by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Saturday, July 16 — the day Charles and I marched in
the San Diego “LGBT” Pride Parade (I can’t stand those initials even though I’m
supportive of the inclusion of Bisexual and Transgender people in our movement)
— I ran for us and our friend Leo Laurence the 1962 John Ford film The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance. It was John
Ford’s second-to-last film and his last commercial success (though apparently
the song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, written to promote the film but not
used in it and a hit record for Gene Pitney, was a bigger hit than the movie!),
and when it was released it was promoted as the first on-screen teaming of
James Stewart and John Wayne. I was especially interested in having Leo watch
this film because he was one of the pioneers of Queer Liberation in San
Francisco in early 1969 — months before the riots at the Stonewall Inn in New York City that have come to be
celebrated as the birth of Queer activism in the U.S. even though there was a
Queer rights organization as early as 1924 (the Society for Human Rights, based
in Chicago and founded by Henry Gerber) and a continuous history of American Queer activism since Harry Hay
(the real equivalent for the Queer community to Martin Luther King, Jr. and
César Chávez — not Harvey Milk, who came along later and made a major
contribution during his regrettably short life but was not the trail-blazing
pioneer Hay was) and four others founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles
in 1950. Leo is personally bitter that his and others’ “pre-Stonewall”
contributions have been at best slighted and at worst completely ignored in the
“official” histories of our movement, and every time he’s bitched about this
I’ve been reminded of the famous line late in The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance: “When the legend becomes
fact, print the legend!” (It’s become one of the most oft-quoted lines in any
John Ford film, and one Ford biographer even titled his book Print
the Legend.) I don’t think I’d ever seen The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance start to
finish before, though I’d seen clips from it in documentaries about Ford and I
caught the film’s marvelous ending scene at least once on TV.
Based on a story
by Dorothy M. Johnson and scripted by Willis Goldbeck (who also produced) and
James Warner Bellah (author of the story source for a previous John Ford-John
Wayne Western, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance begins with U.S. Senator Ransom “Rance” Stoddard
(James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) returning to the old frontier
town of Shinbone (what state the film takes place in is deliberately kept
ambiguous; the old Citadel Press book The Films of John Wayne stated it was Nevada but it’s not specified in the
movie itself, despite the similarity Charles picked up on between the name of
the film’s state capital, “Capitol City,” and Nevada’s real one, Carson City).
When Charlie Hasbrouck (Joseph Hoover), an inquisitive young reporter for the
town’s newspaper, the Shinbone Star,
meets Stoddard at the train station (Charles inevitably joked that this was the
railroad connecting Shinbone to Thighbone), he begs off of an interview and
finally tells the reporter, “I’m here to attend a funeral.” The funeral is that
of a totally unknown man, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) — though why the writers
spelled his last name so oddly is a mystery, especially since the other actors
pronounce it “Donovan” anyway — and eventually Stoddard agrees to meet with
Hasbrouck and his editor, Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), and tell them the
story of his early days in Shinbone. He went there following Horace Greeley’s
advice to “go west, young man, and grow with the country” — only as he was on
his way through the unnamed territory his stagecoach was waylaid by a gang of
bandits headed by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin in what proved to be a major step
forward on his path to stardom; three years later he would play a dual role in
the 1965 Western spoof Cat Ballou,
one a sober, evil gunman copied from his part here and one a drunken, good
gunman — a character itself parodied as Gene Wilder’s role in Mel Brooks’ Blazing
Saddles — and his Cat Ballou role would make Marvin a major star after he’d been
“typed” as character villains for over a decade). Valance is a total psycho who
carries not only guns but a cat-o’-nine-tails whip, with which he assaults
anyone who particularly pisses him off — and Stoddard, with his lawbooks, his
father’s watch, his $14 and change and his determination to bring “law and
order” to the West, is instantly #1 on Valance’s hit list. Valance not only
steals everything Stoddard has — at one point opening one of the lawbooks and
contemptuously ripping out a chunk of pages from it — he whips him within an
inch of his life, and only the timely arrival of Tom Doniphon saves him.
