The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Director, John Ford

 “Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance!” says the train conductor, as the aged senator and his wife sit in their seats, returning to Washington from a visit out west.  It is one of the bitterest ironies in all of American film.  For the senator has built a whole political career on that reputation.  Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin at his malicious best) was a gunman who terrorized the ordinary people by the Picket Wire River, when that land knew only territorial law, which meant, practically, the law of might and the barrel of a gun.  But one night it came to a showdown, and the tenderfoot lawyer ended up facing a man who could have outshot him blindfolded, if he felt like it.  And just when the gunman was going to put a bullet right between the lawyer’s eyes, a shot rang out, and Liberty fell.

If that was the main plot of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it would be the well-worn and comfortable story of the righteous underdog defeating the evil giant.  But there’s another man whom Liberty hates, a rancher, as tough as the soil from which he wrests a living, and this rancher (John Wayne) and the lawyer (Jimmy Stewart) are rivals for the heart of a beautiful woman who was born in that place (Vera Miles), and who, when the lawyer shows up in town, does not even know how to read.  And in fact, the only reason why the famous senator, many years later, has come back to the old place is that his rival the rancher has died – with almost no one left to mourn him, and absolutely no one left who knows the truth about the gunfight.

John Ford was the master of the western, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, I believe, his greatest work in that genre.  Ford understood all too well that civilization comes at a steep price.  It’s not just that people must sacrifice for it, must sweat and toil, and sometimes shed blood – other people’s blood, or their own.  It’s also that civilization is something of a mixed blessing.  It is good that there should be roads and schools and newspapers and railways, and soon people forget that there was ever anything good besides.  But Ford will not let us forget.  In this film, it is not clear that the better man has won the girl.  And even when the senator finally tells a couple of people the truth, they are not willing to reveal it.  “This is the west, sir,” says one of them.  “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

Unlike most of Ford’s films, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has almost no musical background.  It does not feel stark, though, because it is filled with an array of character actors at their finest: the stuttering good-willed coward of a sheriff (Andy Devine); the hard-drinking newspaper man (Edmond O’Brien) who wants a real democracy and not a lawless dust bowl; the rancher’s loyal freedman, humble and yet smoldering with dignity (Woody Strode); Liberty’s flunkies, one brainless and puny (Strother Martin), one oily and malevolent (Lee Van Cleef); and a passel of others too.  It has first-rate performances from Wayne and Stewart; you can’t imagine anyone but Marvin as the bad man, and as for Vera Miles, that beautiful woman could make her countenance go from lovely to glacial in a single instant, and she too conveys something of the loss that civilization incurs.  A great and deeply human story, from the time when directors still thought that telling stories, not jiggering your nerves, was their real job.

---

Word & Song is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymn, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. To support this project, please join us as a free or paid subscriber.