The point being made by Ford and his screenwriters, James Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, is that what’s needed for the establishment of civilization is, in the first instance anyway, not law but heroism. Someone has to risk his life to put an end to the threat of violence and disorder to the whole community. The problem, as in the parable of the mice, is that there is no incentive for any particular individual to be the one to bell the cat. And even if there were, there could be no question of due process about the exercise. The man who took on Liberty Valance would have to be as much outside the law as Liberty is—at least so long as his ability to intimidate witnesses makes the law powerless against him. But the filmmakers also seek to show us how this has become an unpalatable truth and one that people seek to disguise from themselves. Doniphon is induced to shoot Valance in what he himself describes as an act of “murder, pure and simple”—but in such a way that it looks like an act of self-defense by Stoddard, who is the representative of culture (he teaches the illiterates of the town to read), as well as law and civilization. When these desirable things all proceed, after the death of Valance, to thrive in Shinbone, the story of that death is then mythologized into a founding legend of the town and of the territory, shortly to become a state. Although he is told the truth years later, the local newspaper proprietor (Carleton Young) doesn’t want to know it. He responds with what has become the movie’s most famous line: “This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In this, he is echoing the irony of Dutton Peabody (Edmond O’Brien), his predecessor as editor of The Shinbone Star, on that memorable occasion years before when Valance and his henchmen had been made to back down in a confrontation with Doniphon, occasioned by Valance’s deliberate tripping of Stoddard as he was carrying a tray of food..."...How did our culture get to the point where the heroism of some is thought to diminish others—where heroism in general has become an embarrassment, something not to be talked of in public for fear of giving offense to non-heroes? As it happens, the California conference I attended had devoted one of its sessions to a discussion of John Ford’s film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Released in 1962, this classic Western tells the story of a frontier town called Shinbone that is terrorized by a murderer, thief, and gun-for-hire who bears the significant name of Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). A lawyer called Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) comes to town with the idea of setting up a practice there. But before he even arrives his stagecoach is waylaid by Liberty and his gang, and he is robbed and beaten. Symbolically, Liberty tears the pages out of one of Stoddard’s law books. On his arrival in Shinbone, the lawyer is nonplussed to find that there is no law enforcement there willing or able to bring Valance to justice. Tom Doniphan (John Wayne), the only man in town capable of standing up to him, is disposed to mind his own business. On the frontier, the law is otiose because (as Tom explains to the newcomer) there, “men take care of their own problems.”
URL is HERE.
Good piece. In some minds, Todd Beamer should have been arrested for assault and murder.
Sorry, there’s no valor in this act, for the reasons I state in #21.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is my favorite Western (with Pale Rider a close second), both for the deeper allegory in the story, and also for the fact it unites Ford, Stewart, and Wayne with the latter two giving great performances in the type of roles they did best.
However, I’m not sure of the applicability of the movie to this particular situation. Liberty Valance’s Shinbone was a place where there was no functioning law, but these particular marines operated within the highly structured environment of our armed forces. They may have had the best of intentions, but they chose to operate outside the accepted procedures.
I think the themes of that movie may be much more applicable to a situation like Haditha. When we send our soldiers to war zones like Iraq, we send them into situations in which there is no law, free press or honest witnesses. We expect them to react instantly to deadly situations. To then treat their best decisions as potential criminal acts to be investigated using the local insurgents as witnesses is beyond absurd.
On the streets of Fulija or Anbar province, I want our soldiers to be Tom Doniphon and John Wayne. When it comes to the operation of our military intelligence network, I want Jimmy Stewart and Rance Stoddard in charge.
“Nothing’s too good for the Man who shot Liberty Valance.”