the william brigman jpc award winner : john ford: the man who shot liberty valance

The William BrigmanJPC Award Winner

John Ford: The Man Who ShotLiberty Valance

K E N T A N D E R S O N

JOHN F. KENNEDY ACCEPTED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S NOMINATION AS

candidate for President on July 16, 1960. During his speech thatevening, he said, ‘‘we stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and

paths . . . we stand on this frontier at a turning point in history’’(Slotkin 2). The Frontier of the Old West had been closed sinceFrederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous thesis in 1893, andKennedy and his staff saw the Frontier as a ‘‘complexly resonant sym-bol, a vivid and memorable set of hero-tales—each a model of suc-cessful and morally justifying action on the stage of historical conflict’’(Slotkin 3). Released in 1962, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance ad-dresses the end of Turner’s frontier, just as ‘‘the frontier of the 1960s’’opened; it is director John Ford’s artistic coda and an extended eulogyfor a markedly individual vision of the past, expressed in the form of amemory play, engaging the myth of the frontier on a ‘‘stage of his-torical conflict.’’ Ford described the film to reporter Bill Libby bysaying, ‘‘It was a story full of pathos and tragedy’’ (Peary 101). All ofthe director’s later work could be presented in those terms, and itseemed to indicate that he had passed from the less-tragic expressionsof his early work into a more profound and disturbing eloquence. AfterThe Searchers (1956), his films became traumatic explorations through

The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2006r 2006, Copyright the AuthorsJournal compilation r 2006, Blackwell Publishing, Inc.

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subversive issues. This is what distinguishes Ford’s early and middleperiods from his later work. Sergeant Rutledge, Two Rode Together,The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and Cheyenne Autumn, despite somehumorous moments—which are part of the classic Ford manner,anyway—are more overtly unsettling than his work prior to the middleand late 1950s, utilizing The Searchers as the line of demarcation. Lib-erty Valance encapsulates the spirit of a highly evolved mode of cin-ematic articulation, deconstructing the iconography that Kennedy wasinvoking. It is about myth, which, as Slotkin explains in GunfighterNation, drawing on terms loaded with semitotic understandings, is theuse of resonant ‘‘symbols, ‘icons, keywords,’ or historical cliches’’ (5).Myth ‘‘becomes a basic constituent of linguistic meaning and of theprocesses of both personal and social ‘remembering’ ’’ (5). Through thedirector’s darkly tinged perception, the film develops ‘‘processes of bothpersonal and social ‘remembering,’ ’’ reacting against the fundamentalquestions of meaning that are summed up in the famous line: ‘‘Whenthe legend becomes fact, print the legend.’’ Ford would be best re-membered as a storyteller, a word much more in keeping with his stylethan ‘‘auteur,’’ and he made Liberty Valance because he had something tocommunicate to the audience, through his personal cinematic languageof myth.

In Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford, Scott Eyman alsosuggests that the film is a memory play, citing ‘‘the under populatedsets’’ and ‘‘the archetypes of its characters’’ as his criteria for thesobriquet (490). A more profound understanding of the film can be for-mulated by drawing on the opening soliloquy of the Tennessee Will-iam’s playtext, The Glass Menagerie. Tom, the protagonist and thenarrator, describes a memory play: ‘‘It is dimly lighted, it is senti-mental, it is not realistic.’’ In the same monologue, he states: ‘‘Inmemory, things often happen to music.’’ This functions as an accuratedescription of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The sharply definedstyle of the black and white cinematography, the unadorned sets, theaura of the silent-era, the flashback structure, and the conspicuouslydistinct use of musical accompaniment, all contribute to a series ofcinematic sketches of distant things remembered. Frame by frame,through a process of revelatory remembrance, the narrative is clarified.Liberty Valance begins as a mystery. The audience must wait, as theeditor of the Shinbone Star does, to find out why Senator RansomStoddard ( James Stewart) has come all the way from Washington, DC

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to a small western town to bury a man named Tom Doniphon ( JohnWayne). The implication of the opening and closing sequences wouldseem to be that the story is told through Stoddard. But, as theappearance of several resonant images and a snatch of song suggest, thisis John Ford’s memory play, his reflection on his past achievements as afilm maker and myth maker, brought together with an understandingof his problematic existence as an artist in the 1960s. In ‘‘terms of ideasand feelings,’’ as McBride puts it, in John Ford, ‘‘it is perhaps the mostpersonal and typical of all his films’’ (176). The journey begins as aniron horse moves through a sparse black and white wilderness, trans-porting the audience into a visionary landscape of America’s frontierpast. McBride again, ‘‘We have seen this image in countless Westerns;like a folk song, it releases a flood of memories and associations’’ ( JohnFord 175). John Ford is telling a story. Shinbone is the destination ofthe locomotive, transporting Stoddard and his wife, Hallie (VeraMiles), into town to attend Doniphon’s funeral. They meet a pensiveold man, Link Appleyard (Andy Devine), who helps them to a buck-board. These are the principal characters, brought together by a long-ing for a time that has passed.

