In retrospect it’s shocking that the critics didn’t like John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance when it premiered in 1962. Accustomed to Ford’s trademark action sequences and landscapes, they saw this movie’s introspective, elegiac tone as anticlimactic. The Chicago Tribune even called it “tiresome.” And what to make of the paradoxical line at the end: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”?
In the decades since, of course, Liberty Valance has come to be recognized as a masterpiece, arguably the greatest Western ever made. And now it’s the focus of a recent book: a slender volume by historian Chris Yogerst, published as part of the University of New Mexico’s “Reel West” series of monographs on classic Western movies.
Unfortunately, Yogerst’s book is deeply flawed. Aside from numerous factual, grammatical, and spelling errors, it weirdly tries to force Liberty Valance into the hoary template of Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey” theory. That theory—which holds that all great epics from The Odyssey to the New Testament are framed on a single “archetypical” pattern—was influential enough in Hollywood that George Lucas consciously based Star Wars on it. But Liberty Valance is not about an epic hero’s quest. Still less is it, as Yogerst claims, about “stamp[ing] out” the idea of “rugged individualism.” Rather, it’s a humbler, more solemn tale about the birth of a new kind of individualism—about what it really means, as the U.S. Constitution puts it, to “establish justice” and “ensure domestic tranquility.”
Liberty Valance takes the form of an extended flashback—a reflection by Sen. Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart) about his younger days on the frontier. Although he’s celebrated for having brought law and order to the town of Shinbone by gunning down the savage bandit Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), Stoddard confesses to a reporter that he didn’t actually do that. He first encountered the outlaw, he says, when Valance’s gang robbed and beat him on the highway. Carried into Shinbone to recover from his wounds, he appealed to law and order, but found Shinbone’s marshal too cowardly to arrest Valance. That left the gunman free to terrorize the townspeople with impunity—all except Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), that is.
A solitary, laconic giant, Doniphon had no particular interest in bringing down Valance, but he was sweet on Hallie (Vera Miles), a waitress in the town’s steakhouse. Following the cowboy’s code of honor, he was willing to defend her, and he alone could strike fear into Valance’s heart. The film’s climax comes when Valance, working for a group of wealthy ranchers, tries to obstruct the upcoming convention seeking statehood for the territory. Stoddard, despite having little experience with a gun, confronts him on the street, and in the ensuing duel, it’s Doniphon, hiding in the shadows, who secretly kills Valance just as Stoddard lifts his pistol.
Stoddard gets credit for defeating the criminal, and more: He ends up marrying Hallie and becoming an honored statesman, while Doniphon burns down his cabin and vanishes.
The flashback ended, the gray-haired Stoddard explains that he and Hallie have returned to Shinbone to attend Doniphon’s funeral and lay a cactus rose on his coffin. The reporter to whom Stoddard has confessed closes the story by tearing up his notes—because in the West, you “print the legend.”
As always with the finest Westerns, Liberty Valance works simultaneously as a thrilling action story and a meditation on the meaning of the frontier experience—especially, in this case, on the end of that experience. Widely seen as John Ford’s swan song, the film reflects as much on the director’s own career as a mythmaker as it does on the meaning of “winning the West.”
Born just seven months after Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous lecture about the closing of the frontier, Ford devoted his Hollywood decades largely to Westerns, especially after his blockbuster Stagecoach (1939) made John Wayne into an icon. But where that film unabashedly romanticized the West, Liberty Valance does the opposite. Ford had “told the legend” so many times by 1962 that he was ready now to tell the truth, instead, about the competing forces that gave rise to the American way. Liberty Valance is therefore an elegy about the struggle for—and the costs of—civilization. In short, it’s about the rise of bourgeois values.
The term “bourgeois” originally meant “town dweller.” It thus shares a root with the word “civilized,” which comes from the Latin for “city” (civitas). One who lives in a city is civilized—is a civilian—because he’s not a warrior or a nomad. To live in a city means to surrender some autonomy, and, to some extent, to trust others. A civilian must accept the rule of law and respect his neighbor’s rights. But he exchanges the warrior code of honor, hierarchy, and chivalry for the bourgeois virtues of responsibility, diligence, and thrift. The profits of that exchange are the accumulation of capital, the equal protection of the laws, material and spiritual progress—and education. (After all, you can’t have a university on a cattle drive.) But while city walls promise safety, they can also feel confining. Thus the permanent tension in the American soul between the desire for order, family, and a future on one hand—and, on the other, the wish, as Huckleberry Finn puts it, to “light out for the territory.”
