This film is part of my small John Ford Marathon.
The west, as I’ve seen it, has always been a legally void society. It’s a time when communities were a group of farmers who lived miles away from one another and people lived on their moral code as opposed to any governed law handed down from a president or congressman or whatnot. So when a man with books and ideals comes west to discover his ideas mean little to nothing against a gun it’s easy to empathize and at the same time very difficult to cheer for him.
Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), a Senator, comes back to Shinbone to pay his respects to his friend, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who’s recently passed away. Under pressure from the press Ransom is made to tell the tale of how he came to know Tom and his time in Shinbone where he became famous for having killed the local outlaw, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).
When I think about the westerns I love and the ones I have trouble discussing I find the list of ones that give me trouble seem very akin to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. While the ideas of education and progress versus the outlaw wild west are apt — and still very applicable to today’s society in some ways — there are some elements of how Ford chooses to frame this discussion that give me pause. One could point to the idealistic manner in which he frames his characters that some may call static, one may choose to point to how he constantly seems to be injecting some form of cartooned humour into the film to help ease the audience into this disgusting tale of a man who whips, tricks and plays with his prey constantly as he’s the biggest gun in town and it’s only when faced against the only other big gun — John Wayne — that he withdraws from the situation. This tension between Marvin and Wayne, Marvin and Stewart and Stewart and Wayne all over violence as a mode of handling life fuelled the film but at one point ended up feeling repetitive.
Where Ford‘s talent is never wasted is in the visual aesthetic of the film. It’s not uncommon to see a film produced in the 60s being made in black and white, but somehow it’s still amazes me that studios back then seemed (obviously from the outside looking in) more okay with the development of these now defunct and aged technologies in a way that they aren’t today with 2D versus 3D productions. However, we’ve already seen Ford’s cinematography turn out beautifully in films such as Stagecoach and How Green Was My Valley. Here however his use of shadows is striking in a way that purposefully affects you. In scenes where characters come out the shadows in ways that confound the viewer — knowing there was no way for them to be ‘cut in’ — such that it becomes even more shocking when the violence starts after they appear.
The film is told entirely from the perspective of Stewart’s character as he is retelling it to the press of Shinbone in an full disclosure interview that he decides to tell us. So when the story is over and we return to the present we see the press seated with a pad filled with notes only to have the lead editor pick them up and rip them to shreds to say “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. Legends are the tales we tell our children which are idealized versions of the truth that in their exaggerated ways help guide us through the morally divisive world we already exist in. This moment is a moment that cinema loves, where we admit to the purpose of storytelling (like a film such as this) in such a succinct and eloquent moment like this. With Ford being known as the ‘western’ filmmaker he deals in legends constantly and I for one am happy to see more legends on the screen always.