Link and Hallie are left alone, and she says, ‘‘The place has surechanged.’’ She notes the school and the church. ‘‘Well, the railroad donethat,’’ Link responds. The Frontier is closed. But, he adds, ‘‘Desert’sstill the same.’’ He knows where she wants to go, ‘‘Maybe. Maybe you’dlike to take a ride out desert way. Maybe look around.’’ Hallie’s voice iscomposed in a touching symmetry of bitterness and sweet reminis-cence: ‘‘Maybe.’’ There is a shot of the buckboard rolling through thebland streets of the town, then, with the gentle ease of nostalgic rev-erie, an eloquent lap dissolve moves the scene ‘‘out desert way,’’ to theburned-out remains of a small house. Amid the ruins, several cactusroses have sprung up. Softly, the Ann Rutledge theme from Young Mr.Lincoln can be heard, as the buckboard pulls up, illustrating with aslight touch the quiet tragedy in Hallie’s suffering heart. In memory,things often happen to music. ‘‘The opening sequences are edited withthe familiar incisiveness of a director who cuts in the camera and hencein the mind’’ (Sarris 176).

Lincoln was released in 1939, and Ford could not have expected theaudience in 1962 to recall a subtle piece of music from over twentyyears ago. Peter Bogdanovich points out that when ‘‘one realizes it isthe same music Ford used after the death of Ann Rutledge in Young

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Mr. Lincoln, its meaning in Liberty Valance is heightened’’ (32). Doniphonis the ‘‘lost love’’ of Hallie’s youth, just as Rutledge is of Lincoln’s (32).Ford would never admit to such a continuity. His response to sucha suggestion would be that he liked the tune. ‘‘Generally,’’ he toldBogdanovich, ‘‘I hate music in pictures—a little bit now and then . . .but something like the Ann Rutledge theme belongs’’ ( John Ford 99).The mood evoked in the theme was important for him; it was hissentimental longing for the past, as much as Hallie’s, that inspired theinsertion of the music. It ‘‘belongs’’ because it exemplifies the emo-tional thrust of the film with an economy of expression that is trulyFordian in its understated and undeniable force. ‘‘The music . . . helpsreinforce the film’s (and Ford’s) deep-seated ambiguity toward the lossof the wilderness and the march of civilization’’ (Stowell 119). There isa deep-felt grief shared between Link, Hallie, and, most significantly,Ford; the director is bound to these despondent people by a commonmemory of dejection and regret that seems to be evoked by the rosesand the house.

Then there is the rugged cactus rose, a significant motif, repre-senting the unsophisticated love offered by Doniphon but never ac-cepted by Hallie. Within the flashback, the initial use of this pricklyromantic offering is as a gift, brought by Doniphon for Hallie. Afterthe flower is planted in the garden, she calls Stoddard over. ‘‘Yeah,it’s very pretty,’’ he says, although he is clearly unimpressed. ‘‘Hallie,’’he asks, ‘‘have you ever seen a real rose?’’ She has not. Someday, shesuggests, maybe they will dam the river, ‘‘then we’ll have lots of water,and all kinds of flowers.’’ Stoddard has recently arrived from the east,bringing with him a bag of law books and a head full of ideals. Hisintroduction to ‘‘western law,’’ is by way of a silver-knobbed whip,wielded by Liberty Valance, who leaves Stoddard thrashed and bleedingoutside of town. Doniphon tells him, ‘‘I know those law books mean alot to you. But not out here. Out here a man settles his own problems.’’He caps his stalwart assertion of individuality by slapping his holster.‘‘You’re saying just exactly what Liberty Valance said,’’ Stoddard ex-claims. He sees Doniphon and Valance as part of the same problem.

‘‘When history is translated in myth, the complexities of social andhistorical experiences are simplified and compressed into the action ofrepresentative individuals or ‘heroes’ ’’ (Slotkin 13). Doniphon andStoddard are codified embodiments of Western values, past and present.Hallie is caught between them, in a position of tension and mediation,


and her yearning for ‘‘all kinds of flowers’’ seems to suggest that shewould like to see the wilderness cultivated. When Stoddard emphasizes‘‘real’’ in his dialogue, he demonstrates his lack of consideration for theuncultivated and unsophisticated West. Hallie had to choose betweenthe cactus rose of a rugged land and the beaming flower of embellishedromantic significance in refined society. She went east, as Stoddard’swife, but her heart remained in the West, in the rough, simple house ofa rough, simple man. The virtues of the wilderness (Doniphon) areconsigned, no doubt with some regret, to the abstract shadows of avaguely remembered and largely unacknowledged yesterday.

Braced by the love story, the social and political evolution of theWest is the ideological narrative within the structure of the film,designating the ‘‘stage of historical conflict.’’ Stowell states that ‘‘Fromthe stories told on film by Ford many issues and problems concerninghuman and institutional values have been raised and settled’’ (147).In Gunfighter Nation, Richard Slotkin, utilizing the terminology ofsemiotics, illustrates that the ‘‘symbolic language of’’ the Myth ofthe Frontier ‘‘is rooted in history but capable of transcending thelimitations of a specific temporality’’ (4). This accounts for its pervasiveinfluence in media, by way of symbols and signs, in every decade forhundreds of years. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is ‘‘rooted inhistory,’’ in the attempt at verisimilitude of an Old West out of thedirector’s imagination, and thematically poised on the ‘‘new frontier’’ ofthe 1960s. It engages the citizens of the time in which it was createdby invoking the ideological dynamics of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, through the semiotics of myth. The love story and touches ofcharacterization demonstrate that, whatever the ideological issues in-volved, the events are firmly imbedded in the rich clay of humanity. AsBogdanovich quotes Orson Welles, ‘‘John Ford knows what the earth ismade of’’ ( John Ford 110).