Stoddard, his luggage full of law books, represents bourgeois values in a land still governed by the warrior ethic. This is brilliantly illustrated by a scene in the restaurant where Stoddard, temporarily working as a waiter to earn his keep, carries a steak to Doniphon only to be tripped by Valance. Doniphon orders Valance to pick up the steak, and both men stand staring at each other with their hands on their guns. To Stoddard, the standoff is insane. “Is everybody in this country kill-crazy?!” he shouts, picking up the steak himself and slapping it back on the plate. The idea of killing a man “over one measly steak” seems ludicrous to him.
That very reasonableness, however, makes Stoddard incapable of defeating Valance. Shinbone isn’t ruled by law or reason, but by the will to power, and that comes from the barrel of a gun. When Valance finally leaves the restaurant, Doniphon sneers at Stoddard’s bookish ways. “I wonder what scared him off,” he says. “You made your point,” Stoddard admits. “The gun scared him off.”
But if only Doniphon’s power can defeat Valance, only Stoddard’s law and order can bring the peace, equality, and plenty that the people of Shinbone crave. This is sensitively captured in a scene in which Doniphon proudly presents Hallie with a cactus rose. As she admires it, Stoddard asks a simple question: “Did you ever see a real rose?” No, she replies, “but someday if they dam the river, we’ll have water and all kinds of flowers.” Only the orderly, commercial civilization Stoddard represents can offer Hallie that sort of thing. Stoddard’s bourgeois values may lack sublimity, but they create a world of hearths and homes, in which families can have futures. Doniphon’s wilderness, for all its rough beauty, is something only Übermenschen like himself can enjoy.
Naturally, Doniphon doesn’t like it when Stoddard starts teaching school in Shinbone. Hallie, on the other hand, shows up eager to learn—as does Pompey (Woody Strode), evidently the town’s only black man. Although the film never quite calls Pompey Doniphon’s slave, Doniphon treats him with aristocratic haughtiness. In another ingeniously written scene, Stoddard quizzes his class about the Constitution, and Pompey raises his hand. Standing before a picture of Abraham Lincoln, he stumbles, confusing the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence and briefly forgetting the words “all men are created equal.” Stoddard gently corrects him. “I just plum forgot it,” Pompey apologizes. “That’s all right,” Stoddard answers. “A lot of people forget that part.”
Soon after, however, Doniphon bursts into the room and orders Pompey back to work. “Why have you been wasting your time in here?” he scolds. Like Hallie, Pompey has everything to gain from the establishment of the city and the fruits of civilization. Doniphon, by contrast, can only lose in a world where everyone knows the three Rs. Education even causes Hallie to talk back to him. When he orders her to go home, she snaps, “You don’t own me.”
That’s why Yogerst’s effort to fit Liberty Valance into the same mold as epics like Star Wars or The Odyssey is so misguided. Liberty Valance is ultimately a critique of the ancient warrior virtues that lie at the heart of those stories. Doniphon may be outwardly admirable, but under the skin he and Valance are the same: both wolves. Doniphon chooses to be nice to the sheep, but he remains a predator just the same. “You know what you’re saying to me?” Stoddard says, when Doniphon says that Western men settle their problems with a six-shooter. “You’re saying just exactly what Liberty Valance said.”
Thus the film celebrates the dreams of ordinary people. What closes the frontier, and opens the possibility of a future for the people of Shinbone, is Stoddard’s triumph, however engineered it may be. That triumph is not, as Yogerst claims, a “transcendent” heroic journey, but something both more mundane and more sophisticated: By destroying Valance, Stoddard and Doniphon act out the old political theory of the “social compact”—establishing, by the consent of the governed, a rule of law in place of the vigilantism and anarchy of the territorial state of nature. Together the film’s two heroes obliterate the world in which only giants can survive, thus making it possible for people like Hallie and Pompey to thrive.
“Now, today, have come the railroads and the people; the steady, hardworking citizens; the homesteader; the shopkeeper; the builder of cities,” says a character toward the film’s end. And “to protect the rights of every man and woman, however humble” requires the leadership of those who come “not packing a gun, but carrying instead a bag of law books.”
Doniphon knows well enough that this means his day is over. He vanishes, which proves his noblest act. For the last decades of his life, he keeps the secret about who really killed Valance. On one hand, that’s just pioneer chivalry—as Waylon Jennings sang, a cowboy’s “pride won’t let him do things to make you think he’s right”—but on the other hand, it’s an act of bourgeois decency. After all, Stoddard showed genuine courage standing up to Valance, even if he didn’t fire the fatal shot. Heroism is possible in bourgeois civilization, the movie teaches—but it’s a more nuanced, human heroism than the kind painted with the broad strokes of the warrior’s brush. In the end, legend doesn’t obscure fact, but merges with it into something greater—the kind of civic religion that Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory.” And, as with the Book of Genesis, this creation myth has at its heart the love of a man and a woman. Doniphon’s disappearance is, first and foremost, a gesture of love for Hallie. He goes to his grave knowing that for all his valor, he could never have given her real roses.
