So, I was thinking I would open this entry the way I normally do by pointing out that I generally prefer Westerns with Clint Eastwood, at least behind the camera, than I do with John Wayne. But that’s old ground for me, and then I remembered how Steven Spielberg’s most recent film The Fabelmans ended with the Spielberg stand-in’s meeting with director John Ford. The scene in question is a recreation of a story Spielberg himself has told many times over of his own youthful meeting with the legendary director, and he had enough of a sense of humor about it to cast another legendary director (David Lynch) in the role of the foul-mouthed, unfriendly man who made some of the greatest films of his era.
Here’s the thing: apparently working with the real Ford was something of a nightmare. For all that he worked frequently with star John Wayne, Ford was not above making Wayne as miserable as possible. Wayne, famously, managed to avoid military service during World War II, and during the production of Liberty Valance, Ford apparently frequently told Wayne that his costars Jimmy Stewart and Woody Strode, both of whom had served in the war, were legitimate combat heroes while Wayne just pretended to be one. It probably didn’t help that, at this point in their lives, Wayne and Ford were on the opposite ends of the political spectrum where Wayne was the model conservative and Ford was a liberal, at least until much later in his life when Ford himself got angry with anti-Vietnam protesters and hippie types and became something of a conservative himself.
The point is…I had a lot of stuff to say about John Ford and John Wayne and wasn’t sure where else to put it.
However, of the various Ford/Wayne collaborations, while I have seen and enjoyed many of them, my favorite is still The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. For me, I think it’s mostly due to the contrast between Wayne’s Tom Doniphon and Stewart’s Ransom “Rance” Stoddard, two men who could not be more different but became friends of a sort despite it all when tough guy rancher Tom does what he can to look out for Eastern-born-and-bred lawyer Rance, out West to try and bring law and order to unnamed Western territory. There are a lot of things going for it, not the least of which is the overall cast, one that includes a number of Ford’s mainstays and Western character actors including the likes of Andy Devine as the cowardly town marshal, Edmond O’Brien as the drunken newspaper publisher with literary aspirations, and even Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef as Liberty Valance’s two henchmen.
But for me, the standout outside the two leads is Lee Marvin as the title character, a man whose first appearance shows him robbing a stagecoach before giving Rance a beating for the crime of standing up for a widow. There’s just something about Marvin’s performance that seems to ooze evil and cruelty. Liberty Valance has absolutely no redeeming qualities, someone who is a thief, a killer, and often just a bully, a man who seems to only really fear Tom Doniphon, the fellow who proclaims himself the only man in the territory tougher than Valance. Plus, I gotta say, giving the character the first name “Liberty” is an interesting choice. You’d think he’d be a more heroic figure with a name like that, but no. While for most, you’d think liberty would equate to freedom, but for Liberty Valance, it looks like it’s more about the freedom to be an absolute bastard.
As it is, this film is a very traditional Western in that, like many stories of this genre, it’s about bringing civilization to a lawless land. Rance represents that civilization while Tom is more the classic Western hero in many ways. Sure, this is the film where Wayne keeps calling Stewart “Pilgrim,” the standby for many a bad Wayne impression, but there’s good reason for it as Rance is basically a traveler for religious reasons, but his religion is the law. He’s an idealist who thinks the marshal can simply arrest Valance and lock him up in jail, something that won’t work because the marshal is a cowardly comic relief fat guy, the jail only has one cell for one man, and the lock doesn’t work anyway. Tom believes the thing to do is get a gun and know how to use it. Rance’s weapon is the law, plus he’s someone who will pick up a steak off the ground to stop a shoot-out, not to save Tom’s life but because he won’t let other people fight his battles for him and killing someone over something so petty is just so stupid in his mind.
That doesn’t change the fact that before the film is over, Rance is taking shooting lessons from Tom, and he is pushed to the point of wanting to shoot Liberty Valance, even to the point where he thinks he did. He didn’t. Tom did. That’s something Tom can do, but it is likewise something that pretty much guarantees Rance’s future political career. This is a film with a framing device of the elderly Rance coming back for Tom’s funeral, only now he’s a Senator, and even telling the local newspaperman the true story doesn’t get it out because, in the West, when the legend becomes truth, print the legend. Tom died an anonymous death. Few people remember him by that point, with only the marshal, Rance, Tom’s sidekick Pompey (Strode), and Rance’s wife Hallie (Vera Mills) really seeming to know who the man was.
