THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE
Directed by John Ford
Written by James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck and Dorothy M Johnson
Starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin and Vera Miles
Released in 1962
Directed by John Ford
Written by James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck and Dorothy M Johnson
Starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, Lee Marvin and Vera Miles
Released in 1962
Does the same technology that has so impacted the nature of movies have an effect on the nature of friendship? Most of my closest friends prefer to use their phones for texting between one another rather than the old method of speaking mouths to listening ears. In spite of the resemblance to reality provided by such alleged innovations as Skype, very few people I know use it on a frequent basis, seeming to prefer the less intrusive private messaging offered by social media. When Spencer Tracy addresses the jury in the movie Inherent The Wind, he makes the point that as our society evolves, we make bargains. In the case of the telephone, the Clarence Darrow substitute tells the jurors, we are able to reach across the miles but sacrifice our privacy. In the early part of my lifetime, it was not uncommon for five or more families to share the same telephone line, meaning that if you happened to be on a call, it was not unusual for the people in the house across the street to pick up their telephone and listen in on your conversation. As a result, information that today would be deemed sacred in its scarcity was in those days common knowledge and not worth one hell of a lot.
As I write this piece, I am fifty-nine years of age. Somehow or other, I have as many friends younger than myself as I do those who are my age or older. I have observed no correlation between age and the use of modern technology. I have friends in their late thirties who may not even know how to send a text message, just as I am "close" to some people older than me who seldom leave their homes, never answer the telephone, and have not been to a movie theater in decades. I have one foot in both camps. I can Skype (God, it's become a verb!), text, private message, just as I can use the telephone in more conventional ways, holler across the yard to the guy next door, and curse at strangers in five different languages. I take some pride in this versatility inasmuch as it was no less a malcontent than Fyoder Dostoevsky who said that man is that rarest of creatures who can adapt to anything. If that worldview is good enough for the author of Notes From Underground, it is good enough for me.
Technology in the movie under consideration tonight, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, may seem irrelevant. In the wild west of director John Ford's America, there were no cars, no telephones, no televisions and certainly no movie theaters. In that America, people traveled across country by stagecoach. Men either owned cattle ranches or worked for someone who did. In Ford's cinematic recreations, women played a support role, stitching up their men when they suffered a cut in a knife fight, cleaning up the blood from the barroom floors, scrubbing the dishes that hadn't been lost in the nightly conflagration. Jimmy Stewart begins this movie very much as a female man, at least in the John Ford-John Wayne sense of the expression. He heads west in a stagecoach where he becomes the victim of a threesome of outlaws who rob the other passengers but decide to horsewhip Stewart once they discover him to be a bookish lawyer lacking experience with a gun. It is Stewart's aim, if he survives the whipping, to bring civilization to the mad anarchy of the west. The big money cattle ranchers are doing quite well, thank you, under an anarchic system and have employed Liberty Valance to make sure the overriding emotion of the townsfolk is fear. Stewart opens up a law practice in the offices of the local newspaper, and, that business being a bit slow, he teaches the kids and their parents to read, write and think. He also holds the fascination of Vera Miles, a spunky young illiterate who heretofore had been the sexual province of our young Mr. Wayne.
We do not discover what Wayne's occupation is in this movie, but he evidences some talent for it in the sense that he owns his own place and employs a black manservant named Pompey. Wayne disappears for brief periods of time, but when he is in town, he attempts to teach Stewart how to be a man. Liberty Valance (possibly the most powerful name an outlaw ever had and in this case played to perfection by Lee Marvin) intends to eventually get around to killing Jimmy Stewart. Wayne makes it clear: Stewart can get out of town--and nobody would blame him if he did--or he can stand up to Valance and most likely be killed for his trouble. One of the big twists as this plot begins to announce itself is that Vera Miles likes John Wayne but she loves Jimmy Stewart. And John Wayne knows this. Yet he tries to help Stewart anyway. When Liberty trips Stewart as the latter is serving up steaks for the restaurant (we are informed that waiting tables is womanly), Valance trips him and Jimmy drops the steak on the floor. It just so happens that the steak in question had been cooked for Mr. Wayne. Big John steps up to Valance and tells him to pick it up. Valance says the western equivalent of "Make me," to which Wayne replies that he doesn't make shit, he burns it. While Valance tries to fathom the colloquialism, Stewart pulls himself off the floor and demands to know why the blue-bloodied hell everyone out here is so all-fired kill crazy.
The showdown between Stewart and Valance does occur after some subtle character development and sexual tension and when it does happen you may figure out the other big twist in the story or you may not understand it until it is spelled out near the end of the film. If you do not get the twist until the end, that might actually be more enjoyable, so don't feel bad either way.
You may have discerned a certain relative primitiveness to the old west in question here. My hunch is that the very isolation of the town where the action is set serves to bring Stewart and Wayne closer together. They both like the same woman, Stewart thinks Wayne is a barbarian, Wayne thinks Stewart is a sissy, and Vera can't make up her pretty little head which of them she wants. Yet Wayne understands that the anarchy which has allowed a few men to prosper at the expense of everyone else is coming to an end and he further intuits that men such as Stewart will be necessary if the west is to survive. Stewart also knows that his own lofty ways of thinking can only be allowed to bloom if they have the protection of self-righteous tough guys like John Wayne.
I think it unlikely that such cognition could establish itself through a series of text messages.