Doniphon takes him to Shinbone and to Pete’s Place, a restaurant owned by
Swedish couple Peter and Nora Ericson (John Qualen and Jeanette Nolan — he was
a longtime character actor, one of the so-called “John Ford Stock Company” of
actors he liked to use again and again, and she played Lady Macbeth to Orson
Welles’ Macbeth in his marvelous 1948 film of Shakespeare’s play). The Ericsons
agree to put Rance up and give him a job as a dishwasher — for which he has to
wear an apron, an “unmanning” similar to that Nicholas Ray wreaked upon Jim Backus
as James Dean’s father in Rebel Without a Cause — but he still has to worry about Liberty Valance
returning to Shinbone and finishing the job of killing him.
Rance and Doniphon
form an edgy friendship — the sort of thing a modern screenwriter would call a
“bromance” — though they also get into arguments, with Doniphon, like a typical
John Wayne character, arguing that the West is no place for law and lawyers
because it’s a frontier community and men settle their own arguments. “That’s
exactly what Liberty Valance told me!” Rance says in shock. Doniphon is also
dating Hallie, the Ericsons’ daughter, but she loses interest in him and drifts
towards Rance when Rance, shocked when he realizes Hallie can’t read, offers to
teach her and sets up a class for Shinbonites of all ages who want to become
(or make their children) literate. Doniphon convinces Rance that he needs to
buy a gun and learn to shoot to protect himself against Valance’s return, but
when the two go out to Doniphon’s ranch Rance is totally inept at aiming his
gun — Rance misses three paint cans Doniphon sets up as targets and Doniphon
not only hits all three paint cans in succession but does so in a way that
drenches Rance in paint. Valance returns to Shinbone as agent for a group of
cattlemen north of the “Picketwire,” which doesn’t mean a fence but is slang
for the Purgatoire River (a tributary of the
Arkansas), who want to keep the unnamed locale a U.S. territory instead of a
state because that will mean the land will remain open range — while the
homesteaders of Shinbone and other communities south of the Picketwire want it
to become a state so there will be a functioning state government that will
recognize their land titles. Valance and his gang (including a young Lee Van
Cleef, who’d also become a major Western star later in the 1960’s, mainly on
the strength of the so-called “spaghetti Westerns” shot in Italy which also
made a star of Clint Eastwood) crash the election meeting at Hank’s Saloon
that’s supposed to send Shinbone’s two representatives to the territorial
convention in Capitol City that’s supposed to decide whether to apply to the
federal government for statehood. Rance Stoddard chairs the meeting and insists
that the bar remain closed during the election — much to the discomfiture of Shinbone Star
editor Dutton Peabody (a virtually unrecognizable Edmond O’Brien in a role Ford
would have no doubt cast with Thomas Mitchell if he’d been well enough to work
— Mitchell died in L.A. of bone cancer on December 17, 1962). Rance nominates
Tom Doniphon as one of the representatives but Doniphon turns it down, and
eventually Stoddard and Peabody turn out to be the candidates against Valance,
who runs but is disqualified because he doesn’t live in Shinbone. Valance
insults Stoddard at Pete’s Place when he trips him while he’s carrying a steak,
and Stoddard accepts Valance’s challenge to a gun battle even though he hates
the idea of two grown men settling their differences with weapons in the
street.
On the day of the big gunfight (which takes place outside a Mexican cantina and therefore gets scored with cheesily clichéd “Mexican”
music — most of the score is by the usually bouncy Cyril J. Mockridge but Ford
also rips off the main theme Alfred Newman composed for Ford’s Young Mr.
Lincoln 23 years earlier) Valance shoots
Rance in the arm, then shoots the gun out of his hand, then challenges Rance to
pick it up again. Rance fires, Valance goes down and the town doctor, Dr.
