A week almost has elapsed since I saw The Man who Shot Liberty Valance. It is John Ford's last western. I cannot avoid to view it as an allegory about Hollywood and the closing of a glorious cycle: that what later came to be know as classical american cinema.
Cinema had now a big "competitor": television. It was no longer the first public form of entertainment. The small flickering screen in the living room was emptying the large dark room. What was once a ritual occasion became a vulgar thing. Until we arrived at our days where TV is everywhere, making silence run for cover while the vomited refuse concocted by a few media conglomerates is fed in elephantine doses. But I digress, after all I'm using my time to say something about this film: a masterpiece. Furthermore John Ford's view is not bitter. He accepts the new times, and declares himself a member of the old (dis)order.
In the film a freshly graduated lawyer, Ranson Stoddard — played by Jimmy Stewart —, goes west to seek adventure and establish his practice in unchartered territory in terms of the legal system. Before arriving to Shinbone, the dilligence where he travels is assaulted and he makes contact with a typical westerner: an outlaw called Liberty Valance — a superb performance by Lee Marvin. Then the film develops with John Wayne — playing Tom Doniphon — and Vera Miles — playing Hallie — forming the core of this film.
Stewart's character stands for the progress, while Wayne and Marvin's characters are part of a world that is vanishing. The world of the first settlers that ventured into hostile territory and built a life for themselves and their families. Wayne and Marvin are the two sides of the same coin. The coin of adventureness, of audacity, of strength, of violence, of getting of they wanted whithout asking no one for permission. The prototypical westerner. At least the westerner that Ford's films have given us. It's his vision of the West. Is it true? Who cares, like a line that is said in the film, and can serve as an epigram to all of the classical Westerns that Hollywood produced.
Out here in the West when the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
But then an Artist does not reproduces reality: he recreates it.
Ford, Hawks, Huston, Walsh, Vidor, &c, are the Wayne's and Marvin's of film making. While Stewart is the newly arrived director that started in television and that finally arrived to Cinema. Ford might have been cruel, sadistic, and ruthless, but was also someone that took pride in his work, in a sane, primitive, artisan kind of way. Quite removed from the now prevalent romantic attitude of the director-artist. Instead of making a film, they are making a work of art. But when one thing advances, its opposite advances also. In an age where the label artist is used to denominate trash like the one that soils the walls in our cities, and that is labeled as "urban art", to a great painter like Vermeer, the number of reals works of Art is marginal.
The studios were run by excentric tycoons that where interested not only in making money but also in producing something in which they had pride. When the big studios became to be run by managers interested only in $, and removing artistic value of the film producing equation, the classic era had to end. Until then Hollywood was like the Wild West where fortunes were made and lost, were everything was run by strong personalities, just like Valance and Doniphon, that made their own law. Was it not Nietzsche that said that: "justice can only exist among equals"? Doniphon and Valance are equals, they are both outlaws. Valance has decided to be a beast of prey, while Doniphon decided to be a creative child, to use two Nieztschean terms. Both reject the law. Valance despises it and violates it, while Doniphon ignores it, since he is capable of making his own laws. This is all in the spirit of the Western frontier. At least as Ford saw it.
Stoddard has to face Valance in a duel. Miraculously Valance is killed. Stoddard is, a "tender foot", as Doniphon puts it, while Valance is the thoughest man a around..., after Doniphon that is.
Stoddard cannot live with "his" legitimate defense murder, and avoids the honors that the population wants to bestow on him, because of his conscience. In reality Doniphon killed Valance with a rifle, covered by darkness. He reveals to Stoddard when the later refuses to be the candidate of the small settlers to go to Washington to get statehood for the future Arizona. In the scene Doniphon says:
Cold blooded murder, but I can live with it.
This was a race of men that understood that times were changing and accepted that the moment to leave center stage had arrived. Like Doniphon saves Stoddard's life and sacrifices is girlfriend Hallie, that will become Mrs. Stoddard. This is the proof of his nobility of character. Just like Ford understood that Hollywood was changing and his exit moment had arrived. Of course Ford directed films after this one, but the conscience of the changing times is already here. Fords says goodbye to Westerns, and in a certain way to the classical Hollywood. There's no nostalgia, just a truly tragic acceptance of his destin. Like a character in a greek tragedy.
There's no moralistic conclusion. We cannot avoid to admire the utter villany of Valance. Both Doniphon and Valance are amoral characters. Only Stoddard is a moral character. But the way Ford depicts him is ambiguous. On one hand he is a man of law and order. On the other hand he is not capable of fighting his own battles. He doesn't know how to deal with someone that refuses to submit to his scale of values. He wins over Hallie by evoking her motherly protective instincts: he is injured in the duel with Valance and is beaten when the dilligence his assaulted. While Doniphon conquered Hallie by his virility, by his roughness, his capacity for violence, his haughtiness.
A truly wonderful film: a masterpiece wholly recommended. There are those that try to say much and convey little, as are those that say little and convey much. John Ford was one of the later. Liberty Valance is dead: long live Liberty Valance.