And it’s that last person that makes for the most interesting of the group. Hallie at the start of the film is the object of Tom’s affections. He’s courting her the old fashioned way by bringing her flowers with the promise he will marry her when he finishes a room in his ranch for her. That never happens, but for all that Tom is much more forward-thinking than the other, unseen ranchers who hired Valance to hassle the local smaller farmers and townfolk to prevent the territory from becoming a state, bringing law and order with it and blocking the cattle ranchers from continuing to do whatever they want with the land and water resources, he’s still not as “modern” a man as Rance. Tom’s old fashioned ways mean he does (gently) order Hallie around at various points, to the point where he objects to her learning how to read. Who’s teaching her? Rance is. Rance actually seems to treat Hallie like a human being, and there’s a part of me that wonders how much the filmmakers had realized Tom was being a little too propitiatory towards Hallie, assuming she was something to just be passed around. Rance doesn’t talk like that, so it makes sense to me that she would prefer the man who treats her like her own person and not just a pretty thing to take home and take care of.
Besides, I figure there’s a reason Ford used Mills in the role and not Wayne’s frequent co-star Maureen O’Hara. O’Hara was one of the toughest women on screen in her day, and I can’t see her going along with whatever Tom is doing the way Mills as Hallie does.
Furthermore, Tom objects to Pompey’s likewise learning to read at Rance’s school. Now, Pompey was there instead of doing work at the ranch while Tom was out of town, so Tom might have a legitimate grievance, but Pompey’s presence as the film’s lone Black man means he can be used by Ford to make some political points for his 1960s audience. Pompey doesn’t speak much, but among his lines are some in the schoolhouse where he reads a bit from the Declaration of Independence, particularly the part where all men are created equal (even if Rance is the one who says those exact words). He’s seen sitting outside a meeting for the townsmen when they’re voting on who to send as delegates to a meeting for potential statehood, and his presence is prominent enough that it is difficult to not notice him. And, by the end of the film when Tom is acting hostilely to everyone after Valance’s death, he insists the local saloon keeper serve Pompey too despite the fact he, previously, had apparently been barred from doing so. I wouldn’t call it subtle, but having some attacks on Jim Crow in a film like this was not something I was expecting when I saw this film for the first time.
But getting back to Tom, his behavior in that scene where he is acting strangely hostile to everyone after it appears that Rance has, in fact, shot and killed Liberty Valance, is a moment that makes more sense having seen the film before. Tom has just made the decision to step aside for Rance in, well, everything. The pacifist Rance will be the face of the territory to guide it towards statehood, not the man who advocated gun ownership as the solution to all problems for anyone who insisted on staying in the territory. Tom knows Hallie will marry Rance even if Rance has never suggested the idea himself. Tom knows time has passed him by, and it is men like Rance who are the future. Tom’s a relic who will be forgotten. And sure, Rance didn’t shoot Liberty Valance. But no one aside from Tom, Pompey, and presumably Hallie know that. He’ll use that to ride to future political success and continue to do good for others.
On a final note, the fact that Rance uses the idea that he shot Liberty Valance, even indirectly, to his political advantage actually makes him quite a bit like successful, real world politicians. I remember when Barack Obama was a Senator, he gave an interview where he said that every successful politician has what he called a lizard-like part of the brain that creates a public persona in order to win votes. Something like that can be seen with both of his successors in the Oval Office. For Joe Biden, it’s the nice man who likes ice cream and fast cars, someone who spent his entire political career going home to Delaware on weekends and occasionally says goofy things. For Donald Trump, well, he would just bluntly tell people what he wanted them to think of him, usually something with a lot of superlatives. How much or how little these personas are close to the real thing I couldn’t say. I’ve never met any of these men, but I would suspect it’s a bit easier to create that persona when it is close to someone’s actual personality. What’s ironic here is Rance actually tries to shed that persona and just can’t. I don’t think any real world politician would do such a thing.
So, for this film, it’s not so much who actually shot Liberty Valance. It’s more about who people think shot Liberty Valance. All I know for sure is, that guy had it coming.
NEXT: I’ve been fortunate enough to see some non-samurai Akira Kurosawa films I’ve never seen before with this project, but next time I get to see one of his samurai films that I haven’t seen before. Be back soon for my thoughts on 1961’s Yojimbo.
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