Willoughby (Ken Murray) — who, like Peabody and quite a few other members of the
dramatis personae in Ford movies, is a
drunk — pronounces Valance dead and Rance his killer. Valance’s gang members
threaten to lynch Rance for killing Valance, but the rest of the town proclaims
him a hero — only later, after Rance returns in triumph from the convention
that has decided to pursue statehood, Doniphon tells him, “You didn’t kill
Liberty Valance — I did.” It seems that
Rance’s shot went wide and Doniphon picked off the outlaw with his rifle. Rance
tells all this to Shinbone Star editor
Scott and reporter Hasbrouck in the framing sequence, imploring them to print
the story and thereby establish the truth of what happened a quarter-century
earlier — but Scott tears up the notes Hasbrouck took of the conversation and
tells Rance he isn’t going to run the story because “when the legend becomes
fact, print the legend.” On the train leaving Shinbone to take Rance and Hallie
back to Washington, D.C., Rance says that as soon as he finishes work on the
irrigation bill he’s pushing he’s going to step down from the Senate and retire
to Shinbone, and he’s given V.I.P. treatment on the train which he thinks is
for his illustrious service as the state’s first governor, a multi-term U.S.
Senator and ambassador to Great Britain — until the conductor tells him,
“Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.” The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance is a great film despite
some technical sloppiness — Ford either chose not to shoot on his spectacular
Western locations like Monument Valley, Utah (though a couple of stock shots of
Monument Valley’s famous elevated mesa appear as process-screen backgrounds) or
wasn’t given a big enough budget by the studio, Paramount, to do so; and
there’s one scene in which we see the exterior of Pete’s Place through a window
and it’s a matte painting of surprising crudity (Ford’s grandson told
biographer Lindsay Anderson that by then Ford was getting bored with the whole
process of filmmaking and no longer considered it fun — and a similar ennui-driven technical sloppiness impacted Alfred Hitchcock’s
last films as well) — mainly because of its elegiac quality.
It’s a film made
by old men who were all too well aware that they weren’t getting any younger —
James Stewart and John Wayne were both at least 20 years too old for their parts
— and it’s a film that draws not only on the classic Western clichés but on
quite a few other parts the stars, Stewart in particular, had played before:
echoes of Stewart’s characterizations in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (the reluctantly drafted politician), Destry Rides
Again (the Western lawman who’s afraid of
guns) and Winchester .73 (an even
darker film than The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and one I’ve described as “a film noir in Western drag”) appear here. Yet it’s also a film about
the peculiar yin and yang that seems to drive American politics in general and its
attitude towards political violence in particular — as well as drawing on the
same sort of romantic triangle between a woman, a rather bookish man and a man
of strength and power Ford had used in his unsung silent masterpiece Three
Bad Men in 1926 (a little-known precursor
of the “psychological Westerns” that became all the rage — and were considered
so “innovative” — in the 1950’s). In modern equivalents Rance Stoddard is
Barack Obama, convinced that any
threat, no matter how immediate or dire, can be solved through negotiation and
appeals to reason and due process; while Tom Doniphon (as befits the real-life
politics of the actor playing him) is Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush, and
even more his possible successor, Donald Trump, in his conviction that the only way to meet violence is with more violence. John Wayne’s
comment to John Ford on the set of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance that he didn’t want
any ambiguity in his character — “Screw ambiguity. Perversion and corruption
masquerade as ambiguity. I don’t like ambiguity. I don’t trust ambiguity” —
certainly comes from the same place as George W. Bush’s famous remark, “I don’t
do nuance” — whereas Obama’s statements on terrorism both abroad and at home
seem so mired in nuance it’s easy for the Rightists of today to proclaim him
“weak” and say we need a strong, tough hand who will take out the bad guys “by
any means necessary.” (The shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge
have pushed American progressives into an odd position where they want to
condemn the people who kill police officers while also maintaining the
criticism of police officers for the way they treat people of color — while the
Right has no problem: in their view, police officers are good and anyone who
questions their tactics are bad and likely to get them killed.)
