Out with the Old, in with the New
John Ford’s late period masterpiece is a meditation (at least as meditative as his tendencies would allow) on the twilight years of the American West as it disappears under the blanket of progress.
The film opens with Jimmy Stewart traveling back to Shinbone, a stand-in for any frontier town, for the first time since ascending the ranks in Washington. At this point, Shinbone is basically a novelty, not nearly the cut throat locale it was decades prior, and Stewart saunters around the city that platformed his successes like a college graduate returning to their hometown. While he is clearly on a mission, he takes note of the progress as he passes through town, shooing away eager journalists in his path. He ultimately reaches his destination, a dusty, disheveled funeral parlor to pay his respects to a man that Shinbone has long since forgotten. Curiosities peaked, the local newsmen swarm, desperate to understand the importance of the man in the coffin, to which Stewart begins to unfurl the truth of the beginning of his own myth.
What takes place next is a tight parable about 3 stages of The Old West intersecting. The lawless, the stabilized and the modern, the former two yielding in time to the latter. Lee Marvin represents the savage, untamed west as the trigger happy, moral-less Liberty Valance, John Wayne plays the righteous, unshakeable Tom Doniphon, an archetypical mid-era cowboy, and Stewart, playing the educated, dutiful Ransom Stoddard, represents the inevitable, civilized progress drifting in from the East.
Stewart at first has a hard time grappling with the rules of his new home, butting heads with Wayne as he firmly, but honestly lays out the facts of the land. Stewart, a lawyer, refuses to stoop to what he sees as the vigilante justice of the territory, despite the looming threat of Lee Marvin’s whip and revolver. Overtime, as Stewart begins to educate and organize Shinbone, Wayne begins to recognize the end of his era. He sees the woman he longs for latch on to a future that will surely leave him behind, he sees the town around him begin to modernize and the people in it becoming self reliant, no longer needing his brand of swift justice.
The only threat to that creeping progress is Marvin’s Valance who gnashes like a rabid dog at the signs of change, vowing to deter, by violent means, the oncoming law and order. Wayne recognizes this affront to the advancement set into motion by Stewart and begrudgingly helps by beginning to relinquish his watchful grip on the town to Stewart.
This all comes to a head in an iconically framed, expertly staged shootout between Marvin and Stewart, with Wayne lurking off camera in the shadows. After a bit of back and forth, and a few cheap early shots from Valance, it appears as though Stoddard bests Valance just after the scoundrel vows to “place one between his eyes”. Ultimately, it is Wayne who secretly guns down Liberty Valance from the shadows, knowing that change will only come if he sacrifices his own legend for the sake of modernization, dooming his way of life in the process. Further still, in an act of pure selflessness, he reveals the truth only to Stewart, clearing his conscious, allowing him to rise unburdened.
The glory of Ford’s final opus is just as much in the text of the film as it is in the subtext. Ford is a filmmaker who revolutionized the Western, a genre that Hollywood and moviegoers couldn’t get enough of for the majority of his career, and he was deemed a master of the form nearly two decades before this movie even came out. He lifted the genre into a higher filmic language, codifying it’s sweeping zooms, it’s selfless heroes, and it’s wind whipped tension. Still, with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance he knows his time is up. He returns to black and white, suggesting a nod to the past, and tells a story through the lens of his greatest muse about the end of an era. Few filmmakers have the awareness in the wake of their own reputation to know their time is soon over, but that’s what makes a legend a legend.
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