doug's Site: "Liberty Valance" : Kill Crazy After All These Years

(above) Rough and Realistic Tom Doniphon ( John Wayne) and Sadistic but Nasty Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) are patrons of a local frontier restaurant. Here they are discussing the finer points of good customer etiquette in a public establishment while the younger man grows a bit pensive in John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence" (1962)

"Has everybody in this town gone kill crazy?!" James Stewart asks in a key scene in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Stewart is Ransom Stoddard, a newly arrived young Eastern lawyer, a "dude" of books and laws caught between two rival alpha males. He's temping, you might say, as a dishwasher and waiter in love interest Vera Miles' eatery in this dusty Western town that looks like the Main Street went up last week. All Stoddard wants to do is give Doniphon his steak. But Lee Marvin as Valance trips Stewart up o nthe way to the table. The steak and the plate hit the floor. Valance and his gunsels think its funny. Stewart, already whipped once by this whip-wielding nutjob, isn't ready for Round Two--yet.

But Tom Doniphon (Wayne) wanted that steak what's now gathering dirt on the floor. That makes it his business. And Wayne wants Marvin to pick up that steak. And only Marvin.

Anybody could pick up the steak, even Tom himself. But he won't lose face because Shinbone (i.e., frontier America) is a Hobbesian hell hole for weak and ordinary men (i.e., those not bristling with nerve and slow on the draw.) So Marvin's character HAS to pick up Wayne's steak. The problem is Marvin (Valance) takes his first name all too seriously. Liberty for him doesn't mean he gets to vote in municipal elections or buy a beer in a saloon after ten at night; it means he has license to rob, bushwhack, shoot and generally put fear of death into anyone in his way. Or he just isn't happy.

Valance is Jean-Jacques Roussaeu's "Natural Man" run amok. And Valance can't lose face, either, not in front of the crowd of "sodbusters" and townspeople he terrorizes regularly for fun. So the steak lies there, and out come the guns.

Indeed, it might appear "kill crazy" is the operative term for all this: two grown men appear liable to start a gunbattle over a pound of overcooked ribeye. We've all seen variations on this duel of egos before; maybe we've had the misfortune to feel the need to act a similar scenario with some tough nut once or twice in real life. Personally, my sentiment's with Stoddard; its just a steak, after all. But can you play in that way in such an enviroment and not sooner or later stand up for yourself?

Welcome to the West, folks; it's a place a long time ago that the United States never quite grew out from.

And that's the reason I recommend this 45-year old movie. We are still a Gunfighter Nation as Professor Richard Slotkin put it in a popular non-fiction book from the late eighties. The struggle between personal freedom and the security of the community from criminals goes on today, of course. In other countries, they have customs. In America, we still come back--too often--to the gun. I offer no solution or higher vision for that; it's simply a matter of fact.

In America, one of the things the Western film has taught people, rightly or wrongly, is that the instutions of law and order are often weak and ineffectual, that democratic protections are too soft on criminals, and not only are you on your own in an emergency, you are on your own, period. Americans respond to that message, and fill the coffers of the big movie producers. How else to explain the wave of "vigilante" and "cop gone trigger happy" movies that replaced the Western as a primary vehicle for exploring violence through the cinema in the 1970's. What is "Dirty Harry" (1971) or "Death Wish" (1974) or the "Lethal Weapon" movies of the 1980's but Westerns with cars? Hell, what is "Star Wars" (1977) but a Western about a young man who grows up to fight the people who killed his adoptive parents? The recent buzz about the Jodie Foster movie, "The Brave One" shows producers haven't forgotten that great American credo that justice seems more satisfactory when its repaid in kind to the unjust.

At its worst, this sort of thinking could lead to anarchy or fascism. At best, as long as people accept ineffectual law enforcement as a basic entertainment device, it can make us feel a little better about this unsafe world. A trigger-happy cop, in a movie where the bad guy always is nothing but bad, is better than no cop at all; the angry good guy with a gun at least can stop his nemesis--provided he shoots straight and actually has the right person in his bead, something only a movie script can always guarantee.

"Liberty Valance" came at the end of the great Western film cycle; to me the film is Ford the Maestro's summing up of the ebbing away of freedom and true individualism in America for the sake of progress and civilization. Men like Valance work only for the powerful few: the cattle barons who want "open range", no statehood for the Territory and no law "south of the Picket Wire". Such men, gunsels like Valance and certain rich men behind him, have destroyed the ideals of real individualism because they see no reason to accept the self-disapline and responsibly that such a license requires in a growing territory.

Wayne's Tom Doniphon, of course, can be both singularly "free" and on good behavior around lesser men. It's interesting to me that, in the end, John Ford and his writers realized this Old West Achilles must be sacrificed as well.

And you do not have to be a die-hard reactionary or a cowboy poet in Wyoming or Nevada to lament that loss. In a modern world, a commonwealth can only extend freedom as far as can be followed by baser human instincts. Too many people rely on them rather than a conscience, from the white-trash poor meth dealer in a trailer park to a billionaire oil barons who (alledgedly) cut deals with monsters like Saddam Hussein to make a buck. That's why we need more laws than a good man or woman can easily put up with. And its that friction that makes a movie like this one relevant even today.