Through A Gun, Darkly

Rio Bravo notwithstanding, my favorite studio-era westerns are the ones that play like frontier films noirs; I prefer Anthony Mann or Sam Fuller to Raoul Walsh or John Ford. Ford's critics (myself included) concentrate on his bitter aversion to realism and complexity; he is to western clichés as Godard is to art-film stereotypes, and nearly all of his collaborations with John Wayne were obviously cooked up for quick cash. He embodies the old school of westerns, and usually plays it straight for action and melodrama.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is the story of Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), a famous senator returning to a dusty frontier hovel to bury an old friend, the unknown Tom Doniphan. Stoddard attracts a considerable amount of attention, and when the perplexed townsfolk demand to know the backstory, the flashback kicks in...

After being roughed up by highwayman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), Stoddard, a greenhorn lawyer, resurfaces in a new town and vows to take Liberty on, through due process. Doniphan, the rugged local enforcer (Wayne), would rather settle things his way. Both men pine for Hallie (Vera Miles), but she's smitten with Stoddard; Doniphan tolerates Stoddard for her sake, but obviously wouldn't give him a tumble otherwise.

This is where the movie gets interesting. Stoddard - a consummate weakling and flop as a gunslinger - gains political prestige and respect in the face of an upcoming cattle war, and Valance encroaches further. Eventually Stoddard is forced to accept the bandit's violent proposition, and goes to work on his marksmanship; when the Final Showdown comes, he quiveringly shoots and, to his - and everybody else's - astonishment, kills Valance. Where was the Duke?

While Stoddard is hailed as a hero, we find out: Doniphan is drunk and heartbroken, stumbling around in the house he built for Hallie - his once-intended fiancee. In a revealing tableaux, Wayne stares directly into the camera, lurches forward and, in a rage, hurls a gaslamp against the wall, torching the place.

So we're back to The Searchers: the heroic cowboy, deep down, is just as weak and angry and childish as anyone else. Strong stuff, but not groundbreaking. Stoddard is catapaulted into politics, geared to take on the endless corruption, to tame the west. During the nomination, his opponent pays a cowboy to ride up onstage to rally the crowd, lasso n' all. Stoddard is propped up for having taken care of Valance, but he can't handle the guilt, and flees out of the room.

Doniphan tracks him down and, in strictest confidence, tells Stoddard (and the audience) that, hidden in the shadows, he really shot Liberty Valance - illegitimizing Stoddard's reputation as a violent hero, but preserving his earnestness as a lawman.

Doniphan knows his idea of integrity in action is already anachronistic. It's more important to him that Stoddard keep the truth inside, make Hallie happy, and go on to reform the frontier, even if it means being his reduced to a drunken nobody - which is, of course, what's happened by the time Stoddard arrives for the funeral. The newspaperman tells Stewart: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."

I read this as complementary to (if not defiant of) the antiheroics of The Searchers, to the moral complexity that was growing in popularity even in 1962. Rather than being swallowed whole, alone in the face of the new West, Wayne heroically helps push it into being, sacrificing himself in the process.

Like most Ford/Wayne collaborations, I expected Liberty Valance to be thematic fodder for the scalpels of Robert Altman, Monte Hellman and Sam Peckinpah. But instead, Ford anticipates them: Stoddard (now a legend himself) must live with the ugly underside of his brand of enforcement, the knowledge that Valance's death put him where he is. Can you say Unforgiven? Even if America now has no time for old gunfighters, the country was built by them.