The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
19th - 25th of October
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)
A journey through the past that gnaws on the loss and regret of two men’s hearts, drawing with it questions of civilisation and community, tying the iconic to the canvas. Few directors more than Ford have fascinatingly used the political and emotional resonance of actors, not just as crude symbolism but as seething hulks of expectation and promise. ‘Together for the first time!' crowed the posters, above the instantly known faces of John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart. The former, a symbol of rugged americana, western expansionism and exceptionalism, the latter the innately human everyman, searching for goodness.
Told in flashback by, the now senator, Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), we return to his youth as a law graduate. Newly arrived to the west from the eastern cities, in the desert his stagecoach is held up by a gang of outlaws led by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) leaving him beaten and left for dead beside his law books. After being found by horse trader Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and nursed back to health by the Ericson's, and their daughter Haillie (Vera Miles), who run the restaurant in the emerging town of Shinbone, Ranse slowly begins to promote the ideals of education and democracy in the town, while hoping to get justice against Valance; who, acting as hired gun for the rich land owners “north of the Picketwire River”, begins to intimidate the townsfolk against voting in their best interest. As Tom attempts to talk the lawyer out of his desire to seek legal or violent, retribution, this friction is deepened by the blossoming relationship between Ranse and Tom’s intended, Haillie.
It’s easy to read Ranse, who eventually finds footing in many of the traditional hallmarks of western establishment: law, media, education and the state, as a paradigm for a classical view of civilisation, whereas Tom is a man who is at once outsider and insider to the town, whose dreams and desires are on the surface individualist, personified in the raising of his hopeful, romantic, house extension, surrounded by cactus flowers; as he informs Ranse “out here a man settles his own problems”. On closer inspection, however, his actions are often carried out, if not for the sake of, but with the benefit of communal reward. It is a beguilingly subversive role, rejecting state sanctioned authority, while also stood fast against the whims of capitalist greed and cruelty. It’s a more passive performance than one is used to finding Wayne in, he eyes what’s happening in scenes more than directs them. The stressed vocalisations of Jimmy Stewart frequently merely bounce back from his shadow on the wall. it’s a remarkable performance, of tired grace and slow gravitas that eventually leads into a reckless breakdown of such humility and sadness, it would seem as if the duke would crumble at a touch.
As in The Searchers (1956), a door eventually closes on Wayne’s character; becoming a past America has left behind. In that film he was a warship due to be broken up. An obsolete hulk of racial superiority and sexual anxiety that needed to be forgotten for this to be “a good country some day”. As the man walked away, the camera stayed in the cabin, with the hearth and with the future. When the door closes behind Tom Doniphon, we walk with him. Not so easily can Wayne’s character be read. Certainly, the racial politics represented are less clear-cut: for much of the film, and even after his death, years later, he is accompanied by Pompey (Woody Strode), a man certainly in service to him, though the exact details of which are never clear, who alternates between a submissive employee and caring friend. At times Tom strangely symbolises a force for egalitarianism, quickly shutting up a barman, who has begun to refuse to serve Pompey. As far as gender politics he has an affection for women, Haillie quite literally forming the foundation of his future life, but he seems to bristle at the idea they should be protected or patronised; “looks like we’ve got a ladies man” he teases on learning Ranse was injured protecting a woman.
Liberty Valance operates as a more blackly obvious enemy to the state of society, and allusions may be read in the white cloaks and masks the gang are first seen in, but his function as a tool for the wealthy cattlemen, resistant to the threat of statehood that would end their monopolies, implicates larger forces in the bloodshed caused. Unlike Ranse, Tom understands the ugly power which a gun and the money that buys the gun can wield. There is honour in Tom Doniphon, even if his actions in the films climax are wrong in the eyes the upstanding Ranse. The truth of the event itself is prefigured twice before it’s flashback reveal; first in the restaurant when Liberty Valance is made aware of Pompey’s gun pulled on him and secondly when we see John Wayne stumble, defeated and heartbroken, down the shadowed alleyway, that opens on to a view of the main parade. The audience know the truth, forcing us to become aligned with Tom, having one over on Ranse. He, and the viewer understand its necessity. If the outcome is what ultimately destroys him, it is the knowledge of its necessity that gnaws at Ranse.