The appeal of the cinematic western--especially a John Ford western and most especially this John Ford western--is how the very primitive societies nurture the human conflict through which people have a chance of becoming better specimens than they otherwise might. It is, then, a living example of romanticizing an era that may not necessarily have been accurately constructed. For instance, it seems unlikely that the most incompetent coward in town invariably wears the sheriff badge, or that one of the supporting characters tends to have a drinking problem, or that there's never more than one attractive woman in town, or that stagecoaches never arrive until somebody needs one. But if we must suffer these stereotypes and conventional devices, it helps to have the baddest man alive be the villain, just as it blows to dust any concerns over historical accuracy (the much-coveted statehood did nothing to suppress the avarice of the landowners) when the truth (rather than the facts) are as gripping as our involvement in the friendship between the two male heroes. As one of the newsmen tells Stewart, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
As I write this piece, I am fifty-nine years of age. Somehow or other, I have as many friends younger than myself as I do those who are my age or older. I have observed no correlation between age and the use of modern technology. I have friends in their late thirties who may not even know how to send a text message, just as I am "close" to some people older than me who seldom leave their homes, never answer the telephone, and have not been to a movie theater in decades. I have one foot in both camps. I can Skype (God, it's become a verb!), text, private message, just as I can use the telephone in more conventional ways, holler across the yard to the guy next door, and curse at strangers in five different languages. I take some pride in this versatility inasmuch as it was no less a malcontent than Fyoder Dostoevsky who said that man is that rarest of creatures who can adapt to anything. If that worldview is good enough for the author of Notes From Underground, it is good enough for me.
Technology in the movie under consideration tonight, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, may seem irrelevant. In the wild west of director John Ford's America, there were no cars, no telephones, no televisions and certainly no movie theaters. In that America, people traveled across country by stagecoach. Men either owned cattle ranches or worked for someone who did. In Ford's cinematic recreations, women played a support role, stitching up their men when they suffered a cut in a knife fight, cleaning up the blood from the barroom floors, scrubbing the dishes that hadn't been lost in the nightly conflagration. Jimmy Stewart begins this movie very much as a female man, at least in the John Ford-John Wayne sense of the expression. He heads west in a stagecoach where he becomes the victim of a threesome of outlaws who rob the other passengers but decide to horsewhip Stewart once they discover him to be a bookish lawyer lacking experience with a gun. It is Stewart's aim, if he survives the whipping, to bring civilization to the mad anarchy of the west. The big money cattle ranchers are doing quite well, thank you, under an anarchic system and have employed Liberty Valance to make sure the overriding emotion of the townsfolk is fear. Stewart opens up a law practice in the offices of the local newspaper, and, that business being a bit slow, he teaches the kids and their parents to read, write and think. He also holds the fascination of Vera Miles, a spunky young illiterate who heretofore had been the sexual province of our young Mr. Wayne.
We do not discover what Wayne's occupation is in this movie, but he evidences some talent for it in the sense that he owns his own place and employs a black manservant named Pompey. Wayne disappears for brief periods of time, but when he is in town, he attempts to teach Stewart how to be a man. Liberty Valance (possibly the most powerful name an outlaw ever had and in this case played to perfection by Lee Marvin) intends to eventually get around to killing Jimmy Stewart. Wayne makes it clear: Stewart can get out of town--and nobody would blame him if he did--or he can stand up to Valance and most likely be killed for his trouble. One of the big twists as this plot begins to announce itself is that Vera Miles likes John Wayne but she loves Jimmy Stewart. And John Wayne knows this. Yet he tries to help Stewart anyway. When Liberty trips Stewart as the latter is serving up steaks for the restaurant (we are informed that waiting tables is womanly), Valance trips him and Jimmy drops the steak on the floor. It just so happens that the steak in question had been cooked for Mr. Wayne. Big John steps up to Valance and tells him to pick it up. Valance says the western equivalent of "Make me," to which Wayne replies that he doesn't make shit, he burns it. While Valance tries to fathom the colloquialism, Stewart pulls himself off the floor and demands to know why the blue-bloodied hell everyone out here is so all-fired kill crazy.
The showdown between Stewart and Valance does occur after some subtle character development and sexual tension and when it does happen you may figure out the other big twist in the story or you may not understand it until it is spelled out near the end of the film. If you do not get the twist until the end, that might actually be more enjoyable, so don't feel bad either way.
You may have discerned a certain relative primitiveness to the old west in question here. My hunch is that the very isolation of the town where the action is set serves to bring Stewart and Wayne closer together. They both like the same woman, Stewart thinks Wayne is a barbarian, Wayne thinks Stewart is a sissy, and Vera can't make up her pretty little head which of them she wants. Yet Wayne understands that the anarchy which has allowed a few men to prosper at the expense of everyone else is coming to an end and he further intuits that men such as Stewart will be necessary if the west is to survive. Stewart also knows that his own lofty ways of thinking can only be allowed to bloom if they have the protection of self-righteous tough guys like John Wayne.
I think it unlikely that such cognition could establish itself through a series of text messages.
The appeal of the cinematic western--especially a John Ford western and most especially this John Ford western--is how the very primitive societies nurture the human conflict through which people have a chance of becoming better specimens than they otherwise might. It is, then, a living example of romanticizing an era that may not necessarily have been accurately constructed. For instance, it seems unlikely that the most incompetent coward in town invariably wears the sheriff badge, or that one of the supporting characters tends to have a drinking problem, or that there's never more than one attractive woman in town, or that stagecoaches never arrive until somebody needs one. But if we must suffer these stereotypes and conventional devices, it helps to have the baddest man alive be the villain, just as it blows to dust any concerns over historical accuracy (the much-coveted statehood did nothing to suppress the avarice of the landowners) when the truth (rather than the facts) are as gripping as our involvement in the friendship between the two male heroes. As one of the newsmen tells Stewart, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
