Burying the Western: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
A Western about the end of the West. You could call it a Twilight Western.
Grade: A+
Possibly the last great Western and the finest film, Western or otherwise, that John Ford made.
Who is Liberty Valance? “He’s a no-good, gun-packing, murdering, thief” who terrorises the town of Shinbone in the Old West. He’ll rob you, thrash you bloody and shoot a bullet through your forehead and he’ll do it for money, hooch or even just for fun. Valance is played by Lee Marvin. Marvin should be ranked amongst the best actors of Classical Hollywood for his perfection in playing sadistic monsters. Thanks to him, Liberty Valance is up there with Darth Vader, Heath Ledger’s Joker and Bruce the Shark amongst the ranks of the scariest screen villains. There’s always a malevolent shine, like the sweat on an addict’s brow, on Valance’s face and a drunken beastliness in his eyes whenever he’s ready to beat or kill anyone (which is all the time) regardless of if he’s shouting at his intended victim or eyeing them up carefully to tell how big they are and how tough they’ll be to fell.
He seems in a constant state of intoxication with the monstrous pleasure he gets from his cruelty and violence. You’ll want to be the man who shoots him but you’ll also be too terrified to try. “I’m looking forward to the day it’s gonna be you they’re calling me for,” Shinbone’s resident doctor tells Valance when he’s called away to tend to the victim of another of Valance’s ‘accidents’. Valance tosses him a coin. “Paid for in advance,” Valance says and he cackles. That cackle! It’s a hoarser version of the Joker’s: a drunken rattle-snake’s cooing. Valance is the naked anarchy of the West in one malevolent package.
Who’s the man who shot him? That’s what the film’s about, who’s the man who shot Liberty Valance, and there are two candidates: Ransom Stoddard and Tom Doniphon. Stoddard, played by James Stewart, is a young and weedy man fresh out of law school. He goes West to seek adventure but instead finds a violent land filled with men like Valance. Here, his knowledge of the constitution, separation of powers and the rule of law is useless. “I’m a lawyer…and…I’ll see you in jail for this,” Stoddard tells Valance when Valance holds up the stagecoach Stoddard is travelling in. “Jail?” Valance laughs before knocking Stoddard to the ground.
Valance proceeds to dump Stoddard’s luggage on the desert floor and rummage through it for any cash or jewels. He finds just Stoddard’ law books and he tears one to pieces with his bare hands. “I’ll teach you law,” he tells the skinny silk. “Western law.” That he does. He whips Stoddard to near death. All that saves Stoddard is the intervention of local homesteader and all-round tough guy Tom Doniphon. Doniphon is played by John Wayne and Wayne is right at home playing the only man in Shinbone Valance is afraid of. He fits it as snuggly as he did in his great first role as the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach. It’s amazing how little time changed John Wayne. Stagecoach was made in 1939 and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was made in 1962, but in the latter Wayne’s still as mighty as a barge and talks out of a throat as deep as a ship’s horn. He’s still the rugged Western hero down to the rumbling and heavy tones that fit his every word like a cowboy’s boot. “You’d better start packing a handgun,” he tells Stoddard. Shoot or be shot, Doniphon advises Stoddard, that’s the only way to survive out West. “You’re saying just exactly what Liberty Valance said,” Stoddard tells him.
Civilised law-abiding or rugged lawlessness. Which one wins?
Whether it’s Stoddard or Doniphon means more than just which of them beats Valance. Doniphon’s girl Hallie (Vera Miles) starts to fall for Stoddard. Doniphon’s tough and can keep Hallie safe and give her a good home, but Stoddard teaches her to read and write. Together, they set up a school for Shinbone’s people and kids, and when Stoddard closes it due to threats from Valance and Haley looks at her school bell in her downcast hand, she looks like she’s staring at her dreams, hopes she can write about and all the books she can read to feed those hopes, broken on the floor. Doniphon can only offer her the present. Stoddard can give her a future.
Hallie is America. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a tale of America at a crossroads between two eras as Hallie faces a choice between two men. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a Western about the end of the West. You could call it a Twilight Western. The entire story is told as a flashback by an elderly Stoddard who’s now a successful US senator. He tells it to a newspaperman who wants to know why he’s returned to Shinbone after so many years to bury a man the newspaperman has never heard of. The man’s name is “Tom Doniphon.” Doniphon only exists as a living and breathing man in the flashback. This Western hero is never seen in the film’s present. You’ll just see the wooden box he’s going to be buried in and at the county’s expense. “I ain’t gonna make a nickel out of it,” the undertaker tells Stoddard. Doniphon lies awaiting his pauper’s burial in the undertaker’s parlour and alongside him is the stagecoach that brought Stoddard to Shinbone all those years ago. He was the hero in a Western story. Now, he’s an antique.
John Ford invented the Western hero in Stagecoach, and in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford buried him. There was perhaps no better end for the Western, its heroes and the man who made them legends.