| |
|||
 |
|||
|
|||
|
|
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is director John Ford’s precise, matter-of-fact deconstruction of the Western legend that he helped perpetuate with classics like Stagecoach, The Searchers, and Rio Grande. After years of filming John Wayne against the backdrop of Monument Valley in such films, which are best described as Western fairy-tales, Ford finally took his most legendary star and put him in a film that de-mythologized the myth. It was not the last collaboration between Ford and Wayne (they had two more: Donavan’s Reef, a South Seas adventure, and Chesty: The Birth of a Legend, a Ford-shot documentary for which Wayne provided the narration; Ford also made one more non-Wayne Western, Cheyenne Autumn), but it was at least the last entry in their most beloved genre that they made together, and was thus Ford’s final chapter in the John Wayne Western, which is certainly its own subgenre (Wayne is such an iconic image that he is a category of his own). This fact is important and appropriate: After you have lifted the curtains from the motifs you single-handedly created, with the star who helped perpetuate them, you are left with nothing else to explore in that area, and no reason to linger any longer under the veil. The film’s tagline, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” reads like Ford’s defense for his many Western films, all of which embellished the stereotypical images of the West and used them to create compelling adventures loaded with political and social subtext. And the subtext is important—fairy tales are parables after all, told for the sake of a moral lesson that they seek to convey. Most of Ford’s films reflected traditional American values and argued for the ethical supremacy of true justice over evildoers, but beneath the surface, the images of honor grow disturbingly murky. We cannot watch The Searchers, after all, and see in Ethan Edwards an upright example of a hero’s righteousness, particularly because bigotry clearly motivates his “selfless” acts of courage. And watch the way the Ringo Kid undresses the leading lady with his eyes in Stagecoach. If his methods are pure, his intentions are not. As in all fairy tales, simplicity masks the complex contradictions in all of us, and it provides padding to help us deal with our more disturbing reality. But the romance always comes first: The nuance would not work without the Hollywood fable sugarcoating it, and Ford crafted masterful festoons. Like Kurosawa and Leone (who both considered John Ford to be the greatest director who ever lived), Ford’s films are celebrations of romantic movement and even more romantic people. No one better utilizes the epic crane shot to give his characters and their horses a genuine sense of urgency as they bolt in exhaustive, single takes across the Western landscape (see the Indian raid in Stagecoach, which is still among the single greatest action sequences ever conceived in the movies), and most of his characters are impeccably noble or demonically villainous to exaggerated degrees, so that we are never in question (at least on a superficial level) over which character is the good guy and which one is the bad guy. Ford generally keeps the white hat/black hat archetype firmly intact. And that’s exactly the way we prefer Ford’s films—he is interested in the legends of the West, the romanticized view of its heroes and their foes, and the noble idealism that good always overpowers bad, even if his good have skeletons to deal with. The darker subtext generally accentuates these ideals by raising their stakes without condemning his heroes. His days were before the revisionist interpretations of Peckinpah and Eastwood, who took Ford’s shady undertones and transformed them into clear themes. Brilliant as these directors are, they could not have existed unless they had Ford’s conventions to jumpstart their own interpretations. Certainly not all of Ford’s films worked on this generally optimistic level—earlier films like Sergeant Rutledge (essentially a courtroom drama that just happened to take place in the West) and the immortal The Grapes of Wrath (which took place in the Depression) were unquestionably more interested in the cold realities of life than Hollywood beautification. But for the most part, as long as Ford was shooting tales of the West, Monument Valley remained his glorious setting and the quixotic legend became the primary focus, trumping out the historical accounts that are perhaps more mundane and ethically vague. That was until Liberty Valance, anyway, in which Ford finally prints the facts. Godard, of course, said that the greatest form of film criticism is to simply make another movie, and if we didn’t know that the man responsible for this film was John Ford, it would be tempting to construe it as a cutting denigration of the great director’s legacy. The film tells of Jimmy Stewart’s two journeys to the town of Shinbone—the first as a young lawyer who wants to help propel the town’s surrounding territory into statehood, and the second as an old, retired state senator who mulls humbly over his much-respected life, which has been elevated more by exaggerated fables than actual achievement. In the earlier story, John Wayne serves as Stewart’s guide through the rough realities of the Old West, which Stewart is determined to civilize. In the later sequences, where the Old West is now new, Wayne is an unseen ghost of sorts, always reminding Stewart of a disturbing irony that secretly traps both men in their later lives. This irony is centered on the fate of the sadistic outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), who is determined not to allow any political changes to out-trump his own fearful reign over the people of Shinbone. Stewart’s campaign, as well as his desire to intellectualize the town, upsets Valance’s balance of influence. Wayne, the only man in the territory more deadly than Valance, would rather settle down at his ranch with his girl (Vera Miles) than bother with any renegade outlaws, but Stewart’s idealisms, not to mention his influence over his fiancé, foil Wayne’s plans and eventually forces him to take sides. Which side he takes, and how he takes his side, become the crux of the film and reveal its ultimate thesis of the power of legend over fact. Throughout this story, Ford’s strategy is to create set-ups for which we expect his normal, spectacled showdowns, and he instead cuts down these expectations by providing wordy, unspectacular payoffs. Monument Valley has been replaced with mostly interior scenes in which men defend their honor with dialogue instead of bullets. The film’s two protagonists, Stewart’s naïve East-coast lawyer and Wayne’s alcoholic gunslinger, certainly don’t reflect the typical