10 WESTERNS YOU MUST WATCH - Six

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALLANCE
(1962)
Director John Ford

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."


John Ford here takes the themes of taming the west and a nostalgia for the loss of the wilderness. The director explores the bringing of law and order to explore the fearsome cost of civilisation on a way of life. Ford has never been so Freudian.

The film is unusually dark for Ford. On times it's even bitter as it explores the loss of law and order and acknowledges the need for brutality if the law is to be upheld. Sergeio Leone said this was his favourite Ford movie because it was the only time the director seemed to understand pessimism.

Stoddard (Stewert) is an educated Easterner whose political rise was due to the fact that he shot the badman, Liberty Vallance(Lee Marvin). Tom Doniphon (Wayne) is the man who actually did the killing and he did it from concealment, shooting the man in the back. But when confronted with the truth a newspaper man decides that the legend must endure and the killing is credited to Stoddard who did, after all, have the guts to face up to a man he had no chance of beating.

Visually this is unlike a Ford western - the director went for black and white and confined the action to sound stages far from his beloved Monument Valley. In fact so dark is the film, both in theme and texture that it would qualify as western noir.

There are theories that Ford intended this as his farewell to a genre he felt was becoming too violent - the lack of exterior footage was seen as evidence that the director was tired of the western genre and the appearance of a stagecoach in mothballs is an obvious reference to Ford's most famous western.

It's still a brilliantly acted, powerful story and was notable for being the first time Wayne and Stewert were paired on screen. It's an essential western and a brilliant movie in its own right.



TRIVIA:

John Wayne addresses Stewert's character as pilgrim 23 times in this movie.

Liberty Vallance plays the dead man's hand before going out to face Stoddard. Aces and eights is the hand Wild Bill Hickok was supposedly holding when he was shot in the back of the head in Deadwood.