The civilization of the West was inevitable, and these characters arehumanized embodiments of essential values emerging on two frontiers,that of the 1960s and that of the old west. The conflict betweenRansom Stoddard and Tom Doniphon, taken together with the debateover statehood, demonstrates and engages Theodore Roosevelt’s credo,as put forward in his essay, ‘‘The Manly Virtues and Practical Politics’’:

If we wish to do good work for our country we must beunselfish, disinterested, sincerely desirous of the well-being of the

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commonwealth, and capable of devoted adherence to a lofty ideal;but in addition we must be vigorous in mind and body, able to holdour own in rough conflict with our fellows, able to suffer punish-ment without flinching, and, at need, to repay it in kind with fullinterest. A peaceful and commercial civilization is always in dangerof suffering the loss of the virile fighting qualities without which nonation, however cultured, however refined, however thrifty andprosperous, can ever amount to anything. (Dippie 20)

Ideals are as necessary as a fighting spirit wrapped in a callous hide.Stoddard clearly wishes to ‘‘do good work,’’ as his unselfish behavior inthe face of the brutal Liberty Valance testifies. During his initial en-counter with Valance, he defends an old woman, and he is whipped forhis trouble. Stoddard challenges the validity of Valance and Doniphon’s‘‘western law,’’ which amounts to rule by strength, by toughness. Yet,while Stoddard is ‘‘vigorous in mind,’’ it is Doniphon who exemplifiesthe rough manliness that Roosevelt delineates as meaning, ‘‘able tohold our own in conflict with our fellows, able to suffer punishmentwithout flinching, and, at need, to repay it in kind with full interest.’’The ‘‘virile fighting qualities’’ necessary for a nation’s survival aretransferred to Stoddard when Doniphon shoots Valance, so that thelegend of the man who shot Liberty Valance becomes the underpinningof the logical progression from Frontier to present day that Rooseveltbelieved in.

Slotkin notes that Roosevelt understood, ‘‘the industrial/urban orderof the present [as] the direct, logical, and hence desirable outcomeof a frontier past’’ (35). The author also discusses the literature thatRoosevelt was drawing on, such as the works of James FennimoreCooper, and indicates that there was a ‘‘schematic form’’ to that genrewhich often demonstrated an alliance between an ‘‘ ‘old hunter’ ofplebian origins and a well-born natural aristocrat’’ (35). And, after1860, the ‘‘dime novelists who developed the Cooper formula’’ fusedthe socially disparate figures into one man (35). Liberty Valance un-dermines the ‘‘outcome of a frontier past’’ by suggesting that it is builton a lie, and it confronts the Cooper formula by complicating the‘‘schematic form,’’ and it does so on Roosevelt’s ground. Ford is makinga statement. The director can be freely associated with both Doniphanand Stoddard, but his sympathies are with the old shootist, who is nota fusion of the aristocrat and the frontiersman, and who is the basicfrontier hero only superficially, being ideologically complex. Both


Cooper and Ford, however, experienced an inglorious fate toward theend of their careers. Grant indicates that ‘‘the two artists moved froman initial optimism about America and democracy toward an increas-ing doubt and disillusionment’’ (208). And as Doniphon is left to anobscure end, much like Natty Bumppo in The Prairie, cast away by anation’s progress, the film contradicts Roosevelt; the ‘‘virile fightingqualities’’ need not be fact, as long as there is a legend to print.

Ford was not distracted by historical or political issues; he needed tosimply and viscerally engage the audience, whatever else he may haveintended, and in Liberty Valance this was especially necessary. Two of hisfilms from 1939 are inter-textually related to this discussion. Young Mr.Lincoln has a central character who is famous for reducing potentiallycomplex legal matters into rudimentary, down-to-earth problems;there was no need for the verbose articulation of dense terminology, ‘‘Imay not know so much of law, Mr. Felder,’’ the young Abe Lincolndeclares to the prosecutor, ‘‘But I know what’s right and what’s wrong.’’Stagecoach also exemplified Ford’s desire for simplicity. Ringo ( JohnWayne) is the quintessential Ford outlaw hero, an unsophisticated manwho could see what needs to done and do it, without excessive talk, andwith a lucid determination to act, as when he simply, yet elegantly andrespectfully, woos Dallas (Claire Trevor), ‘‘Look, Miss Dallas . . . I stillgot a ranch across the border—it’s a nice place—a real nice place –trees – grass – water—there’s a cabin half built. A man could livethere—and a woman. Will you go?’’

Tom Doniphon is the last and most poignant of the Ford Westernheroes portrayed by John Wayne, a line of men initiated by the RingoKid. The rugged, surly Doniphon bears an aged resemblance to old-time heroics, and the film itself is haunted by the director’s recognitionthat times have changed. The filmmaking process was, for Ford, a kindof purification ritual, a regeneration through the artful creation ofmyth. ‘‘When I come back from making a Western on location, I feel abetter man for it’’ (Peary 48). It was the process he loved, more than theresult. Liberty Valance was made almost exclusively on a sound stage,and that invests it with a disquieting significance, when one realizesthat the situation, along with the black and white photography, was aconscious choice made by the director.

