The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Well, I finally watched John Ford's 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and... I had more problems with it than I usually have with Ford's movies. Liberty Valance is billed as the first time Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne are together in a film, and they play their usual archetypes. Wayne is a short-tempered, confident gunslinger who has no time for law and order but somehow at the same time, like, just really loves "America". Stewart plays a law-and-order-loving attorney who comes west for no reason I can really understand. He apparently followed Horace Greeley's advice to go west young man and all that. The violent man and the peacenik inevitably come into conflict. 

I've noted this before, but there's a trend in films at this time in which a man who is opposed to violence comes to the west and teaches everyone that there are better ways than violence to deal with problems (The Violent Men, Friendly Persuasion). But of course, this same person must also be violent in order to get anything done. Violence is only good when used by the right people, and when it's used by the right people, it's the best thing in the world. This ideological approach is the perfect narrative sleight of hand for USAmerican democracy – violence is bad and no one should commit it except the state. The state upholds its own monopoly on violence and justifies its own use of force while pretending that it disapproves of violence on a large scale. One is reminded of George W. Bush's famous phrase "When we talk about war, we're really talking about peace".

This was my chief political problem with Liberty Valance, but this movie is also just really dumb. It wants to be taken very seriously for a while, and it begins in a very somber mood – with a weepy and aged Vera Miles – but then once we go back in time to hear the story of Liberty Valance, almost every single scene is a cartoon. Edmond O'Brien, who is doing good work, plays the town newspaperman and town drunk, but the script is written so that the whole thing is just silly. No opportunity for a joke is skipped. It's constant! And I actually don't really understand why. The main part of the film feels phony from start to finish. One or two examples will suffice, I think. At one point, Ransom Stoddard, Stewart's character, starts a school in order to teach some folks how to read and write. Once we see the school, no one is learning how to read and write. Instead, Stoddard is teaching them about the U.S. constitution. Everyone behaves earnestly, pretending that some scene like this could actually happen, with adult people pushing other adult people to remember the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence and encouraging each other earnestly, while miming eager listening. It's an insane scene. It is made even more bizarre when Denver Pyle, who was 42 in 1962, enters dragging his wayward teenage son played by O.Z. Whitehead, who was 51! There is a later scene in which this character is licking a lollipop, and another in which John Wayne lifts Whitehead off of a bar and says get out of here. You're too young to vote. Excuse me, that is literally an old man.

This very weird approach to age was especially colorable in Liberty Valance, but it can also be seen in almost all Jimmy Stewart films from this period. Well into his fifties Stewart was constantly playing young men in their twenties. It always looks so weird to me. He is never believable as a twentysomething. This is not only true of John Ford movies, but a whole host of Stewart's films in the '50s and '60s. It has always bothered me.

I will say that I did like the very strange ending to the film, in which Stewart's relationship with Vera Miles is shown to be not quite as satisfying as it seemed in the cartoon part of the movie, and in which we glimpse that she may really have loved John Wayne's character all along. Stewart is playing a character his own age there, and his approach is filled with regret and indecision. It's much more interesting than his faux-youthful performance in the larger film. 

But I guess I just don't really know what The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is supposed to be about. The last long act of the film is about a nomination scene in which a whole bunch of men yell in a totally phony-looking election scene because – as in so many of Ford's films – this is really a movie about USAmerican politics. And Ford's white supremacist and imperialist opinions about USAmerican politics are of no interest to me.