The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Thomas E. Wartenberg sees current concerns about truth in the news spotlighted by a classic Western.

- Thomas E. Wartenberg

It’s rare that current events change our appreciation of a classic Hollywood film, but that’s exactly what’s happened over the past two years with regard to my perception of John Ford’s Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In the age of ‘fake news’, this film’s examination of the transformation of the role of the newspaper from a courageous purveyor of truth to an ignominious peddler of falsehoods demands our attention.

So engaging are the central scenes of the film’s narrative that viewers sometimes forget that what they’re watching is an extended flashback narrated by Senator Ranse Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), in which he explains why he and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of town drunk Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). In a great sequence in which the outlaw Liberty Valance’s death is depicted in the film for a second time – this time from a point of view that establishes who actually fired the shot that killed him – Doniphon explains to Stoddard that he gunned down Valance in cold blood from an alley. Everyone had assumed that Stoddard himself had killed Valance in self-defense on the main street – including us viewers, when we first watch the event from a viewpoint on the street. Because he had murdered Valance, rather than shooting him in self-defence, Doniphon had to conceal his role, lest he be prosecuted. As a result, Stoddard gains an unearned reputation as the man who heroically shot Liberty Valance – a reputation that eventually propels him into the US Senate.

Important as the events in the body of the film are, it’s the frame that interests me here. For the frame, which depicts events taking place decades after Valance’s death, has an uncanny contemporary relevance.