The elegiac quality of the film is beautifully evoked in Hallie andStoddard’s arrival at Doniphon’s wake. There is a shot of the trio as theymove down a cramped alley, followed by a view of the old caretaker’s

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shop. It is a room filled with fragments of archaic equipment. Theyhave walked into a graveyard for the discarded emblems of the past.In the back room, there is a bare wooden box. Stoddard glares at thecaretaker, Clute. ‘‘County’s gonna bury him ya know,’’ the old manexplains, ‘‘Gosh, I ain’t gonna make a nickel out of it.’’ The irony isbitter; Tom Doniphon, the once mighty signifier of Western fortitude,and the man who handed Stoddard his career—and his wife—is now aninsignificant relic in a crude coffin. Also present is an elderly blackman, Doniphon’s longtime companion, Pompey. The stillness andsilence seem sacred, as if these people are united in an unspokenacknowledgment of an esoteric guilt. Stoddard looks into the simplecoffin and reacts with disgust. ‘‘Where are his boots?’’ Clute has re-moved them; they were almost new. ‘‘Put his boots on, Clute. And hisgun belt. And his spurs.’’ He is stripped of the emblems of his existence.

The meaning here is destabilizing; the established myths of theAmerican experience in the Old West are being reviewed by a skepticaleye, and the implications for ‘‘the frontier of the 1960s’’ are notpromising. ‘‘Stoddard, Hallie, and Link Appleyard are all haunted, andeverything has changed, changed utterly, except the desert. Everyonehas gotten what they wanted, and nobody is happy. Welcome to thetwentieth century’’ (Eyman 491). The death of Tom Doniphon issomething more than the end of a man’s life; he was a representation ofvalues now lost in the dust, left to the desert, and useless to theprogress of a rapidly industrializing civilization. The narrative frameestablished in the opening sequences of the film sets the emotionalbraces for a grim rumination on the shadowy morality of America’spast, and its present, in 1962, as viscerally experienced within thecontext of a love story.

When the editor of the Shinbone Star interrupts the wake, heinitiates the unfolding of a legend. In Sarris’s words, ‘‘The mood ofirrevocable loss and stilled life becomes so oppressive that the editor(and the audience) demand an explanation’’ (177). ‘‘Who was TomDoniphon?’’ the editor bluntly asks. Stoddard decides to give them thestory, and we see him wandering about the caretaker’s workshop. Henotes an old stagecoach, sitting without its wheels and covered in thicklayers of dust and cobwebs, forgotten and useless. It is John Ford wehear when Stoddard says, ‘‘The first time I came to Shinbone, I came bystagecoach. A lot like that one right there. Could be the same one . . .Could be the same one . . . Overland Stage line—I think it is the same


one.’’ Shinbone is a mnemonic microcosm of the Western genre and itsmyths, as abstracted and/or represented in Ford’s career. Stagecoach, inwhich he arrived, fully and maturely, as a Western film maker in 1939,is powerfully evoked by the humble relic in the room. It was this filmthat moved beyond the underdeveloped characteristics of what hadbeen the frontier adventure genre and introduced the world to the JohnWayne. Ford and Wayne rode the Western into prominence. The coachindicates the film that inaugurated Ford’s dream of the Old West in thesound era. And the name of the coach line visible on the conveyance inStagecoach is the same on the coach in the caretaker’s shop in The ManWho Shot Liberty Valance: The Overland Stage Line. Stoddard’s lines pointit out. The director has come full circle. And he has come to a hard andsad end.

Ford captures a sense of this after the fateful Saturday night show-down with Valance at Peter’s Place; Doniphon leaves, stepping out thebackdoor as is his habit, and Hallie rushes over to see him go. There isa cut to an exterior shot, with Hallie back in the depth of field, framedagainst the light in the kitchen door, as Doniphon walks into thedarkness, toward the camera, moving off to the right of the frame. Thisshot is representative of the dark historical obscurity that has uncer-emoniously subsumed the Western hero, the genre, and the director.Tom Doniphon will ride away, much like Ethan Edwards and theRingo Kid (and Ford); although all three are distinct characters withseparate motivations, their significance as symbols is fundamentallyidentical, due, in part, to the fact that John Wayne portrayed all ofthem, directed by John Ford. Each man is a loner. Ethan attempts towalk into a domestic scene, but his presence is more disruptive thancongenial, and the familial ties do not bond quite so well because he isin love with his brother’s wife, and he is an inveterate racist. Ringo isgood-natured, without a family, and fixed on revenge, but the latterquality is unmixed with the baser matter of racism. On his encounterwith the stagecoach, he yells up to the driver: ‘‘Hiya, Buck—how’syour folks?’’ He says this just after we have been privy to a demon-stration of his skill with a Winchester, the gun that won the west. TomDoniphon is likewise generous, although with a harder edge. He is acallous, more experienced version of Ringo. Doniphon has no family;there is not even an allusion to one. He is the last of his kind. Ethanmust be expelled from society, as must Tom Doniphon, and Ringo fleesfrom it, running off with Dallas, after having rid a community of three

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notorious outlaws. They are necessary, and are endured, even accepted,but only as long as threats like Scar, Liberty Valance, and Luke Plum-mer menace order and prosperity. ‘‘In The Searchers, as well as LibertyValance, the kind of men needed to master the wilderness are the kindof men than can only function in wilderness; they are men who civ-ilization must expel’’ (Eyman 492). The same is true in Stagecoach;Ringo and Dallas are ‘‘saved from the blessings of civilization,’’ ridingaway from the community, into the wilderness. They do it because theywant to, but also because their outsider status (shootist and prostitute)makes it necessary.

