The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Pamela's Nite
Chicken in a wild mushroom and port cream sauce; braised red cabbage; baby Yukon gold potatoes and blue river green beans in a lemon butter sauce. Dessert was blueberry pie and ice cream.
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Grant Tracey Via Images Journal:

But did Doniphon, alone, kill Valance? This question has haunted me for years. If we read the film traditionally and contend that Wayne sacrificed himself and the woman he loves for the good of civilization, making Stewart the somewhat false hero, then the film resonates an elegy for the dead, and the image of Hally’s cactus flower on Tom’s coffin and her own admission to her husband that she put it there sings a kind of sad tribute of lost love. However, what if Stoddard killed Valance? A close return look at the second shooting scene shows smoke wisping from the barrels of both weapons simultaneously. No doubt Doniphon, a tough-guy hero, hit his target, but maybe Stoddard did too. The slim possibility exists that Stoddard could have done the killing without Doniphon’s help. And if that’s the case, then the film deconstructs a traditional garden/wilderness reading and the resounding words of the editor, "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," resonate as ironic fallacy. What if Stewart didn’t need Wayne’s gun, and Wayne didn’t need his self-consuming guilt? Wayne’s decline and debasement were for nothing and that’s a lot darker notion to ponder than the darkness this film already radiates.

Jabberwock observes:

John Wayne and James Stewart were 54 and 53 respectively when this film was made, and one of the standing criticisms of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that they were far too old for their characters in the “flashback sequence” (which is, after all, 90 per cent of the film). Makeup helps to an extent, and one of the most notable things about Stewart’s performance as the young Ransom is how he quickens his reactions and physical movements without making it very obvious. He’s a lot more alert and sprightly than he presumably was in real life (in fact, even as a young man, Stewart’s stock in trade was a shuffling, slow walk and a Midwestern drawl – so this performance, given in his 50s, is probably among his most energetic ever!).

The criticism about age is of course justified from the point of view of verisimilitude, but it’s impossible to imagine this film without these men in the leading roles, for their screen personalities are crucial to its effect. Stewart, a more nuanced actor, was the modern man – vulnerable, complex, unafraid to show a feminine side (in fact, he spends some of the key scenes in this film in an apron, which has led to much critical analysis of gender roles!). This was reflected in the roles he played in middle age, especially in films by Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. Wayne, in contrast, was repeatedly used by Ford in their many films together as an emblem of the Old West – the macho cowboy who survived by his shooting skills. By all accounts, the screen image was not very far from the man’s real-life persona, for Wayne was known to be jingoistic, brow-beating, politically on the far right, pro-Vietnam War, full of notions about what “real men” must be like.

Richard Franklin on Ford vis Senses of Cinema:

Ford's style was one of measured simplicity. His pace is slow, his shots simple and unpretentious. Though it is possible to trace the much vaunted lighting style and deep focus of Orson Welles to Ford's earlier films (cf The Long Voyage Home [1940]), his later Technicolor works are the essence of simplicity - eye level camera with hardly a dolly in sight. Director Andrew McLaglan (son of Ford stock company veteran Victor, who cut his teeth as a Ford assistant) tells an amusing story of how he suggested that there was a good angle from an overhead bridge, for John Wayne's introductory shot in The Quiet Man. Ford simply asked "do you stand on a step ladder when you meet someone?"

Director John Milius describes John Ford's style in terms of the Japanese idea of "conservation of line", saying Ford can do with a couple of "brush strokes" what it takes others six or eight to do. Early in his career, Ford talked about what he called "invisible technique", to make an audience forget they were watching a movie. But later he refused to dissect his work, saying things had to be dead before dissection, and telling young directors like myself only to "make sure you can see their eyes". The impact of an astonishing scene like Tom's farewell to his mother at the end of The Grapes of Wrath is achieved with virtually television coverage. Yet only in Ford would the characters' eyelines intersect at a point somewhere in the middle distance, as if they both see something spiritual.

It is for me in the spiritual that Ford expresses the greatest we can hope our art to be. It is his capacity to mythologise; to ennoble that which might otherwise go unnoticed (like the image of the Philippino extra listening to the announcement of Pearl Harbour, or the "expendable" limping away down a beach, "glorious in defeat", because the artist tells us they were and are).

Orson Welles called John Ford the greatest "poet" the cinema has given us. He is at the very least the US's greatest historian (his films having examined virtually every era from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam) and his landscape surpasses that of say a Remington. His images of the individual dwarfed by this landscape, of family and community huddled against the brutality (and primal beauty) of Monument Valley in The Searchers is unsurpassable. It is not necessarily a true history, but as Ford says in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, "when the legend becomes truth, print the legend".

John Ford was more than a filmmaker. He was a legend.

Ken Bowser on Ford & Wayne via PBS American Masters:

Ford had been a successful director for over a decade when he met Marion Morrison, at the time a young USC student working a summer job on the Fox lot as an assistant property man. He saw something in Morrison and gave the "kid" a few walk-ons in his films. Within two years Morrison had changed his name to John Wayne and Ford, very pleased with the young man's work, recommended him to Raoul Walsh, another director on the lot.

Walsh was about to start one of the biggest films Fox had produced to date, THE BIG TRAIL, and the director gave Wayne the lead. The film ultimately flopped and Wayne's career was quickly relegated to grade C westerns on poverty row. This was a situation many felt Ford could have stepped in to remedy, but over the next decade all the struggling young actor heard was that "Pappy was keeping an eye out for a script that would best suit the Duke," his affectionate nickname for Wayne.

As Wayne's career stalled Ford's roared ahead; he was now one of the biggest directors in Hollywood. But the two men stayed friends -- as long as it was clear who was boss.

During these years, Ford (contrary to popular myth, which portrays him as a simple-minded, flag-waving conservative,) gained a reputation inside Hollywood political circles as a staunch Roosevelt Democrat. Wayne on the other hand had virtually no political opinions -- his focus was on his career and family. The bond between the two men was largely the result of long cruises to Mexico and the Pacific Island chains on Ford's yacht "Araner." These jaunts, where Ford was accompanied by Wayne, Henry Fonda, Ward Bond, and others looked like nothing more than drunken pleasure trips, and for Wayne and the others that's what they were. Unbeknownst to his passengers however, director Ford was spying. Since the mid-thirties Ford had been covertly photographing shorelines and shipping lanes for the American military in preparation for a war many in the War Department felt was inevitable.

It was after one of these voyages in 1938 that Ford teasingly asked Wayne to read the script of his next picture. Could Duke give him "some advice on what young actor might play the role of the Ringo Kid?"
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Being a symbol of America was a responsibility that ate away at Wayne. It was that sense of responsibility combined with his continuing guilt over not serving during the war that drove Wayne deeply into politics.

As the Cold War heated up and the Iron Curtain fell, Wayne began to merge his personal commitment to defending America with his screen persona. And from behind the camera, Ford's vision of his country and his part in how it saw itself was shifting. With THE SEARCHERS, THE HORSE SOLDIERS, and THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE, Ford would use the iconic image he'd helped Wayne create to cast light into the shadows of the country he loved. While Ford's perspective may have grown darker, his love of America, its people and its landscape, never dimmed.