Ford hero—Stewart spends his time mulling over legal books, Wayne doesn’t get one obligatory action scene, and their frequent battles are verbal clashes between differing political and moral idealisms instead of gunfights. The only sequence in which Wayne and Stewart actually face off with weapons comes when gunslinger tries to teach the lawyer how to shoot a pistol. Wayne makes for a lousy teacher, and Stewart is even worse as a pupil; the scene ends with both guns in the sand and Stewart covered with white paint as Wayne laughs to himself. The moment is humorous and well-acted, but it clearly has no place in Ford’s canon of the mythological West. Scene after scene, Liberty Valance continues to drive itself further from Ford’s legacy by replacing the staples of the great director’s classical westerns into scenes of “normal” conversation and political banter. Instead of fighting with fists for a woman’s honor, Stewart and Wayne battle for a newspaper editor’s right to publish his paper. Instead of a climactic showdown with bloodthirsty Comanches, we have a wordy face-off between politicians over the rights of statehood. Instead of the hero riding off into the sunset on his horse, he takes the train and complains of fatigue. And so forth. The result is a methodical disassembling of Ford’s motifs; instead of romantic depictions of the good guy vs. the bad guy, all the characters are neither transcendent nor corrupt, but are simply realistic in their normalness. No one acts entirely heroic or completely villainous—life is too complicated and busy for anyone to take sides. The cruel Valance is perhaps the exception, but maybe not—it cannot be ignored that even he eventually tries to exercise his influence through the democratic process rather than brute force. The list goes on, but I’ll skip to the end with the most dramatic and important departure from Ford’s conventions: The one gunfight in the film only has four shots fired, two of which miss their target. One of the two gunmen in this scene, played by Jimmy Stewart, wears a kitchen apron instead of a cowboy hat, and the other, Lee Marvin, is quite literally shot in the back. The scene is filmed without Ford’s famous crane, and he instead uses long-shots and quick edits—rare for his shootouts. This revealing passage alone is enough to indicate that this is a different West—one more grounded in routine veracity than in fantasy; it is a fitting action scene for a film that essentially takes Ford’s fairy tales and, slowly but surely, stands them on their head; it is also the final clue to let us know that there are absolutely no traces left of his previous fantasies in this story. Not to say that these changes aren’t interesting —they are simply not expected. This isn’t necessarily an exciting film, but it is certainly a fascinating one—among the best of Ford’s films (and by default, among the best of films). There is a scene late in the proceedings in which delegates gather to discuss matters of the territory, and it is absolutely riveting in the way it shows underlining contempt creep in and mix uncomfortably with the required air of cordialness. Delegates argue over who they will elect as the first senator of their new state, and Ford eloquently draws out a series of long speeches and audience reactions that seem just about right for the way such a meeting would go (especially if you’ve ever spent time watching CSPAN; not much has changed in one hundred years). The scene is not without its self-referential humor—a candidate rides his horse across the stage to campaign in a mock-image of the Old West—and watch the way Ford basically has two stories being told in this single sequence: One focuses on the praises that the characters ordain on each other, and the other concerns what they aren’t saying, in the unspoken hesitations and pauses that reveal different, more opportunistic motivations altogether. It’s the history of the American political process in five minutes. We should also reflect briefly on John Wayne’s portrayal as an old gunslinger. I just wrote that there are no traces of Ford’s previous fantasies in the story, but let me make a critical distinction: This statement is true of the story itself, but I intentionally didn’t take Wayne’s character into account. Even as the film purports honesty, the very presence of Wayne forces us to remember Ford’s mythological origins. This was the first black-and-white Western that John Ford shot in years, and Ford purported to have made this decision to cover up the fact that by 1962, Wayne was thirty years older than his character, and the lack of Technicolor covered up his gray. I prefer to think that Ford is also intentionally reaching back into the days of Stagecoach, Red River, and Fort Apache—an era in which Wayne was establishing his iconic status instead of confirming it. Liberty Valance does not contain Wayne’s best performance, nor his most complex ( Red River, The Searchers, and The Shootist are better contenders), but it does provide him with a role that celebrates his contribution to the Western instead of redefining it. That the film is such a drastic departure from his normal Ford collaborations is enough to make his character stick out like a bleeding thumb; Wayne has to be himself, so that the disparity between his character and the rest of the film can intentionally jar us with its alteration from the Western fairy-tale. Stewart plays an effective foil, because he represents the true west, the new west, measured against Wayne’s romanticized representation. The most effective aspect of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is not so much its method but the intended impact of its method. Ford forces us to adjust to realism while at the same time keeping us aware that we are watching a John Ford/John Wayne Western; the end product intentionally obliges us to change gears, and so the film’s ultimate power is in how we find ourselves reacting to its departures. It is fitting that in his final bow with John Wayne in the Old West domain, he triumphs truth by unearthing and meditating on the reality that led to the legends’ creation. The exercise therefore becomes something of an elegy for the true west that Ford previously denied in his fables. In a way, it is the most correct sendoff he could give his classical motifs: Leave it to John Ford to de-myth his own myth when saying goodbye. Cast: A film by Paramount Pictures. Directed by John Ford. Written by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, from a story by Dorothy Johnson. No M.P.A.A. rating, but contains mild violence that might be disturbing for young viewers. Running time: 118 minutes. Original United States theatrical release date: April 22, 1962. Questions? Comments? E-mail me: danel_the_tinman@hotmail.com |
||