There are also extra-diegetic implications in the shot of Hallielooking on as Doniphan walks into the night. It is notable that in 1939Ringo is sent on his way with a beautiful woman and celebratoryfarewells from Doc Boone and the sheriff, Curly. Even Wyatt Earp, inMy Darling Clementine, has his ‘‘lady fair’’ to look after him as he ridesinto the desert. But the last time we see Doniphon, he is wandering offalone, bitter and lovelorn. While Ford was riding at a steady gallop in1939 and throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, he could stillpermit himself to indulge in endings that were not explicitly tragic.Fort Apache ends with irony that may well be tragic, although notovertly so, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande do not havetrite resolutions, but they are not tragic. In Young Mr. Lincoln, which isnot a Western, but must figure in a discussion of Liberty Valance, theresolution is haunted by a sense of tragic destiny, but without an overtdemonstration of pathos such as we find in the Westerns after TheSearchers.

When the door closes on Ethan Edwards, it is John Ford who isbeing left to ‘‘wander forever between the winds.’’ In the initial shot ofThe Searchers, a door opens onto the vast, picturesque landscape of theWestern Frontier, out of which rides a man who is as much savage ascivilized, the kind of rough and ready indelicate individual who hassometimes been necessary for Roosevelt’s progress. By the end of thenarrative, having witnessed Ethan’s brutality and hate, it becomes clear,not only to Martin Pauley, but to the audience, that this kind of manis a destabilizing pariah and must be excluded from society; he isdestructive and intransigent, and he knows it. ‘‘Ford may celebrateAmerica’s history and values, but he also articulates the contradictionsthat can easily lead to a mournful pessimism’’ (Eyman 492). The doorcloses, on the man, on the genre, and on the director. ‘‘Always, Ford


lingered over the man deserted by time and tide because he knew thatit happens to everybody—even film directors’’ (Eyman 564).

The Searchers marked the beginning of the traumatic subversion ofthe mythic West and the essential themes on which it is founded. JohnFord’s dream becomes a nightmare. After the hard-driving Ethan Ed-wards rides away, he leaves in his wake the wind-blown desolation ofthe director, whose later Westerns become commentaries on his pre-vious films, as they redefine the essence of the genre, and, in doing so,reappraise his sense of America’s past. Ethan Edwards embodies theworst aspects of America’s late frontier period and the best hope forhumanity. This is the contradiction that is resolved as Ethan raisesDebbie (Natalie Wood) in his arms. Savagery is expiated in a catharticrush, generating intense familial devotion, after Ethan has scalped Scar.This film grows in popularity and importance from decade to decade,largely because of the emotional grandeur of this disturbingly complexindividual. And the search for Debbie is played out with expressionistinsight against the mighty wilderness of Monument Valley. There iswhat McBride called ‘‘an epic detachment conveyed by the vast aerialviews (there are many more high-angle shots than is usual in Ford)lending an almost supernatural aura to Ethan’s quest which is denied tothe more prosaic characters of the other Westerns’’ ( John Ford 148).The stunning cinematography of Winton C. Hoch helps develop thenarrative in keeping with its broader implications beyond the simplestory of an abducted girl and the men who sought to rescue her.

When The Searchers is viewed alongside The Man Who Shot LibertyValance, the two films become complementary perspectives on not dis-similar themes. The kind of men, and women, necessary to the build-ing of modern American society, and the conflicts they endured, arepresented in the wilderness in lavish color and vibrant action in theearlier film, and in subdued, somber lighting amid an oppressivelyconfined frontier town in the latter film. For American society’s valuesto be affirmed, the Western hero, Ethan Edwards, must come to termswith his racism and kill himself, in killing Scar. Tom Doniphon mustdestroy himself, in killing Valance, to make it possible for Hallie tomove on and for Stoddard to become the vanguard of the new West.What we see in Ford’s treatment of these dubious heroes and theirvicious antagonists is an illustration of a critical aspect of myth, asdefined by Slotkin in Gunfighter Nation, ‘‘. . . symbolizing [a] society’sideology and . . . dramatizing its moral consciousness—with all the

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complexities and contradictions that consciousness may contain’’ (5).‘‘John Ford believed in America and he believed in the future, evenas he mourned the past’’ (Eyman 564). Ford is struggling to reconcilehis dream of the Old West with the modern world, its legends, and itsfacts. Legend and fact produce myth. Ethan’s rage and his racism andMartin Pauley’s mixed pedigree and more accepting nature are em-blematic of social discourses evolving in the ideology of modernity.And Tom Doniphan shooting Valance from the shadows in order topreserve the life of the idealist demonstrates a metaphoric understand-ing of the fundamental discrepancies that are possible between legendand fact, particularly in the modernist era. Peter Bogdanovich placesLiberty Valance in the social context of 1962 as follows:

Released the same year Marilyn Monroe died, and one year beforethe murder of John F. Kennedy, it is a deceptively simple Westernwhich concludes, metaphorically, with a U.S. that has buried itsheroes in legends that are false, that has built out of the wildernessan illusory garden and left us longing for the open frontiers andideals we have lost. (11)

