A new breed of Western: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Written: Feb 14 '00 (Updated Sep 23 '07)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Great story, acting, direction, cinematography, and score
Cons: More people need to see this!
The Bottom Line: This is as good a film about the taming of the Wild West as there is; one of John Ford's finest works. See it!
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| George_Chabot's Full Review: |
TThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
“Think you can make it, Pilgrim?” Tom Doniphon
Director John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance marks a milestone in the Western genre - an essay on the passing of the Wild West and the rise of law and order.
Gone is the white hat/black hat morality of the classic western. Gone also is the idea that the good guy always wins.
Benefiting from a masterful screenplay by a committee of screenwriters, the story is set in several acts, almost all of which take place indoors. The movie begins in a bustling western town around the turn of the 20th century. The railroad has brought prosperity to Shinbone. But the story goes back a long time before the railroad -
Jimmy Stewart stars as the bumbling eastern dude lawyer, Ransom A. Stoddard. Stoddard is a guy who took Horace Greeley's "Go West, and grow up with the country" advice to heart. Trouble is, he is not fitted out to cope with the realities of life on the frontier.
He quickly finds out just how vulnerable he is when his stage is held up and the villain, Liberty Valance, (Lee Marvin’s finest performance) gives him a vicious beating with a silver-knobbed whip. Clearly, the ability to quote long passages from his law book is not going to do Stoddard much good when confronted with such men.
Beaten and broken, he is befriended by the honest rancher Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) a man of action and everything that Stoddard is not. Stoddard is just about to give up and go back East, but there is a girl, Hallie (Vera Miles)…
The movie begins with Stoddard returning to the town of Shinbone to attend the funeral of his friend, Tom Doniphon. Stoddard is a US Senator, ever since the territory became a state. The movie is told in flashbacks from Stoddard's memory. Stoddard got his notoriety years before from standing up to Liberty Valance, the meanest man south of the Picket wire. Now, after forty years, with all the principal players dead, Stoddard decides to come clean and tell how the territory was settled and how the gunfight with Liberty Valance went down. At the end of his surprising story, the newspaper editor simply says, "When the legend has become fact, print the legend."
Shot in gritty black and white, in a day when Technicolor was the norm, I believe Ford was trying to show the incremental difference between good and evil, along with the varying shades of gray we humans invariably find in-between; how compromise dulls our edge and makes us settle for less than we could have had. Such is politics and such is the story of civilization.
The characters are typical, but stereotypical behavior was what Ford wanted from his cast, to underscore his moral; and he got it in spades from an ensemble cast. Gone are the heroic characters, each has flaws and prefers to brood about them in ample shadows that invest Shinbone.
Liberty Valance memorably endowed with life by Lee Marvin, is the town bully running rough shod over all who cross his path. That is, except for Tom Doniphon (John Wayne, in one of his finest performances) who was the one man who stood up to Liberty. He took care of the problem, but allowed the credit to devolve on Stewart, who successfully ran for Senator as "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance." Stewart, to his credit, plays his role with a bit of reticence, even wincing when he sees his long time wife Hallie (Vera Miles) places a beloved cactus rose on the coffin, proving she still loves the dear departed big lug.
Great supporting cast in Woody Strode, Andy Devine, Edmond O'Brien, Vera Miles, Lee Van Cleef, and Strother Martin. Outstanding dramatic score by Cyril Mockridge as well as compelling expressionist cinematography by William Clothier.
Other highly recommended movies on the passing of the West are Ride the High Country, and The Wild Bunch.
Watch a good movie tonight!
Recommended:
Yes
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