As an opposition to Valance, the establishment Rance upholds is certainly not presented as the gleaming beacon the youthful man sees it as. Authoritative power in the town rests in Link Appleyard (Andy Devine), the overweight, childlike and cowardly Marshal, whose beat as comic relief is undercut by a patheticism, sticky to the touch. Later, the convention at Capitol City gives an impression of politics as a world filled with false rhetoric and shameless stunts. One final moment of disillusionment occurs when Ranse, now senator, is accosted by the train conductor who prostrates himself before the VIP. Ranse acquiesces, as if performing a role, proudly thanking the man and informing him that he will contact the rail office in gratitude. It seems minor in description, but it’s a brief sequence filled with a profound hollowness that wrinkles with discomfort; were these the stakes all along?
Filmed in black and white, and divorced from the spectacle of landscape and human transposition across it that so often becomes mesmeric metaphor in Ford’s westerns, the camera is here focused on people as individuals. Rather than allowing grandeur of space to take up his image, Ford’s canvases are small rooms whose character disguises their structural fragility; illustrated with shadows that grid or drape across the openings left between people. What these do is rather than emphasising the heroes part alongside a ‘many’ standing in for nationhood, we see a spiderweb of interrelationships, formal and informal, that form a distinct community. Once we look at the networks of connection — of commerce, of education, of friendship — between Tom, Ranse and the others in the town it becomes clearer; we should not view these two as lone individuals, but recognise that their activity is superior to themselves. Whether direct or indirect these actions are the ongoing construction of a community.
This growth is best personified in the interchanging emotional significance that we witness exchanged between characters; most memorably to my mind the joyous, engaged, realisation on Ranse’s face as he reads an editorial written by Peabody (Edmond O’Brien, delightfully chewing scenery throughout) — the verbose newspaperman, in the constant grip of an alcoholic sweat — and his surprised, honest pride on being complimented on it. Objects such as this become totems identified with one but occasionally passed to others; Ranse’s tattered and taped together law book that seems to mirror his own torso crouched in a sling, the tyranny found in the silver tipped whip of Liberty Valance, and, most captivating of all, the mysterious hatbox Haillie clings to in the films opening. Leant on like a crutch when confronted with the fading ruins of Tom Doniphon’s cabin, it disappears once we have learned the reason for the desperate sense of loss that permeates the films opening minutes.
On second watch I began to think about the similarity to, and I’m sure influence upon, Straub and Huillet’s Workers, Peasants (2001), their adaptation of Elio Vittorini’s socialist novel The Women of Messina, about displaced Italians finding refuge in an abandoned town in the months following the end of the second world war. It is another film about the formation of community through cooperation, specialisation, social need and responsibility, that triangulates within and around the romantic entanglements of individuals; using images that very simply present individuals alone, or alongside one another, asserting the role of individual choice and action within communal practice. One might even draw a line between the clear presence of performance in each film, albeit using divergent methods: The Straub’s amateur acting troupe, clearly reciting, often script in hand, and Ford’s presentation of icons, inseparable from their image as actors. In both films, the meaningful network of relationship and exchange present in the community is proposed as preferable to ‘the state’, which appears as a foreign, encroaching influence and which, in Vittorini’s novel, eventually consumes the intimate social drive of the community.
Perhaps the films simplest metaphor is that of Ranse as the railroad that goes straight to Washington. The catalyst that has turned a wilderness into a garden. If this tension between the loss decaying men’s hearts and the warmth and strength found in communal action can be resolved, it is through the realisation that the this latter bond, has been lost also. There is nothing recognisable in the modern town that now bears the name Shinbone, the name Tom Doniphon is an unknown, and the stagecoach sits broken and dusty. The railroad and dam may allow you to grow roses, but you have to ride out of town to see the cacti bloom. It is an elegy for the small, distinct and parochial, lost and subsumed under manifest destiny. The train that boldly enters as protagonist in the film’s opening, departs at the end, having been transformed; in an inexhaustibly strange and unsettling shot of broad open space, seemingly, without centre or focus, the plain slopes downward before us and the camera is shaken by the wind, giving this icon-less image a destabilising touch of the amateur. As the train, insignificant, curves away.
Other Films I Watched This Week
Cure (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 1997) - A deeply unsettling film. An abyssal plain within all of us.
The Cypress Dance (Francisco Queimadela, Mariana Caló, 2020) - Lovely tangibility to this; a hand in a rockpool, drifting and reaching.
Point and Line to Plane (Sofia Bohdanowicz, 2020) - If there is pain, I would always rather it be raw and ugly, than through a construction as sharp and precise as this.
one of those weeks where you spend a lot of time thinking about people on the peripheries of your life. the uncertainty of everything at the moment seems to be dragging everyone down. writing this has been a nice distraction from job applications and the world.
all the best, i hope you and yours are keeping well,
james
xx