McBride points out that the darkly obscured shooting of Valanceanticipates ‘‘the ambiguities surrounding the following year’s assassi-nation of President John F. Kennedy’’ (633). There is terrifying pro-phetic potential in the film, in its two-ply time and place. Thelingering melancholy in the story seems like a palpable expression ofthe epic loss of faith in established institutions that would accompanythe many disillusioning episodes in the years following its release,especially the Vietnam War, which seemingly exposed just how ‘‘il-lusory’’ America’s grand and forceful frontier mythology had become;ideals died hard and brutal in the jungles of Southeast Asia. In A Rumorof War, Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo states that the soldiers ‘‘carried,along with our packs and rifles, the implicit convictions that the VietCong would be quickly beaten and that we were doing somethingaltogether noble and good’’ (xiv). He maintains that, like most of themen in the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade, he had been ‘‘seduced’’by Kennedy’s inauguration speech and the general air of Camelot thatpervaded the dawning years of the 1960s. However, Caputo states, ‘‘wekept the packs and rifles; the convictions, we lost’’ (xiv). Legends havealways been printed, and they began to look false, in a war that sawthe development of the term ‘‘John Wayne syndrome,’’ one of the


‘‘war-related stress disorders’’ that was distinguished by a soldier hav-ing internalized an ideal ‘‘of superhuman military bravery, skill, andinvulnerability to guilt and grief identified at some point with JohnWayne’’ (Slotkin 519– 20). The disillusion with the Wayne ideal is notspecific to any one performance or film, but to the icon, the ‘‘figure ofspeech’’ that he embodies (520). The legend has been printed, andbelieved, and it becomes the basis for a deep bitterness when it isexperienced as fact. The demystification of idealism that was so prev-alent in the 1960s is being explored in Liberty Valance.

Ford’s Westerns are vibrant portrayals of humanity, narratives ofconflicted desires, racial anxiety, martial discipline, and lost love, ex-pressed through his dream of the Frontier. And these extended revelriesare defined in the unquiet imagination of a director who celebrated thegenuine tenderness and loyalty of the human condition, but who alsorecognized the ineffable sadness, loss, and brutality inherent in theevolving social contexts of both the diegetic and extra-diegetic worldsin which he worked. This full understanding is not just part of thenarrative drives in his films; it is also apparent in Ford’s choice oftechniques. Andrew Sarris notes a visual dialectic that began, accordingto him, in the silent period, and is explicit in films ‘‘stylistically op-posed’’ like Four Sons and The Iron Horse, two features that ‘‘happen toconstitute in their obvious oppositions a visual dialectic in Ford’s stylewhich was to remain unresolved to the end of his career’’ (31). It is a‘‘dialectic of day and night, sun and shadow, Manifest Destiny andImplacable Fate’’ (31). His dream was always conflicted, torn betweenF. W. Murnau and D. W. Griffith, and no film demonstrates the powerof that contorting duality better than The Man Who Shot LibertyValance.

In Searching for John Ford, Joseph McBride quotes the director asfollows: ‘‘I have been called the greatest poet of the western saga. I amnot a poet. And I don’t know what a western saga is. I think it’s allbullshit’’ (Introduction). Protracted and congenial conversation wasrare, but it did happen. Bill Libby’s 1964 interview, published inCosmopolitan, and reprinted in Gerald Peary’s recent compilation ofinterviews, is strikingly garrulous, and Peter Bogdanovich, whosebook, John Ford, is a landmark, has noted in Who the Devil Made It that‘‘contrary to the image he generally tried to project—‘hard-noseddirector,’ grizzled, terrifyingly powerful in his calm presence; in hisanger, annihilating so’’ he could be swayed into relaxed reminiscence (4).

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Andrew Sarris notes in The John Ford Movie Mystery that ‘‘Ford is him-self a legend, and the discrepancies that keep popping up in his variousbiographies may never be resolved’’ (11). Sarris also notes, ‘‘we seek outthe man because of his movies’’ (12). An artist’s work is a fusion ofsubconscious impulses and influences and conscious drives and willinevitably say more than can ever be drawn from an interview. Weshould seek out the man in his movies. In doing so, an appreciation ofthis most confounding of personalities is possible; the images will saymore than his words. Ford was a rough-hewn individual, a film makerwho imbued the expression of his celluloid fascination withan intense personal vision, and the hell with what anyone thoughtabout it.

His career as a director spanned five decades, from the two-reelescapades with Harry Carrey beginning in 1917 to his final featurefilm, Seven Women, in 1966. In that time, he won six academy awards—two for his World War II documentaries, four for feature films—, wasnominated for many more, won four New York Film Critics awards,and was the first recipient of the American Film Institute LifeAchievement award. None of his Westerns ‘‘earned’’ an academy award,and it is for these that he is primarily remembered. He never shiedaway from the association. The affiliation is today, as it was then, amixed blessing. As Sarris puts it, ‘‘. . . to the critics of his time andafter’’ Ford appeared ‘‘as a grizzled old prospector who lost his way outin Monument Valley’’ (124). Peary notes that Ford ‘‘is, for the public,a forgotten man. Young people, including film students, haven’t seenFord’s movies, and seem uninterested in going back and catching up’’(xi). Unfortunately, this is not a rare experience. In the introduction tohis mammoth biography of Ford, McBride notes, ‘‘I was shocked acouple of years ago when I asked a film teacher at a leading Californiauniversity what she thought of Ford, and found that she had never seenany of his movies. This was not an isolated instance’’ (12). While manyprominent film makers of today, and yesterday, the world over, admireand seek to emulate Ford, McBride notes that he encountered ‘‘blankstares’’ when he mentioned him to people outside of the film business(12). Directors such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and GeorgeLucas regard Ford as ‘‘one of their masters,’’ and Sidney Lumet has said,‘‘There’s one general premise: almost anything that any of us has doneyou can find in a John Ford film’’ (Searching for John Ford 707). Andacclaimed Japanese film maker, Akira Kurosawa once said, ‘‘From the


very beginning I respected John Ford. I have always paid close atten-tion to his films and they’ve influenced me’’ (Spittles 3). Some whostudy these artists do not even know Ford’s films. As McBride states,‘‘Something is drastically wrong here’’ (12).

