no-good Tom Chaney.

At its release on December 22 in the United States and through the winter worldwide, the Coen brothers’ Academy Award contender is bound to rouse memories of an earlier Oscar race.

John Wayne, well past his prime, won his only Academy Award for portraying Rooster Cogburn. His selection split those who felt justice was served from those who viewed “True Grit,” released in June 1969, as the last gasp of a Hollywood stuck in its own past.

“It was a token Oscar,” said the producer Robert Evans.

The original “True Grit” received only one other Oscar nomination , for a song. But that prize went to Burt Bacharach and Hal David for “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” - just one among a dozen hipper movies that were turning the film scene on its head while Hollywood was still fixed on Wayne and his era.

The best picture of 1969 was “Midnight Cowboy,” John Schlesinger’s Xrated study of Manhattan street life. Both Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight received best-actor nominations for their roles in the film.

It was also the year of countercultural statements like “Easy Rider,” “Alice’s Restaurant,” “The Sterile Cuckoo” and “If”; the European flair of “Stolen Kisses” and “Z”; and the retro sophistication of “They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?,” “The Wild Bunch” and “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”

In the face of all that, Paramount made what many saw as a clumsy attempt to position “True Grit” as part of the revolution. One program for an early studio screening called it a “Brand New Brand of American Frontier Story.” This was apparently an allusion to the feminist spunk displayed by Mattie , as portrayed by Kim Darby. In their leaner, meaner new movie, the Coens deliver a fiercer heroine.

Inevitably, however, a craggy, overweight Wayne subsumed the original “True Grit.” He played the role with an eye patch and plenty of bluster. On May 18, 1969, The Hollywood Reporter said the picture was a “massive bid to cap John Wayne’s 40th year of stardom with the Academy Award.”

But other film devotees, who viewed “True Grit” through the filter of Vietnam- era politics and Wayne’s conservative principles, were less charmed. Writing in The New Yorker, Penelope Gilliatt complained of the movie’s “very right-wing and authoritarian tang.”

The Coens figured no John Wayne movie, according to Joel, “would possibly reflect the very acid sensibility” they found in Mr. Portis’s work. So the Coens, whose “No Country for Old Men” won best picture in 2008, turned to “True Grit.”

And by boring into the tale’s harsh western core, they may have found a cool that has eluded it for 42 years.


By MICHAEL CIEPLY