Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The (DVD)

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"Pilgrim! Where ya goin'?"

Director John Ford started making pictures in 1917 and among his early silents were several Westerns. But it was his 1939 black-and-white Western "Stagecoach" with John Wayne that won worldwide recognition and popularity. So it was fitting that among Ford's very last works he would do the 1962 black-and-white Western "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," with John Wayne and James Stewart. Ford made many a movie with Wayne over a twenty-three-year period, some of them Westerns, some of them not, and he never let us down.

The thing is, this was not one of my favorite Westerns when I was younger. It appeared about the time I graduated from high school, and I had kind of grown out of the Western genre by then. More important, the movie seemed to lumber along at a pace that reminded me of another Western I hadn't cared for, "High Noon." It didn't help that many of the reviews I remember from the time were quite disparaging of "Liberty Valance," calling it clumsy, old-fashioned, and indulgent, and I was well into college before I saw both films again and began to appreciate them as screen classics.

Ford, Wayne, and Stewart are at their best in "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," although all three appear to be doing the same things they had been doing for decades. Maybe it's because Ford and company make it all seem so simple that one can easily miss the substance of their work. About the only critical comment I can make about the film these days is that I wish Ford (or the studio) had filmed it entirely in the great outdoors rather than confining so much of it to studio soundstages. Ford was at his most expansive in the wild, and stages seemed to cramp his style.

"The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" is Ford's bittersweet elegy to the passing of the old wild West with the coming of a new age of law and order. In addition, it's a meditation on the differences between fact and myth, the latter being something built up through dime novels and Hollywood films. Ironically, perhaps, while the movie is thoughtful and thought-provoking, it also displays Ford's most sentimental qualities, which only makes it all the more endearing. Think here of "The Grapes of Wrath."

Ford, along with screenwriters James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, tells the movie's story in flashback, as Stewart's character, Ransom Stoddard, an elderly U.S. Senator, returns to the small town of Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend, rancher Tom Doniphon (Wayne). Stoddard tells the tale to a newspaper editor, apparently to get it off his chest.

Stoddard explains that when he first arrived in Shinbone many years before, he was a penniless young lawyer, newly out of school and with only a law book and a few dollars to his name. But on his way to town an outlaw, Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), and his gang waylaid the stage, and Valance beat Stoddard within an inch of his life with a silver-topped whip. Valance, Stoddard later learned, was a sadistic killer, a "no-good, gun-packing, murdering thief." Stoddard couldn't understand why everyone in Shinbone put up with him, how they could leave such a vicious murderer alone to terrorize the town. He later learned it was because everyone was afraid of him, and the only law in town was a worthless coward, Marshal Link Appleyard (Andy Devine).

Wayne's character, Tom Doniphon, represents the old West, which used the force of fist and gun to administer justice. Who better for the part than Wayne. Wearing a shirt and chaps reminiscent of the ones he wore in "The Searchers," Wayne is the epitome of rugged Western individualism. Stewart's character, Rance Stoddard, on the other hand, represents the new West, which would govern through the law of the land. Stoddard is the idealist, symbolizing the forward progress of civilization, out to right the wrongs of Mankind through reason and intellect. Think of "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington." Inevitably, we know these two diametrically opposed forces will have to clash, providing the movie its major impetus.