John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which turned 60 this year, is undeniably a classic. Pairing John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart for the first time, it’s the Western that introduced Duke’s “Pilgrim” into the Hollywood firmament and gave the world the irresistible line, spoken by a newspaper editor, “When the legend becomes a fact, print the legend.” And, like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, released a couple years earlier, it found an auteur used to wide, Technicolor canvases brimming with budget relegated to drab soundstages, black-and-white photography, and minimal resources — and emerging with a lean, taut masterpiece.
But what makes Liberty Valance timeless is how it continues speaking to us across the decades, and not always comfortably.
Like the best Ford films — Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, The Searchers — Liberty Valance is a How-The-West-Was-Won myth. And like those films Ford has a central American friction on his mind: the law, and whose idea of it rules the land. On one side is Ransom Stoddard (Stewart), a lawyer from the East toting a carpetbag of law books seeking adventure in Shinbone, a frontier town in what’s likely the Colorado territory. He’s greeted by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a “no-good, gun-packing, murdering thief” who ambushes Ransom’s stagecoach. Upon seeing Ransom’s library, Liberty sneers, “I’ll teach you law. Western law,” then proceeds to mercilessly whip the lawyer for daring to stand up to him and his gang. Between them is Tom Doniphon (Wayne), Shinbone’s white hat cowboy who believes in Ransom’s law but instinctively understands Liberty’s. “I know those law books mean a lot to you,” Tom tells Ransom. “But out here a man settles his own problems.”
In other words, the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Yes this is a Western with a title promising that one man will shoot another dead, but Ford unequivocally rejects that argument as not only self-defeating but un-American. The director knew, better than most thanks to what he saw making documentaries for the Navy during World War II, the fragility of democracy. The world might have been made safe from fascism — but not forever. The work is never over. The defense of American ideals demands ongoing, multi-generational vigilance. The American Experiment is always one variable away from blowing up in our faces.
When Liberty Valance was released in April 1962, in the glow of John Kennedy’s New Frontier, it was a celebration of what makes America great (for some, at least). Everyday people pull together to defy the terrorism of wealthy ranchers who hire murderers like Liberty to scare voters away from the polls; they exercise their franchise; and they opt for statehood and its promise of a brighter future of community and progress. The good people of Shinbone reject the gun and the repressive fear of unpredictable murder and brutality it represents. It’s America triumphant, and it’s rousing (albeit laced with a strain of melancholy).
Watching Liberty Valance today is a wholly different experience. Open your daily paper (if you still have one) or a news website or social media app for all the proof you need that we’re living in a funhouse reflection of the nation Ford celebrated. The political minority rules. The future exists for the super-rich. Equality and justice are vanishing concepts. And our culture has determined that the value of guns is greater than the lives of people, particularly children. Somewhere along the way we acquiesced to fear, allowed ourselves to accept as normal what the New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb rightly describes as the absurd “vision of a society in which firearms are as commonplace as cell phones, and where more guns mean more safety.”
Part of our predicament is undeniably due to elements of the Western mythology, created in no small part by John Ford and John Wayne, and their shallow perversion by shallow men who feel the need to be performatively masculine: the attitude, the swagger, the costumes, the guns. Does it matter that it never really existed? Not when it’s there in our manufactured national imagination, a false history to be mined and exploited. Print the legend.
Ford is far from a perfect artist. His portrayal of Native peoples, especially, is often deplorable. Still, he had an incisive instinct when it came to identifying and righteously condemning threats to the body politic. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is perhaps his most explicitly political film, but Liberty Valance doesn’t shirk from that task. And viewed from our 2022 vantage, the film feels like a from-the-grave condemnation of America’s gun cult, our national absurdity.
Liberty Valance is a fascist, full stop. The only freedoms he recognizes are the freedom to be his supplicant and the freedom to pay for disobedience with your life. In one powerful scene, Liberty and his gang destroy the Shinbone Star’s printing press and beat its editor nearly to death for running a story about Liberty losing an election. It’s Ford pulling no punches in showing what’s at stake in this ongoing civilizational battle. But Liberty’s violence is also aimed at disrupting all democracy and daily life, particularly education. Ransom teaches a literacy and civics class that ends under threat of Liberty’s guns. But despite that culture of fear, the Western territory chooses statehood to, as the Shinbone Star editor says, “protect the rights of men and women, however humble.” Ransom is celebrated as a man of the future; Tom slips into obscurity. The ballot defeats the gun.
The American story is written by people demanding their rights in the face of violent reprisal and possible death — from the American Revolution to the Suffragettes to the Civil Rights movement, from pioneers organizing states out West to countless forgotten local decisions made by communities fed up being under the thumb of repressive politics. That legacy vibrates through Shinbone and its people. And sure it’s only a movie, but through it Ford might as well be asking, “They did it — what’s your excuse?”
To really drive home, that violence is a threat to democracy and its success, Ford does the unthinkable: he strips Wayne of his weapons. At the start of the film, which is told in flashback, Ransom, now a former governor and two-term senator, returns to Shinbone to attend to the now-dead Tom. He looks in Tom’s coffin, sees he’s without his boots and pistol, and demands they be returned. “He didn’t carry no gun, Ranse,” the undertaker says. “He hasn’t for years.” John Wayne? Without a gun? Blasphemy!
Or it could be progress. Or at least maturity. At the start of the film, Tom believes strength comes from packing. When he meets Ransom, recovering from his beating at the hands of Liberty, he urges the lawyer to carry a piece if he wants vengeance. “I don’t want a gun. I don’t want a gun,” Ransom replies. “I don’t want to kill him. I want to put him in jail.” Whenever Ransom makes such an appeal, he’s met with the snark and scorn a naive Easterner deserves. “You can’t shoot back with a law book,” the editor says at one point. And while Ransom wavers, acquiring a gun and confronting Liberty, it’s not the bullets that bring civilization to Shinbone. It’s community organizing, government, and constitutional law. Tom knows this best of all: He’s the man who shoots Liberty Valance. Everyone thinks it was Ransom, giving his appeals to law and order some muscle, and so Ransom gets all the glory. But for Tom — the guns-first gunslinger — gun violence costs him everything he loves and values, including his way of life. And so he renounces guns and all their empty promises.
By all accounts, Ford was something of a bastard — especially to Wayne, who he mercilessly bullied on sets for any number of infractions, real and imagined. And yet so many of his films are imbued with a sense of hope and fervor for creating a more perfect Union. People do bad things, some change, others are punished, and violence is often involved. But in the end, if a better country hasn’t been forged, his characters have all the tools and confidence to build one. And as viewers we’re left grappling with a vision for how our country can be (minus the racism and sexism) and viewing our country as it is.
The chasm between those two points feels wider than ever, and often hopelessly unbridgeable. I don’t for a second believe that sitting our feckless politicians in front of a John Ford movie will rekindle whatever is left of their decency or sense of common cause. If the murders of 19 elementary school kids in Uvalde, Texas, or 20 children at Sandy Hook Elementary, or 14 students at Stoneman Douglas High School, or 10 Black shoppers at a Buffalo grocery store, or any of the more than 1,300 people killed in mass shootings since 2009 can’t rouse their humanity nothing can.
But for the rest of us, a film like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, like all great art, can be a kind of catalyst. It’s a reminder that things have always been hard in America, but hopelessness is a choice. And as naive as it can feel at times, especially in the face of the steep challenge, change can happen. All it takes is standing together as a community, locking arms, saying “No more!” — and voting every last one of the un-American pro-death bums out.
