If someone, interested in theatre asked you : « Do I have to read Shakespeare ? »What to answer ?
If someone, interested in cinema asked you: « Do I have to watch John Ford's movies ? » What to answer ?
The same obvious thing. John Ford is one of the greatest directors ever. Orson Welles, just before he shot Citizen Kane, was asked by journalists how he got prepared, he answered : « I watch the old masters, that is to say John Ford, John Ford and John Ford. »
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is his before last western and one of his last movies. Ford is one of the inventors of the western and it is fascinating to see his last look on the genre he adores and its favorite themes : the birth of the law opposed to the wild west, truth and legend, fidelity, violence and its use, the birth of a community and a nation.
Old Senator Ransom Stodard and his wife Hallie come back to a small western town. They are greated by Sherif Appleyard. With very few words, a few looks, no explanation, emotion is there, nearly palpable. Then comes a reocurring scene in Ford's movies : the visit to the dead, in a graveyard. But this time it is an inaugural scene which is even more meaningful.
It is about celebrating, honoring. It is about memory.
For the very first time in Ford's movies, the film unfolds in flash-backs.
Ford casting a look back at history, revisiting memory and his own films and the image they give of the West ? Undeniably !
In a lawless, faithless wild west. Liberty Valance, a gangster (what a doomed name!) terrorizes a small town. Ransom ( the ransom, of course, but also the redeeming one) Stodart, a young idealist lawyer comes to town and is mugged by Valance. He is helped by Tom Doniphon, the old time cowboy. Accomodated and cured by Hallie, Stodard keeps trying to fight Valance in legal ways until a final showdown. Tom Doniphon tries to persuade him that only violence will stop Valance (violence/Valance). This opposition is doubled by a rivalry to win Hallie's heart.
In the background there's a political fight between homesteaders and shopkeepers, on the one hand, and big land and farmowners, on the other hand.
With such a story, Ford can tackle fundamental questions such as : Can violence be legitimate, can violence instore law ? From whom does the law proceed ? Should violence prevail upon law when necessary ? Are legend and myth founding values when they originate in a lie ? Can we really know the truth ? Should we always tell it ?
But the movie, of course, is not the sum of these questions. It is far more than this. It is funny, deeply moving, thrilling.
There's a series of great characters, a cowardly, friendly, sympathetic sherif, a black man bearing a Roman emperor's name, an alcoholic doctor and an alcoholic journalist, that is to say, two very nice characters (in Ford's scale of values), and as usual, strong and interesting women.
Lee Marvin is prodigious. The opposition John Wayne/James Stewart works perfectly. The scenes of initiations to democracy are touching and funny. The photography is nothing but great. Can you ask for more ?
This movie is also the fight between the desert and the garden, the perversion of impotent men who use their whip as a sex, the explosion of paint pots in seminal jaleousy, a savage desire, as beautiful as a cactus flower, litterature that ignorants choke the weel-learned with, democracy as an intolerable limit to alcohol, the infinitely black memory of Abraham Lincoln and the first vote, as moving as a child's birth. It is also an exile, far from the places we were born in, the betrayal of our lives faced with the young men we once were, and a possible come-back that would be like mercy or a tribute paid to ourselves.
I know it sounds very confusing but John Ford is a master in the art of simplicity and obviousness.
A masterpiece !
