A year later a new production succeeded and the play became a classic. The production won the 1953 Tony Award for Best Play. Miller felt that this production was too stylized and cold, and the reviews for it were largely hostile (although The New York Times noted "a powerful play driving performance"). Marshall, Beatrice Straight and Madeleine Sherwood. The play was first performed at the Martin Beck Theatre on Broadway on January 22, 1953, starring E. Miller was questioned by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities in 1956 and convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to identify others present at meetings he had attended. Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during 1692–93. The Crucible is a 1953 play by American playwright Arthur Miller. Yet only a few of their films – for that matter, few Westerns – are as bleakly beautiful as this.For other uses, see The Crucible (disambiguation). Thematic bleakness and artistic beauty are their hallmarks, often for better, occasionally for worse. True Grit is a Coen brothers treasure, up there with No Country for Old Men and Miller’s Crossing, my personal favorite. A stakeout talk between John Wayne and the young Kim Darby was the highlight of the original film, and conversations also prove to be some of the more treasured moments here. The Coens’ delicious lines are spit out by the impressive young Steinfeld, growled by Bridges with just the right serving of ham and babbled by a hilarious Matt Damon as a cocky Texas Ranger who joins the cause. Lightening things throughout is the wittily eloquent dialogue. This isn’t to say that True Grit weighs a ton. The sorrowful opening image of True Grit – a painterly shot of Mattie’s father lying dead on the ground as snow lightly falls – is a pure vision of grim beauty. None of this feels tongue in cheek, as the spirituals occasionally did in the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou? Even the violence, which has often gone hand in hand with humor in their oeuvre, unfolds without any snarky exclamation points.
What grace there is can be found in the ghostly variations of “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” an 1880s gospel hymn that is woven through the movie. True Grit opens with a quote from Proverbs, later references Ezekiel and is propelled throughout by a quest for righteous vengeance (an eye for an eye and all that). It’s this merciless reputation that leads 14-year-old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) to hire him to track down the crook who killed her father.įrom the harsh moral codes of Miller’s Crossing to the cruel, unseen God of A Serious Man, the Coens have always been Old Testament filmmakers. marshal who is a pretty good shot (if an indiscriminate one) when he manages to put the jug down. Jeff Bridges steps in for Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, a perpetually soused U.S. It doesn’t only comment on the giants of the genre it can stand alongside them. This is a real Western, the kind we don’t get much anymore. In other words, this isn’t only a clever, meticulous deconstruction of a genre’s tropes. What’s even more surprising, though, is that True Grit is more than a Coen brothers’ Western. That’s surprising, considering they’ve already dissected the film noir, gangster and screwball comedy genres, to name only a few. Have Joel and Ethan Coen really never made a Western before?įor all their dabbling in traditional Hollywood genres, the filmmaker brothers haven’t officially saddled up until now – with a remake of a 1969 John Wayne vehicle, no less.