The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) Review
9/10
Official trailer
A United States senator returns to a small western town for the funeral of a man nobody there remembers. A newspaperman asks why somebody of his standing came so far for a pauper, and the senator tells him.
The 9 is for a film willing to dismantle its own genre and its own director’s career in the same two hours. Everything Ford built across The Searchers, Stagecoach and a dozen others is examined here and found to have been a story people needed instead of a thing that happened.
What costs it a point is the casting. James Stewart is fifty-three playing a man in his twenties, John Wayne is fifty-four, and the flashback takes up almost the entire film. Everything else leaves me shaken. I think it’s the saddest Western ever made, and Ford gets there without a single speech telling me to feel it.
Print the Legend
The famous line isn’t triumphant and it’s almost always quoted as though it were. A newspaper editor listens to the true account, tears up his notes, and explains that when the legend becomes fact, they print the legend.
What that scene delivers is a refusal. The senator has just confessed that his entire career rests on a killing he didn’t commit, and the press declines to correct the record because the record is more useful as it stands.
Ford is describing his own profession. He made the films that turned a violent and squalid frontier into a national story, and this is a picture in which a man watches that process happen to him and can’t stop it.
The line is also delivered without bitterness. That’s what makes it unsettling. The editor is being practical about what a town needs to believe, and the film doesn’t tell us he’s wrong.
A work that examines its own tradition has to have won the right through participation. Ford could take the Western apart because he’d spent thirty years assembling it.
The mechanism is a character who benefits from the lie and didn’t tell it. Stoddard never claims the killing, the town assigns it to him, and he accepts a career built on it. That’s a far more uncomfortable position than a fraud.
Deliver the thesis without heat. A character stating a cynical truth calmly, as an ordinary professional judgment, hits harder than any amount of outrage.
Two Men and One Function
Ranse Stoddard is a lawyer who arrives with books and a belief that the territory needs statehood, courts and a school. Tom Doniphon is a rancher with a gun who keeps order because somebody has to. The film’s structure is that both are necessary and only one can be celebrated. The territory can’t become a state while men like Doniphon are required, and it can’t stop requiring them until it’s a state. Wayne plays that trap and it’s the best work he did for Ford. Doniphon understands exactly what he is, knows he’s building a place with no room in it for himself, and does the thing anyway. The cactus rose is where the film says it. Doniphon grows a garden and a house for a woman who chooses Stoddard, and the house is never lived in, and the film shows it burned and then shows the coffin of the man who built it.
The burned house wrecks me. Wayne doesn’t get a big scene about losing Hallie, just a garden nobody will use and a fire, and I think it’s the most moving thing he ever did on screen.
Hallie is the quiet center of all of it and Vera Miles plays her almost entirely in silence. She’s a senator’s wife of thirty years who asks, on the way out of town, whether it’s changed much, and the answer she gives herself is about a garden growing where there was desert.
The Shot Itself
The killing is staged twice. The first time we see what the town saw. That’s a lawyer with a borrowed pistol somehow hitting a professional gunman in the dark.
The second version is delivered later from a different angle, and it shows Doniphon in an alley with a rifle, firing at the same moment. That’s the whole political and emotional structure of the film contained in about eight seconds.
What makes the reveal work is that it explains three separate things at once. Why Stoddard survived, why Doniphon burned his house down that night, and why a senator came to a pauper’s funeral thirty years later. Ford shoots it plainly, with no flourish, from a position that makes the mechanics obvious. The revelation isn’t a twist, it’s information the film has been keeping because the character has been keeping it. Pompey is the film’s other unspoken argument. Doniphon’s Black ranch hand fights alongside him, is refused service in a bar, and sits outside the schoolroom where the territory is learning about its own constitution. Ford puts him in the frame repeatedly and gives him almost no lines. That’s either restraint or evasion depending on the viewer.
Showing the same event twice from different positions is one of the cheapest and most reliable structures available, and it works when the second version reorganizes instead of contradicting. Nothing in the first account was false, it was incomplete. That’s a different thing and the reader will accept it.
Make the reveal explain several outstanding questions at the same time. A reveal that answers one thing is a mechanism. A reveal that answers four is a structure.
Place the withholding inside a character instead of inside the narration. Doniphon knew all along, so the story isn’t tricking the reader, somebody with a reason to be silent is telling it.
The Soundstage Is a Choice
Ford had spent his career in Monument Valley shooting enormous landscapes and this film is almost entirely interiors, backlot streets and painted skies, in black and white in 1962 when color was standard.
Paramount reportedly pushed for color and location and Ford refused. The decision reads as an old man’s stubbornness and works as an argument.
A myth is being examined here instead of performed, and a myth examined belongs on a stage. The artificiality is the point, and the film looks like a memory of a Western instead of a Western. It also matches the structure. The story is a man’s recollection thirty years later. That’s exactly the kind of account that would have painted skies in it. William Clothier shot it and the interiors are good, all hard shadow and lamplight, closer to a noir than to a Western. The bar, the newspaper office and the schoolroom are the three rooms the film keeps returning to, and each one is an institution the territory is trying to build.
Ford was right to dig in his heels on this. The painted skies look fake on purpose, and to my eye they make the film sadder, like an old man’s memory with the color already drained out of it.
What It Cost Ford
He made a handful of films afterward and none of them matter much, and this is generally where the career is understood to close. That’s the right reading. A director who spends thirty years building a national story and then makes the film explaining that it was assembled has nowhere obvious to go next. The reception at the time was modest and the reputation has only grown. It’s now routinely placed at or near the top of the genre, and the reason is that it’s the only Western that’s about Westerns.
It also contains the last real collaboration between Ford and Wayne, after more than twenty films together, and it gives Wayne the part of a man who’s written out of the story he made possible. Neither of them commented much on the parallel at the time, and it’s a very difficult one to miss sixty years later.
Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valance is worth a last word. He’s a simple villain and doesn’t need to be anything else. He’s violence without a program. That’s exactly what a territory without law produces, and both protagonists exist because he does.
Marvin plays him with a whip and an enormous amount of enjoyment, and the scene where he trips a lawyer carrying a tray of food in a restaurant is the whole character. It’s a humiliation performed for an audience, and the film understands that humiliation is worse than a threat.
Marvin is the most fun I have in the film, which is a strange thing to say about a man who whips people. He’s so pleased with himself in that restaurant scene that I laugh and want to hide under the table at the same time.
Some works close a career by saying the thing that makes the previous work impossible to continue. That’s a legitimate destination and worth recognizing when you arrive at it.
An antagonist with no philosophy can carry a political film if he embodies the condition being argued about. Valance is what happens without law, stated as a person.
Reputation that grows slowly usually belongs to work that refused its audience something at the time. This film declined to be a Western in color with a hero, and took twenty years to be forgiven for it.
Should you watch Liberty Valance?
Yes, and watch it after a few of Ford’s others. This is the film where the man who built the American Western spends two hours explaining how it was built, on a soundstage, in black and white, with a line about printing the legend that almost nobody quotes correctly. It gets a 9 because it hurts in exactly the way Ford meant it to, and it misses a 10 only because I never quite stop seeing two men in their fifties playing young ones.
