The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is an awkward film. Some regard it as a classic of its genre, others as a weaker entry in director John Ford’s oeuvre. Though the cast includes much of the familiar Ford “stock company,” somehow the magic of his earlier films is missing. But it did manage to produce a line of dialogue that has become famous (or infamous): “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

The main story is presented as a flashback, wrapped by opening and closing scenes taking place years afterward. The famous line, spoken during the closing scene by a newspaper editor who has just listened to Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) tell the story behind his rise to prominence, implies that what is portrayed in the flashback has been “truth,” in contrast to the “legend” the editor has always believed. But a close viewing of the movie leaves one wondering—what if the “truth” of the flashback is half-truth at best?

For starters, “Print the legend” didn’t come from the pen of Montana-bred Dorothy M. Johnson, author of the short story on which the film is based. When you read the story, it seems that very little of the film script actually did. In the original story, Ransom Foster (Stoddard in the film) is not a passionately idealistic young lawyer revolted by the lawlessness of the West—nor is Liberty Valance the hired gun of faceless cattlemen who are trying to manipulate political processes in their favor through strong-arm tactics. Foster/Stoddard is merely a reckless young man drifting the West, who happens to have read law in the past (that fact is not of major importance in the story) and Liberty Valance is a common outlaw who bullies the tenderfoot Foster because it’s in his nature to do so. In the original story the conflict between them is personal—the political conflict that takes center stage in the film adaptation is wholly a creation of the screenwriters.

In a final bit of irony, in the story Ranse loses his first campaign for public office because the opposition makes much of his having shot a man in a gunfight…instead of immediately riding to glory on the basis of having shot Liberty Valance, as in the film.

Confusion

In my opinion, the film version of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance suffers from what authors today call poor worldbuilding. We’re presented with a cattleman-homesteader conflict, told that the cattlemen are fighting against statehood for the territory in order to preserve the open range, and that the townspeople of Shinbone are strongly on the side of statehood. But from their appearance and various scraps of dialogue, many of them confusingly appear to be cowboys and ranchers themselves. Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), the primary representative of the Westerner in the film, identifies with the homesteader/statehood party, but seems to be a rancher on a small scale himself. (In spite of their fairly rugged appearance, the townspeople also exhibit the chronic inability to deal with intimidating outlaws that we discussed in the last post.) Liberty Valance is our antagonist, but if he has any driving motivation, it seems to be chiefly his own love of cruelty and bullying. Yet he’s been presented as a henchmen of the unseen cattlemen, who are thus identified with him as evil.

Even the ultimate solution to everyone’s problems seems to contradict itself, with Ranse Stoddard being presented as a champion of law and order, but Tom Doniphon’s brand of practical “frontier justice” turning out to be the only thing that can preserve Stoddard’s life, and by extension everything he stands for. If the message is meant to be that both are required, it doesn’t come across very clearly. [Read more…]

The Tin Star is a movie I’ve meant to review in one way or another for some time. Surprisingly little-known, considering its director and lead actors, it’s become a favorite of mine over the last few years.

The film opens with bounty-hunter Morgan Hickman (Henry Fonda) meeting a cold reception as he enters a town to claim his reward for the body of a wanted man. The town’s leading citizens disapprove of bounty-hunters on principle, while brutish town bully Bart Bogardus (Neville Brand), has an axe to grind as a relative of the dead man’s. The only hospitality Hickman receives is from a woman (Betsy Palmer) who is mostly ostracized by the townsfolk because her young son (Michel Ray) is half Indian. But after the town’s young and extremely inexperienced acting sheriff, Ben Owens (Anthony Perkins), witnesses Hickman’s ability to handle troublemaker Bogardus—who incidentally has his own eye on the sheriff’s job—and learns that Hickman was once a sheriff himself, he appeals to Hickman to give him some lessons in handling a gun and properly carrying out his job, in hopes of holding onto it permanently. Hickman reluctantly agrees, in spite of his own scornful attitude towards lawman’s work owing to incidents in his past—and the continued disapproval of the townspeople, who take issue with Owens’ associating with a bounty-hunter. Matters finally come to a head after an instance of robbery and murder, when Bogardus stirs up a mob to serve vigilante justice, against Owens’ determination to bring the guilty men in for a fair trial.

The Tin Star is a very good film—well-acted, well-crafted, and with a neatly-layered script. One of the things I like best about it is the complexity provided by multiple antagonists—on one side, ordinary garden-variety stagecoach robbers; but on the other, Bogardus’ campaign to see them lynched which forms the crux of the climax. It’s complicated even further by the clash between Hickman’s pragmatic views of hunting down criminals and Owens’ stubborn, idealistic determination to bring his prisoners in alive.

But on my most recent viewing, as I watched, I became aware of a growing dissatisfaction with something about the story. Something which didn’t ring true for me, after the time I’d spent immersed in earlier literature of the American West.

The Cowardly Townsman

The leading citizens of the unnamed small town in The Tin Star are a type familiar in Western movies. Town-dwellers, suit-clad, apparently owners of local businesses, they have a strong distaste for anything smacking of irregularity or lawlessness, but an equal disinclination to personally take action about anything. They want someone else to handle the job of maintaining law and order, but offer him little practical support and frequently hamper him by objecting to his methods of doing it. The ultimate example of this type of citizenry is found in High Noon (1952), where harassed town marshal Will Kane (Gary Cooper) tramps the streets looking for somebody, anybody, to help him deal with four outlaws, only to have an entire town hem, hedge, and literally hide to avoid taking anything that looks like a personal risk. [Read more…]