I finally went to see the movie “True Grit” over the weekend. It’s been around since December, so I figured I should go before I’d have to watch a rented copy on my small TV screen at home.
I was not disappointed. Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross were superb, just as many of the critics had written. I haven’t read Charles Portis’ 1968 book on which the movie was based, but movie-makers Joel and Ethan Coen say they tried to stick to the book.
The book was first adapted for the big screen in 1969 and starred John Wayne, who’s never been one of my favorites. Too much swagger, too much conservatism, too much John Wayne.
So, I was eager to see Bridges, who is one of my favorites – a good unassuming actor who doesn’t act like a star. But as I sat there watching the movie, I noticed something else. It was almost like a reflex.
I was staring at the props. The old stuff that sets the place and time for this western. The types of items I sometimes see on the auction tables.
I first noticed them when Mattie laid out her father’s belongings on a bed at the boarding house, the elderly owner standing behind her. What I saw was a gold pocket watch (more gold-plated than gold, these come up pretty often at auction), a metal gunpowder flask (that, too) and a few other things. Her father’s gun? Not often at my favorite auction houses, except for a special sale.
I wasn’t looking for these antique items in particular but I zeroed in on them instantly when they popped up on the screen. That’s what happens when you’ve been going to auctions for so long. You look for anything with age on it. I’ve done the same with old movies I’ve seen on TV.
With that first look in my head, I started to notice other things in “True Grit.” Rooster’s tobacco bag, which he pulled out pretty often to make his own cigarettes (or that Mattie made for him). The bottles of whiskey he lifted from a cabin after shooting dead one of the occupants. He tossed one bottle in a stream and stuck another on a broken branch (a trail to lead them back, he said). The lanterns in that same cabin. The posters for the Wild West Show.
I’m sure there were others that I missed as I focused on the movie, which I thought ran a bit too long. I thought it was going to end when Mattie shot the man who killed her father, but instead, the recoil sent her into a cavern with rattlesnakes. And the story continued.
Others must have been just as observant of the props as me, because I found a forum on the web about them. The conversation, though, meandered off into the father’s gun. I also found replicas of the props – mostly, again, the guns. Sure, there was a lot of shooting and killing in the movie, but it was about more than the guns.
The writer of the blog Hollywood Movie Costumes and Props offered photos of a display of the props, primarily the heavy clothes worn by the actors, at a theater chain in Los Angeles soon after the movie was released in December.
If you haven’t seen the movie, you should. You’ll enjoy it, and unlike me you probably won’t notice the props. They blend in so well with the story.
