Ah, but he is the one eyed fat man drunken slob who becomes heroic when the chips are down.
Thor says, “By the Glory of Asgard!” or whatever, Rooster Cogburn says, “Fill Your Hand, you son of a bitch!”
Saw this today and loved it! The theater was packed at an afternoon showing, and the whole audience seemed to enjoy it. I laughed more during this movie than any other in recent memory. I won’t be surprised if this becomes their most commercially successful movie.
Hailee Steinfeld really does an amazing job, and Bridges was great as Cogburn. I didn’t realize until his screen time was almost over that Ned Pepper was played by Barry Pepper.
My only complaint about the film is that the main villain–Tom Chaney–has fairly little screen time, and Ned Pepper and his goons aren’t well developed as characters either. So the final shootout doesn’t carry as much dramatic weight as it could have. It didn’t feel climactic enough.
That said, the performances and dialogue were so entertaining that I really want to see this again. I’ll be rooting for Steinfeld (and Bridges) to get some love from the Academy.
As I said earlier… isn’t it wonderful for the humor to arise out of real characters, rather than artificial gags? Very satisfying.
My brother finally saw it and remarked to me that he liked it, although he didn’t think people talked like that back then. I mentioned that there are written letters to more-or-less prove that’s how people talked. He responded with something like “Well, only the well educated articulate people wrote letters like that and they would always dress up their language.”
OK, so What references can I provide to indicate how conversational English sounded back in the late 1800s?
Make him watch Deadwood.
I really don’t have any idea – there aren’t any extant recordings from that time, of course, so all we have to go on are the letters and memoirs. Both of those were written by literate people, and your brother’s assertion that they probably wrote more floridly than they spoke is probably true.
I wasn’t very sympathetic to Maddy after she screwed over the horse salesman. Yeah her dad died but I saw no need to basically rob a small business owner blind.
Second impression is how brutal they are on their horses. Left outside in a snowstorm for one, constantly shooting guns near their ears, and running them to exhaustion then shooting them. Probably true to the times but still unnerving.
I think the livery guy was taking advantage of her.
Cogburn could ride Little Blackie to death or let Mattie die.
Any references as to when the use of contractions became common?
When Rooster started off with Maddy on Little Blackie, they rode right past Lucky Ned’s horse. Wouldn’t it have been a no brainer to bring that horse along for when the first became spent?
I believe that in the novel the horses were dead or had run away.
Has anyone else read the book? I can’t find my copy.
Couldn’t they have taken LeBoeuf’s horse? Don’t remember, but didn’t he have one? They were going to come back for him anyway.
I looked at the library for the book on Sunday; they didn’t have it.
She didn’t screw him, he tried to screw her. That’s why he knew her threat of taking him to law would not go well for him.
I always think this about all westerns.
I would be very surpised if 19th century Americans (out West or back East) were actually that articulate in their ordinary conversations. On the other hand, 21st century Americans don’t really talk the way we are represented as talking in the vast majority of our movies and TV shows. Every day, we tune out a huge amount of mangled syntax, “ums” and “ahs”, and meaningless little words and phrases (“like”, “you know”, and so forth) in both our own and other people’s spoken language.
We’d be, like, completely, you know, you’d be driving yourself up the, up the wall, if we actually paid attention–paid any attention to this, uh, this stuff. Or, or, if we, y’know, tried to diagram each other’s, uh, sentences, the way you learned, ah, back in the third grade or whatever.
More realistic dialogue:
“I call that bold talk for a one-eyed fat man.”
“Yeah, well, that’s just like, your opinion, man.”
They weren’t a bunch of illiterate, ignorant fools out west. They were, for example, quite familiar with the works of Shakespeare, due to traveling acting troupes and the fact that there were almost as many copies of his plays sold as there were Bibles. Plus, not many people were raised there–they came from all over the country and the world, mingling cultures and traditions and sharing literature, songs, and entertainment. Several renown lawmen and gunfighters were highly educated men, most of them displaced and homeless after the Civil War–like most of the population in the western territories.
Who knew that people were flooding into Arkansas from all corners of the globe? 
True. One need only read a deposition transcript to see the difference between movie dialogue and the way we actually speak.
But who cares if the dialogue is more florid than in real life? So was Shakespeare. It’s poetry!
Memphis was a large center of transportation and trade. St Louis and Fort Smith staging points for immigration Westward. There are Germans in Stuttgart, an Italian community in a city known locally as “Little Italy”.
That bugged me as well. In the original she immediately notes that Blackie can’t hold them both and he says that Blackie was the only one he could catch.
The Coens did a much more believable and very upsetting job of showing that how they really rode Blackie nearly to death. In the original Maddie is immediately screaming to stop that they’re killing him, then he falls and Rooster quickly steals a wagon, it seems to happen in the space of 20 minutes. In this one they show them riding and riding for hours and then Rooster stabs Blackie to keep him going. I was freaking out even though it’s a movie.
The shooting was a kindness, not cruel, though. Blackie would likely have died, but it would have been slow and painful.
As for the way they treated their horses in the old west…I think they probably treated them VERY VERY well! They were their cars! It wouldn’t be very smart to starve and beat them and use them up. When you have a good car that costs a lot of money and will give you a good 10-15 years if you just take reasonably decent care of it, then that’s what you do!
It’s also important to remember that an 8th grade education in 1860 was in many respects, bur particularly in terms of language and literature, the equivalent of a college education today, or better.
But one didn’t have to be particularly literate to speak in a more florid style, especially if everyone around you does. I keep thinking of one line that’s no big deal, it’s just a great example. Ned Pepper, listening to Maddie diss Rooster, says simply: “You do not varnish your opinion, do you?” And that’s just a more interesting way of saying “You don’t hold back.”
Loathe as I normally am to be the one to ever bring it up, I have to say that my depositions were the proudest and most satisfying moments of my entire legal experience. I can say without reservation that I was awesome, dealing with a lawyer trying to do exactly what you always see them trying to do in the movies: put words in your mouth.
I treated it like the biggest game of “Taboo” I ever played, and as it happens I completely kick ass at that game. If you read the transcripts I am never fumbling or stumbling at all, no errs or umms or “you knows”, any more than there would be in a well-played game of Taboo; the more you try to fill the space with sound, the more likely you are to say something you shouldn’t, so don’t open your mouth until you know what you’re going to say.
It helped that I had nothing to hide, but even when you have nothing to hide, the unscrupulous can twist innocence into nefariousness and the truth to a lie, and this unscrupulous one did that bigtime, but he had to be bold as brass about it, given what he had to work with. It was a painful and disturbing lesson in how liars function and how effective lying can actually be when the liar is committed and unabashed.[/SIZE]
Yes. Rooster had already shown that he’s opposed to mistreating pack animals when he sees those two boys teasing the mule and kicks them off the porch. Twice.
I loved that. Mattie was dissing both Rooster and Ned and his gang. She says something like “[Rooster] is no friend of mine. He’s left me here with a congress of louts.” which prompts Ned to say the above.
Re: Ned’s horse, that horse would have had to have run just as hard as Little Blackie to keep up with them, so he would have been almost as spent as Blackie by the time Blackie gave out.
Besides, it’s hard to run full tilt on a horse while leading another horse.
I believe Little Blackie was the only one available. It would make sense to put Mattie on the pony and Cogburn on Pepper’s horse as long as Mattie could ride.