If The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the last film of the classic “romantic” western genre, before it was usurped by those Italians and their more grounded and grittier view of the era and its heroes, then it is a pretty fitting send-off. Directed by a John Ford approaching seventy and starring John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart in their middle-age, it is a subtly reflective film that feels a touch wistful, but more-so thoughtful as it considers the wild west through a more critical lens. We’re used to the lawlessness of it, even of those lawful sheriffs so often played by Wayne, driven by their own moral code more than any legal framework. But what is the effect of that? What would the effect be of structured American law and order coming into that frontier town, and the emergence of its union with a larger society? Ford eschewed his usual grand vistas of Monument Valley, his epic horse or stagecoach action -returning to the sound-stage instead for the more intimate feel of a wide open world being necessarily shrunk to make way for the twentieth century.
That is in fact where the story begins -in the earliest years of the modern era, as an old U.S. senator Ranse Stoddard (Stewart -looking astonishingly like he actually would in his seventies) returns to the town of Shinbone in one of the ambiguous western states to attend the funeral of an old friend and recount his story of a quarter-century prior to the prying local journalists. He came to the town initially as a lawyer and was immediately robbed and beaten by the gang of a local outlaw called Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), who becomes the signature symbol of the violence and lawlessness he looks to pacify by working towards setting up a firm and teaching much of the town’s illiterate population. His values and methods are challenged by Tom Doniphon (Wayne) who endeavours to convince him of the different way things are done in the west, and that his best option is to arm himself and be ready for a fight at any opportunity.
The movie is tangibly very different from most westerns of the time pretty early on, and not just because of Ford’s choice to rein in his more spectacle-oriented tendencies. First, in the aftermath of the attack on Ranse, the effects are more vivid than westerns under the Code era were allowed to be. He is shabby and bruised and bleeding from several places, and this would carry over into a handful of other scenes of violence in the movie. But apart from being more realistic and visceral, it emphasizes a shift in attitude about life in the old west that the Wayne and Gary Cooper vehicles of the 1930s and 40s stepped around -because it would make their heroism harder to take. Lawlessness is not pretty, and there’s an aversion to the violence of that time and place. It’s notable that Ford places the audience surrogate not with Wayne’s standard gunslinger as usual, but with Stewart’s outsider to this world, appalled by its manner and complacency -represented best in the cowardly local marshal played by Andy Devine, who makes the excuse that he can’t do anything about Valance if his crimes occur outside town limits.
But Ford doesn’t completely diminish that old portrait and values that Tom represents about how things need to be done in this environment, by the ways that Ranse is slowly pulled towards the violence in spite of himself, purely due to circumstances. There’s a question of human nature at play -Ranse’s goal is in some manner to “civilize” Shinbone, only to be pushed around by Valance enough that he ultimately resorts to a confrontation of violence himself. And you can see the marked effect on his soul that it has in Stewart’s performance, the shades of his dark Hitchcock years infringing on the optimism of his Capra persona, which he came to town with. Meanwhile, Wayne is as straight and brazen as ever, though with no outlet for his tough guy image apart from Tom simply mocking and belittling Ranse (which ultimately results very satisfyingly in a beat where Jimmy Stewart punches John Wayne in the face for all of us). He is a stubborn relic in everything from his choice in white hat to his choice of black sidekick -Pompey, played by Woody Strode, loyal but attracted to change. Both Tom and Ranse hold to a similar sense of justice though, it merely comes down to how it is doled out. And while the movie opines it is somewhat right that Valance be killed -Marvin does a great job making the character utterly loathsome in every way- the idea is presented with a whole new series of moral caveats, for Ranse and even for Tom. Is this really who we are, the movie seems to ask.
The movie grapples sincerely with the end of the pioneer period and the encroachment of modern institution on the old west framework, not accidentally to Tom’s dismay. Almost with Ranse comes political incentive for the townsfolk to campaign for statehood -a symbol of progress for this independent rural society. As a pawn of the cattle barons, Valance endeavours to get involved in this but doesn’t succeed. Tom refutes the opportunity to be a delegate too though, more comfortable in the status quo than Ranse, who is the convention’s biggest advocate. Yet the people of Shinbone want it too -these modern inclinations somewhat epitomized in Ranse even winning over Tom’s (broadly unaffectionate) girlfriend Hallie (Vera Miles), who soon finds herself falling for Ranse instead. Altogether, this film seems to be another movie for Ford, after The Searchers, in which he positions Wayne in the wrong, albeit less opaquely so. Indeed, Tom is still something of a tragic figure, his perspective and worldview taken as valid -but of an earlier time that is not relevant in the world as it is becoming now. I wonder how much of that Ford was consciously thinking of in application to himself at this late stage in his career. Not counting one of the segments to How the West Was Won, he would only make one more western after this, Cheyenne Autumn -likewise a considered film cutting up the myth of the Old West. Perhaps he sensed the end of an era was coming, or he legitimately believed it was the time to end.
The shooting of Liberty Valance may be seen as the last spark of that Old West justice though, and Ford at least seems to believe in it. It comes on the heels of Valance and his men attacking Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), publisher of the local newspaper gradually becoming a free press. The brutality of the assault is what pushes a drunken Ranse over the edge. The title of the movie would make this showdown seem epic, as much as any climax of a great western; but Ford demystifies it entirely; both parties are quite intoxicated, they stumble into the fight, and the draw itself is quick and easy. It feels a touch more honest than the typical sundown duels, yet it packs the heftier punch even on its winner, as Ranse finds himself disgusted with what he did. Tom, soon drunk and angry himself over losing his girl to Ranse, finishes the job by driving the rest of Valance’s gang out of town -also torching his own house in grief before being rescued by Pompey. His last acknowledgement of cultural and ideological defeat, and the empathy is found by Ford (or maybe rather Dorothy M. Johnson, author of the story the film is based on) in giving Tom the role if not the credit for this last act of frontier justice.
For it is revealed sometime after that the man who shot Liberty Valance was not in fact Ranse -who is a terrible shot, but Tom from another vantage point. He reveals the truth to Ranse to ease his conscience, the incident also proving perhaps for the first time to be a professional liability for Ranse in his role as state convention delegate. Tom doesn’t confess to anybody else though leaving him a mere extra to the legend of Ranse Stoddard. And it remains the case even as Ranse concludes his story twenty-five years later with the new Shinbone editor famously quipping “when the legend becomes fact, print the legend” -journalistic integrity evidently not very important back in those days either. Ranse didn’t need to be the man who shot Liberty Valance though -his life and career was extraordinarily successful without that episode. He and Hallie did marry, and in politics he went on to be governor of that new state, then a senator, a U.K. ambassador, and now likely a candidate for vice president (which given the year this was set would potentially see him taking Teddy Roosevelt’s place in history).
It’s curious though that for all he did and represented, he still seems nostalgic in his old age; and clearly retrospectively respects Tom. Maybe he is an analogue for Ford, but maybe he is also an analogue for the audience of western movie fans who, rightly or wrongly, idolized the picture Hollywood painted of the Old West. Ford and Wayne owed a great deal to them. And so Ranse’s elegiac wistfulness, which extends to him pondering retirement in Shinbone to Hallie’s delight, is in a sense a bittersweet affirmation of what that escapist image meant to people. A curious bit of sentiment from a director who was rarely sentimental. And I can appreciate that even if I don’t sympathize with the message. Yet it is with an uncommon warmth that Ford is saying to his audience, Hollywood’s Old West has ended -it never really existed in the first place. But when legend becomes fact -when romance transforms into realism, print the romance.
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