Like Doniphon, Ford is being unceremoniously buried in obscurity,despite his vast contributions to cinema. It is for this reason that theelegiac impact of Liberty Valance is most poignantly felt in the portrayalof Tom Doniphon, who could not have been a complex nexus of OldWest values played by anyone but John Wayne; it is appropriate that inthe funeral parlor both he and the dusty stagecoach are located neareach other, and that both are displayed as outmoded images, stripped ofsignificance and left to rot. ‘‘The films Ford made between 1948 and1966 seemed out of time in their own time’’ (Sarris 124). He wasalways ahead of his time, and visionaries rarely prosper. Ultimately, justas it is Tom Doniphon who pulls the trigger, it was John Ford whoshot Liberty Valance, and, like the quintessential western hero he cre-ated, and the genre he established, he found himself, toward the end ofhis career, displaced by the rapidly advancing evolution of Americancinematic culture. In 1969, Claudine Tavernier reported, ‘‘I hear him(Ford) repeat a few times like a wounded animal, ‘It’s over. They won’tlet me make any more films.’ I don’t want to hear that sentence any-more. But he repeats it again and again. ‘They won’t let me make anymore films’ ’’ (Peary 101).

From 1939 to 1962, his Westerns illustrate his wistful discernmentof values in shifting historical contexts, animated with humor, enrichedwith pathos, and conveyed with an undeniable warmth. In ScottEyman’s words, ‘‘film by film, Ford was beginning to create a livingtapestry of the great American legend of the West’’ (316). But thisshould be qualified, the tapestry is Ford’s great American legend of theWest. He once said that ‘‘it’s time those of us who make Westerns, orgo to them, or enjoy them in any way, stopped ducking into dark alleyswhen the subject is brought up. It’s time we spoke up’’ (Peary 47). It istime for those of us who enjoy and admire Ford films, and especially hisWesterns, to speak up. In The Glass Menagerie, during the concludingmonologue, Tom says that ‘‘time is the longest distance between twoplaces.’’ The greatness of Ford is the true magic of cinema, with aseemingly effortless fusion of form and content, transporting the au-dience into the landscape of an authentic individual dream, augmentedby memory, across the immeasurable distance of time. Frederico Fellini

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eloquently addressed Ford’s verite, ‘‘When I think of Ford, I sense thesmell of barracks, of horses, of gunpowder’’ (Eyman 561). And OrsonWelles stated, ‘‘With Ford at his best, you feel that the movie has livedand breathed in a real world’’ (Estrin 105). The Man Who Shot LibertyValance is a historical testament of deconstructive meanings, and JohnFord is at the center of them all, as storyteller, as poet, and as subject,looking back on his country and into his work.

In the film’s final sequence, Stoddard and Hallie are in the train,going back east. She mentions how the West was once a wilderness, butnow it is a garden. She asks her husband, ‘‘Aren’t you proud?’’ He doesnot respond. Stoddard asks her who put the cactus rose on Tom’s coffin.‘‘I did,’’ she says, finally, simply. Still struck by the brutally insignif-icant end of Tom Doniphon, he attempted to ascertain whether or nothe is the man Hallie truly loves. He has suspected she was the one whoput the rose on the coffin. Now he knows. Not only did he lose thewest, as a politician, but he lost his wife’s heart, as a man. This is one ofthe bleakest endings in film history; it subverts our well-cultivatedexpectations, which have been nurtured by our awareness of genreconventions, and it gives affective meaning to the kind of deconstruc-tive understandings that begin to form and solidify in the 1960s. Fordis showing us the fact behind the legend, and implying the profoundcontradictions inherent in the moral consciousness of a nation, and aman, as well as himself, as a director of westerns.

Tom Doniphon is not given a place in history, except in the minds ofa few; Ransom Stoddard’s lie is validated, as the editor of the ShinboneStar crumples up the truth and tosses it into the fire. Hallie marriedinto modernity, but she belonged to the past, with Doniphon. Love,like the truth, is left to the desert, and both have only a cactus rose tosuggest their passing. The last time the coffin is shown, the camera isplaced in front of it, the cactus rose on top, in the center of the frame,and Stoddard, leaving the room, is visible in the background, lingeringfor a moment, standing with the door ajar, looking—across his shoul-der, not directly—at the rose, with Hallie positioned behind him, backin the depth of field. As the door closes, the camera moves in on thesturdy flower. John Ford’s career as a maker of Westerns, all of histhemes, his deep sense of devotion to stories a public no longer wantsto hear, all of his life and the depth of his feeling, his despondenceand his pain, are solemnly articulated in that moment. This setupdeeply impresses the feelings of these people, and the director, on the


audience, while also forcing the cactus rose into prominence to such anextent that it seems almost to be superimposed over the last scene,Hallie and Ransom leaving for the east. It was not until July 1998,twenty-five years after his death, that a tribute of any kind was made toFord in his hometown, Portland, Maine. And, even then, the sponsorwas a Louisiana woman, Linda Noe Laine. She commissioned a bronzestatue of the director (Searching for John Ford 28). The work was firstoffered to the Portland Museum of Art, but it ‘‘was not sufficientlyimpressed by Ford’s credentials’’ (Searching for John Ford 28). Stoddardwas not sufficiently impressed with Doniphon’s credentials, and, itseems, neither was Hallie, not until his death.

