The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
By Eleanor Ringel Cater

"This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." So says an early-20th-century newspaper editor to the distinguished Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles) after Stoddard explains why he's back West where he began his career some 30 years earlier. Though now quietly bruited as White House material (it's 1910), the Stoddards have returned to a vanished-frontier nowheresville called Shinbone for the potters-field funeral of their onetime closest friend, an obscure local rancher, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne).

This, in essence, is the plot of John Ford's late-career masterwork, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1961). Stoddard owes his political career to a falsehood. a legend to put it more kindly. Years ago, he wrongly became known as the man who shot the villainous Liberty Valance - a feral, no-good gunslinger, played with a lethal snarl and wild-eyed swagger by Lee Marvin.

Though Liberty Valance was "mighty good" with a gun, as the title song (which, though not used in the film, became a hit for Gene Pitney) has it, Stoddard, supposedly, was better. At least he was on the night it counted. And it was this legendary gunplay that catapulted Stoddard, who was then little more than a tinhorn lawyer, into politics. But it was Doniphon who pulled the crucial trigger.

By the early '60s, Ford had less currency with the studios than some of the stars he had helped create, John Wayne being a prominent example. The director had already discovered and developed Dorothy Johnson's short story, but Paramount only took the project "under consideration" until the filmmaker could cough up some stars. He did: Wayne and then Stewart as pure-gold back up.

But that still meant the studio wanted the picture done on the cheap, i.e., shot in black-and-white and on a very tight schedule. (It must be said that at least one Ford scholar, Scott Eyman, claims the director wanted it that way, echoing Howard Hawks's feeling that black-and-white "gives you a feeling of being older.") In retrospect, these limitations have become boons, imposing a clarity, a theatricality and a character-driven claustrophobia on a slim story.

Stoddard is a young lawyer who, following Horace Greeley's "Go West, Young Man" dictum, comes to Shinbone where, even before getting into town, he's humiliated and almost beaten to death by the antic and rabid Valance and his gang. Tended to by Hallie and her immigrant parents, Stoddard ends up working in their restaurant as payback. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, he's tripped by Valance while carrying Doniphon his steak dinner. The seemingly minor incident explodes to the point of near violence, with guns drawn and threats uttered. But Stoddard intercedes, avoiding bloodshed while, at the same time, bringing further humiliation on himself. He is, after all, wearing a frilly apron, just like a GIRL.

Here, in a nutshell, is Ford's ambivalence toward taming the Old West. He understands that dinner altercations can no longer be settled by a gunfight. But he also says that civilization must adjust, too. It can't come courting in frilly aprons.

Yet it is the killing of Liberty Valance that gives civilization a foothold - not lawyer's words, an editor's posturing or womanly ways. And it's the Doniphons of the world who must do the dirty work, then disappear into the dust, so the Stoddards can forge ahead. The West, like it or not, must be tamed. It must be taught to vote and to read and write. The law no longer hangs from the point of a gun. There will be sacrifices. Tom cedes more than Valance's murder to Rance; he also, less willingly, gives him Hallie. Together, they will prosper in their newly bullet-proof  Paradise Found. Rance will go to Washington, maybe even run for President, with Hallie at his side. They are the future as surely as Doniphon is the past.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is thus, ultimately an elegy - a tribute to a frontier that knew its time had come and made the requisite sacrifice. The West was won, Ford says, by men like John Wayne. But it survived and grew, he sadly acknowledges, thanks to men like Jimmy Stewart.

To quote that song again:

The man who shot Liberty Valance
He shot Liberty Valance.
He was the bravest of them all.

And perhaps, the most heartbroken.

His name was John Ford.

Eleanor Ringel Cater
© FIPRESCI 2009

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