After we
watched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Charles said that the film’s politics were “all over the map” — Doniphon may be
the spokesperson for political violence and taking the law into one’s own hands
but he’s also a supporter of civil rights in the scene in which he forces a
reluctant bartender to serve his Black servant Pompey (Woody Strode, whom Ford
tried to make a star by casting him as a Black Civil War officer in 1960’s Sergeant
Rutledge) — and this was true of Ford in
real life as well: he was generally considered a conservative but in the late
1940’s he courageously spoke out against the Hollywood blacklist (of which his
friend and frequent star John Wayne was one of the strongest and loudest
supporters). The opposition of James Stewart as the reluctant warrior and John
Wayne as the enthusiastic one gets even more ironic when you consider that
during World War II it was Stewart who put his movie career on hold, signed up
for the Army Air Corps and flew in combat, while Wayne wangled deferments and
fought his “war” from the safety of Hollywood’s soundstages. The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance was also Ford’s last
film in black-and-white, and explanations for why it was filmed that way vary —
some sources say Paramount regarded Stewart and Wayne as waning stars and
didn’t want to give Ford the budget to make it in color, some say it was a
practical choice because it was easier to make Stewart and Wayne look younger
in black-and-white than it would have been in color, and some say it was an
aesthetic choice on Ford’s part. Whatever the reason, the black-and-white
photography by William H. Clothier adds greatly to the film’s power; Clothier
shot almost the whole movie through a red filter, which gives the sky an
ominous, almost black look against which white clouds are silhouetted
menacingly. Also, it’s unusual for a Western in that a great deal of the film
takes place at night — though it isn’t as relentlessly dark as Winchester
.73 or an even earlier noir Western, Blood on the Moon (1948), it’s clear that instead of opening up the vistas
and locating the characters in great expanses of landscape, Ford and Clothier
were closing them in and confining them to the settlement of Shinbone — oddly
appropriate for a story which presents the urbanization of the West and the end
of the open range as “progress.”
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is full of symbolism, some of it pretty ham-handed and
obvious — it wasn’t enough for Ford to have Woody Strode recite the Declaration
of Independence in James Stewart’s classroom; he had to do so with a photo of
Abraham Lincoln in the same frame — some of it rich and moving (like the
burned-out house Doniphon lived in, which he set on fire — and from which he
was barely rescued — when he realized Hallie Ericson was going to marry Rance
Stoddard instead of him, and which is still standing in its ruined state when
Rance returns to Shinbone for Doniphon’s funeral, and the rose cactus flower
Hallie gave Doniphon to plant in his front yard and which reappears at the end)
— and it’s also a work that contains the “luminous quality” Walter Legge wrote
is often found in an artist’s late work, “as if the creative mind had
already seen the world beyond death and [was] conscious of things infinitely
greater than the emotional experiences of this world.” John Ford never
considered himself an “artist” in that sense and he was openly contemptuous of
people (especially “intellectual” critics) who tried to present him as one, but
he was an artist and The Man
Who Shot Liberty Valance is an odd
summing-up of themes that had been present in his films throughout his career —
as well as being surprisingly innovative in at least one particular: Liberty
Valance himself is an out-and-out psychopath, a trail-blazing departure from
the standard Western tropes. Most Western villains had been rationally evil men
with a specific goal in mind; Valance is willing to hire himself and his men out
to the cattle barons who want to preserve the territory as lawless open range,
but personally he couldn’t care less: like the Joker in the Batman film The
Dark Knight Returns, he’s the sort of
person who blows things up (or shoots them, or whips them) just for the sheer
fun of doing so, and despite the thin veneer of idealism with which ISIS
surrounds itself one gets the impression that a lot of its recruits —
especially the ones in Western countries that are responding to the call to jihad without much, if any, connection to the “parent”
ISIS in Iraq and Syria — are just signing on because they like to kill people
and by pledging “allegiance” to ISIS they can do the psychotic things they’d
like to do anyway with a thin veneer of “idealism.”