There is more than a cactus blossom to mark his passing, but hislegacy remains neglected, although remembered and even cherished bya few. When Stoddard is stopped in the middle of lighting his pipe bythe conductor’s exclamation that ‘‘nothing’s too good for the man whoshot Liberty Valance,’’ the thematic power of the narrative is channeledinto an ironic statement on the career of the director and the state of hisbeloved genre. There is an ascendance into timeless truth in this mostundeservedly underrated of films. It explores the ambiguous moralterritory of two frontiers, on a stage of John Ford’s imagination, de-tailed by his memory, and illuminated by his seemingly prescientknowledge of evolving social and political attitudes. Myth is the fron-tier in which fact and legend collide as thesis and antithesis, and Ford’sfilms allow us to see the synthesis and resulting deconstruction ofestablished iconography within the scope of human experiences. Thelast words in Liberty Valance are enriched with an oppressive sadnesswhen the director’s status within academia and public consciousness areconsidered, ‘‘nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.’’

Works Cited

Bogdanovich, Peter. John Ford. Berkley: U California P, 1978.

———. Who the Devil Made It. New York: Ballantine PublishingGroup, 1998.

Buscombe, Edward. ‘‘Painting the Legend: Frederic Remington andthe Western.’’ John Ford Made Westerns. Ed. Gaylyn Studlar andMathew Bernstein. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 154– 68.

Caputo, Philip. A Rumor of War. New York: Henry Holt and Company,1996.

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Dippie, Brian W. The Frederic Remington Art Museum Collection. NewYork: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001.

Estrin, Mark W., ed. Orson Welles: Interviews. Jackson: UP Mississippi,2002.

Eyman, Scott. Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford.Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1999.

Grant, Barry Keith. ‘‘John Ford and James Fenimore Cooper:Two Rode Together.’’ John Ford Made Westerns. Ed. GaylynStudlar and Mathew Bernstein. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001.193 – 219.

Libby, Bill. ‘‘The Old Wrangler Rides Again.’’ John Ford: Interviews. Ed.Gerald Peary. Bloomington: UP Mississippi, 2001. 46 – 57.

McBride, Joseph. Searching for John Ford. New York: St. Martin’s Press,1999.

McBride, Joseph, and Michael Wilmington. John Ford. New York:Da Capo Press Inc., 1975.

Peary, Gerald. ‘‘Introduction.’’ John Ford: Interviews. Ed. Gerald Peary.Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2001. X – XVII.

Sarris, Andrew. The John Ford Movie Mystery. Bloomington: Indiana UP,1975.

Slotkin, Richard. Gunfighter Nation. New York: HarperCollinsPublishers, 1993.

Spittles, Brian. John Ford. Harlow, England: Pearson EducationLimited, 2002.

Stowell, Peter. John Ford. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.Tavernier, Claudine. ‘‘The Fourth Dimension of Old Age.’’ John Ford:

Interviews. Ed. Gerald Peary. Jackson: UP Mississippi, 2001.98 – 103.

Filmography

Cheyenne Autumn. Dir. John Ford. Screenplay by James R. Webb (andPatrick Ford, unaccredited). Perf. Richard Widmark, Carroll Baker, JamesStewart, Edward G. Robinson, Ricardo Montalban, Gilbert Roland, KarlMalden, Sal Mineo. 1964. Videocassette. Ford-Smith Productions-WarnerBros., 1990.

The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Screenplay by Frank S. Nugent. Perf. JohnWayne, Jeffery Hunter, Vera Miles, Natalie Wood, Ward Bond, HenryBrandon. 1956. DVD. C.V. Whitney Pictures-Warner Bros., 2000.

Sergeant Rutledge. Dir. John Ford. Screenplay by Willis Goldbeck and JamesWarner Bellah. Perf. Jeffery Hunter, Constance Towers, Woody Strode. 1960.Videocassette. Ford Productions-Warner Brothers, 1993.


Stagecoach. Dir. John Ford. Screenplay by Dudley Nichols. Perf. John Wayne,Claire Trevor, Thomas Mitchell, Andy Devine, George Bancroft, JohnCarradine. 1939. DVD. Walter Wanger-United Artists, 2000.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Dir. John Ford. Screenplay by JamesWarner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck. Perf. John Wayne, James Stewart, VeraMiles, Andy Devine, Woody Strode, Lee Marvin, Edmond O’Brien. 1962.DVD. Ford Productions-Paramount, 2001.

Two Rode Together. Dir. John Ford. Screenplay by Frank Nugent. Perf. RichardWidmark, James Stewart, Shirley Jones, Linda Cristal, Woody Strode, HenryBrandon. 1961. Videocassette. Ford-Shpetner Productions-Columbia, 1991.

Young Mr. Lincoln. Dir. John Ford. Screenplay by Lamar Trotti. Perf. Henry Fonda,Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver, Ward Bond. 1939. Videocassette. 20th CenturyFox, 1988.

Kent Anderson is a graduate student in broadcast and cinematic arts atCentral Michigan University, Mt. Pleasant. He studies film theory, mediacriticism, and television (broadcast and cable).

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the william brigman jpc award winner : john ford: the man who shot liberty valance

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