The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The presence of Jimmy Stewart and the insistent theme of the rights of the common man gives Ford’s last Western of note and the last he made with John Wayne a decidedly Capraesque spin. Particularly as Ford (or at least his cinematographer, William H. Clothier) shot it in black and white, it looks like an old-fashioned Wild West yarn with Lee Marvin obliging as the swaggering, snarling sociopath Liberty Valance, Wayne giving a strong performance as the tough old cow poke, Ton Doniphon and Edmond O’Brien standing out with an excellent comic performance as Dutton Peabody, owner of the local rag,The Shinbone Star,

Stewart however, in his mid-fifties but spending most of the film as a supposedly callow young lawyer and relying on his “gee shucks” Mr Decent characterisations from his work with Capra in the 1940s (as well as a lot of shouting), gives a decidedly laboured feel (he is much better as his older senatorial self) to a film that too often indulges in mawkish sentimentality.  

Ending with the famous line "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend" the film harks back to Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) which looked at the role of what we now call "the media" in creating popular myth. There it was interpreted as a kind of military expediency, here it is given a rather more tragic tone thanks to the fact that Wayne’s character lost his girl Hallie (Vera Miles) and his dream of home and family by giving birth to it. Such, one might say, is the wisdom of years and the film’s title hides a beautifully ironic twist that, despite its pious posturings makes this a Western of unusual insight whilst the presence of Lee Van Cleef and Strother Martin as Valance's stooges presages the coming of the post-Fordian, post-mythicising  Western.

 

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