His act of heroism comes at a great cost. In a wonderful Fordian triangular composition, Doniphon, at the foreground base of the triangle and at an acute angle to Valance, fires the fatal shot. Think back, pilgrim." On the revised narrative, we learn that Doniphon and Pompeii (Woody Stroode) waited in the wings of the street as Valance tormented Stoddard. Years later, when the two men meet at an election and Stoddard is troubled by making his name through the killing of Valance, the unshaven Doniphon, in close-up, blows cigarette smoke and says, "You didn’t kill Liberty Valance. Valance flings back and falls into the street. Valance toys with Stoddard, firing at a flower pot above his head, wounding him in the right arm, and then raising his six-gun to shoot the young lawyer "right between the eyes." Suddenly the tender-foot, gun in left hand, fires.
#The man who shot liberty valance series
Valance, after a series of embarrassments, challenges Stoddard to a duel. In a moment of monumental ellipses (Ford’s narrative dramatically withholds information from the audience), it is the killing of Liberty Valance that poses the film’s central problem.įord’s narrative plays with story and discourse (what we see in the film’s running time versus what actually occurred) forcing the audience to reassess earlier scenes. Told in flashback, Stoddard (now a successful senator) tells of his run-ins with Liberty Valance (a wonderfully menacing performance by Lee Marvin, who decked in black and sloping around like an ape, becomes a Bogartian Duke Mantee of the West) and how he conquered Valance with the help of Doniphon. And thus this film is an elegy for the dead. With the visual progression of the train-coming and going (an image which frames the film)-Ford seems to suggest that with encroaching civilization old-time heroes such as Doniphon needed to move aside. He built a home which he assumed Hally (Vera Miles) would share with him as his wife, but he lost her to the hero of the moment, Stoddard. However, Doniphon died a drunken, dislocated man. John Ford’s last great masterpiece, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), appears to be a dark tribute to westerners such as Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) who packed a gun and tamed the wilderness so that civilized, thinking men such as Ranse Stoddard (James Stewart) could bring to it law and order and transpose the wilderness into a garden.
John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
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