The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962, John Ford) (Patreon)

78/100

[Spoilers, I suppose, if you don't know which star plays the title character.]

Second viewing, last seen 1995. Didn't embrace it back then, and even now there's a grudging aspect to my admiration, akin to what I feel watching prayer and suicidal debasement achieve an apparent miracle in Breaking the Waves (another film I couldn't properly appreciate until I got a bit older and less truculent). For what we have here is a stark dichotomy not merely between the legendary Old West and modern civilization, but between oppositional modes of masculinity, and the fellow with whom I very much identify throughout proves to be the one whom Ford clearly holds in utter contempt. Jimmy Stewart was admittedly well into his dark period by this point, no stranger to less-than-likeable characters, but it's rare for one of his aw-shucks idealists to come across so insufferable; Ranse just seems naïvely oblivious to reality, especially when juxtaposed against Tom's low-key pragmatism. And the film makes a point of feminizing this bookish dweeb, having him wash dishes and wait tables (both coded as woman's work in the dialogue itself). Yeah, he summons the courage to face Valance, but gets rewarded with what's essentially a lifelong case of impostor syndrome, along with a wife who pretty clearly regrets the choice she made. Having forgotten how insanely downbeat Liberty Valance's framing device is, I wound up reading Dorothy M. Johnson's short story (which is really quite short, takes maybe 10 minutes), just because I was curious about whether it's remotely as punitive and unforgiving. Turns out she arguably detests Ranse even more than Ford does ("The swamper's job at the Prairie Belle was not disgraceful until Ranse Foster made it so. When he swept floors, he was so obviously contemptuous of the work and of himself for doing it that other men saw him as contemptible. He watched the customers with a curled lip as if they were beneath him"), and the movie takes its glum ending directly from her, though it's made considerably more funereal by the actors and the lighting.

None of that's meant as criticism, understand, except insofar as I can't help but feel uneasy about having been skillfully manipulated into emotional kinship with a reactionary elegy to the old-school gunslinging alpha male. Crucially, John Wayne, who's never been a big favorite of mine, makes Tom a poignant figure—someone very conscious of his looming obsolescence, yet more amused than actively threatened, even as he sees the woman he loves being drawn to Ranse's intellect. Might be Wayne's best performance...and the thing is, we notice when Tom suddenly disappears at the movie's climactic showdown. It's superlative use of a character as negative space, such that anyone who's paying the slightest attention, and who understands how movies work, should immediately realize that it must have been an unseen Tom who actually killed Valance. There's no other reason for him to be entirely absent at that moment, and only a fool could possibly imagine that Ranse genuinely offing Valance would inspire Tom to drunkenly burn down the house he was building for himself and Hallie. Consequently, the film's big flashback reveal—which I now dimly recall was what bugged me 28 years ago—still strikes me as needless and a little cheap. Indeed, given the screen version's greater emphasis on laws and politics and education as necessary evils, the video to Tom's radio star, I'm surprised that Ranse Stoddard (as distinct from the short story's Ranse Foster; Tom Doniphon was also originally Bert Barricune) doesn't know all along that his bullet missed, with that knowledge fueling his reluctance to accept the nomination for Congress. Would be an even stronger expression of Liberty Valance's the-hero-we-need theme, I reckon. But I'm quibbling again—this is a considerably darker, more provocative film than I grasped as a young man. It kinda sneers at everything that I am and stand for, but I can live with that.