The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Two men of the old west, one of the new.

Directed by John Ford
Written by James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck, Dorothy M. Johnson (novel)
Starring John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin



Look at it; it was once a wilderness, now it's a garden.

There are three genres in cinema that find their roots entirely and exclusively in American soil; the gangster movie, the musical, and the western.  Yet only one of the three seems lodged in a long-distant halcyon age of Hollywood:  the gangster genre is as much about Scorsese as it is about Jimmy Cagney, while musicals have had many distinct ages - the Busby Berkeley-dominated era in the early days of sound, the time of Rodgers and Hammerstein in the 50s and early 60s, the less relentlessly cheerful 70s pictures (such as Fiddler on the Roof or Cabaret), more recent musicals like Chicago, Mamma Mia!, not to mention all those Disney animations.  Oh, and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.  Mustn't forget that.

And the western?  As a genre, it's tied inextricably to one period of time - from the mid-1930s to the beginning of the 1960s.  It's tied to one actor, John Wayne.  And it's tied to one director, the peerless John Ford.  Of course, there have been westerns since - and recently indeed, with the likes of Seraphim Falls, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and the remake of 3:10 to Yuma.  And certainly, Sergio Leone made a tremendous stab at a one-man revival of the genre, yet even his outstanding work in westerns reflects an outsider trying to reinvigorate a world that had died - like the westerns of the past decade, Leone's are a homage to the classic style, rather than a new direction.

The west changed, and the world changed.  The old ways, of big men with big guns and big horses shooting evil, shallow, one-dimensional Indians and/or bandits just weren't relevant any more.  It had been done, and done to death, in a time when the simplicity of an ever-victorious fight between the good ol' US of A and those who seek to stop them was what so much of the public was after; come the 60s, come a new generation with a new set of priorities and a new politics, that world had gone, and it took the western with it.  And come the 70s, the western makes a rare appearance as something antiheroic, something negative and bleak - take Robert Altman's masterful McCabe and Mrs Miller: it has no time for the proud gunslinger and good-hearted young lady, instead giving us a gambler and a prostitute, running a brothel.  The west is not heroic, the west is not the bold and upstanding and fearless foundation of America.  The west is unpleasant, rough, selfish, grubby.  The west is a place and a time to regret.  This is not the west of John Ford and John Wayne.

And yet, it is.  If you wanted to pin down the end of that era, it's here, the last western that Ford and Wayne made together.  It has all the building blocks of the genre - apart from Wayne as burly sharpshooter in love with The Girl, we've a violent and fearsome bandit (Marvin) and his goons, we've a local marshal who's too weak and drunk and gluttonous to do anything about it, we've a brave outsider (Stewart) riding in to transform the present and the future of the frontier town.  But the blocks aren't stacked the right way, the edifice is falling.  The outsider isn't a heroic frontiersman, he's not a cowboy or a sheriff or an outlaw-come-good.  He's a lawyer and sometime politician.  He can't shoot a gun straight to save his life.  When he finally decides that, as the noble hero, he should confront the bandit, he's wearing an apron.

Meanwhile, Wayne, big, strong John Wayne, seems only to slip further into the shadows.  Nothing stands more clearly for the death of the west than the isolation of his character - at first, the brave hero, the only man who really tries to defend his town, but after Stewart rides in, he finds himself gradually yet completely driven aside.  The gunslinger, the quick, strong, western icon, comes to mean so little in the face of a new world.  As law and order, literacy and politics seep into the life of the little town, the role of the old warrior is reduced to nothing more than a murderer hiding in the shadows.  The man of the old west is beaten; all respect him, but none look to him to lead them any longer.  Stewart, his books and his words, represents the future.  Wayne is isolated.  Wayne is the past.  And, ultimately, Wayne hands over the town - and the west - to Stewart to carry forward.

And, in the end, we have Stewart and The Girl riding across the prairie - not in a stagecoach, not on horseback, but in civilised comfort on the railroad.  The west they're leaving behind, she says, has transformed from wilderness into garden - and it's Stewart that's responsible, it's the encroachment of the world of laws and letters that planted the seeds, the seeds which now blossom outside the window of the carriage.

It was the civilising of the west which gave birth to Hollywood, and Hollywood which gave birth to the story, the legend of that vast, open land.  Eventually, the two had to let go of one another.  It's only right and fitting that it fell to Ford and Wayne to write the last word.