Mr. Smith goes West, rather than to Washington. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an occasionally ungainly, but more often provocative combination of a do-gooder democracy drama like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and a morally muddy cowboy picture like The Searchers. John Ford, who directed The Searchers, returns here and reteams with that film’s star: John Wayne. Set in the desert town of Shinbone, Liberty Valance features Wayne as tough-guy rancher Tom Doniphon, while James Stewart—Mr. Smith himself—takes the lead role as by-the-book lawyer Ransom Stoddard, fresh in town from the East and eager to spread reason and due process across the land. After getting robbed and beaten by the bandit of the title (Lee Marvin, radiating real violence), Stoddard seeks to set up a proper justice system in Shinbone. Doniphon advises him to get a gun instead—and learn how to use it. Decades later, the movie still has the smarts to serve as a flash point for discussions about pacifism, law and order, and the right to bear arms in the United States of America. (An exasperated Stoddard exclaims at one point, “What’s the matter — everybody in this country ‘kill crazy’?!,” a question that resonates just as strongly in 2023.) If the ideas at play in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are more at the forefront than the magisterial compositions Ford is widely known for, the director’s blocking of the actors remains unparalleled, especially given the complicated interpersonal dynamics at play in these cramped frontier rooms. Meanwhile, James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck’s script, based on a story by Dorothy M. Johnson, delivers one of cinema’s immortal lines, uttered by a journalist during the bookend sequence featuring Stoddard, now a respected politician, near the end of his career: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Also starring Vera Miles as the Shinbone waitress who finds herself romantically torn between Stoddard and Doniphon, as well as a cast of Fordian character actors. My favorite among them? Edmond O’Brien, whose loquaciously inebriated newspaper editor could be one of Shakespeare’s wise and noble fools.
(2/22/2023)
