Howard Hawks’ 1948 classic Red River is usually described as a Wild West version of Mutiny on the Bounty, and this is certainly true at a superficial level. Basic plot: in the 1850s and 1860s, the single-minded Thomas Dunson (John Wayne) builds a cattle empire and then initiates a drive – with a herd of thousands of animals – from Texas to Missouri. Along the way he becomes so tyrannical and insensitive towards his men that his adopted son Matthew (Montgomery Clift) leads a rebellion against him.
But there's a lot else going on in this multi-layered film. It's a psychological drama built on ambition and lust for power. It’s also an intriguing (though not fully developed) look at gender and familial relations – about fathers and sons, about men who haven’t had a strong female presence in their lives, and about women who shake them up. The film buff can see it as an identifiable Hawks creation, with some of the motifs that ran through this great director’s varied body of work. And there’s even a bit of horror movie buried in it, with innocents being pursued (and haunted in their nightmares) by a seemingly omniscient bogeyman, ready to jump out of the darkness. Who knew that John Wayne could be a prototype for Freddy Krueger!
All that said, Red River is first and foremost a brilliant Western, with everything you could want from the genre. It has an acute sense of history – the struggles of the pioneers and visionaries of the Old West, the constant need to shrug off painful losses, look ahead and move on – and strongly written supporting characters, such as Dunson’s old buddy Groot (played by the always-wonderful Walter Brennan). The location shooting is outstanding; there are cattle-drive and stampede scenes that equal any of John Ford’s action setpieces. (What an experience it must have been to see all this on the big screen!) The film is driven by visual storytelling, a point underlined by the fact that though we get occasional glimpses of a scroll of paper with a handwritten version of the narrative on it, the scroll rarely appears on the screen for more than two or three seconds. It dissolves in and out before the viewer has had time to read the full page – you’re left with a basic impression of the first couple of sentences, which is all you really need, because the camera is speaking so eloquently.
Much of the interest in the film today centres on the contrast in acting styles between old-school leading man Wayne and the young, introspective Clift, who was one of Hollywood’s first major performers from the Method school. Actually the contrast isn’t as pronounced as you might think, because Wayne smartly underplays his role, especially when he portrays Dunson as middle-aged. Here, the swaggering, crinkly-eyed Western hero of the 1930s is replaced by a terse, tight-lipped man, and there’s no doubting Dunson’s hard-headedness. In his overall demeanour one sees something resembling the dogmatism of the religious fundamentalist, and indeed his modus operandi is to calmly outdraw and shoot someone, and then nobly read from his Bible over the dead body. There’s something vaguely touching about this the first time he does it (the victim is the henchman of a powerful land-owner, and at this point Dunson can still be seen as a heroic figure), but soon it becomes creepy. Incidentally the Bible theme leads to an amusing monologue, delivered in a sing-song voice by one of the other men:
Always planting and reading! Fill a man full of lead, plant him in the ground, and then read words at him! Why, when you’ve killed a man, why try to read the Lord in as a partner on the job?
Montgomery Clift's Matthew, on the other hand, is dreamy-eyed and often smiles shyly. He’s a sensitive, almost new-age Western hero who sighs “I’m sorry” after he happens to 
raise his voice slightly during a conversation – compared to him, even Henry Fonda’s reticent Wyatt Earp in My Darling Clementine seems like a rugged frontiersman. Despite the Mutiny on the Bounty comparisons, Matt is no Fletcher Christian. Shortly after leading the mutiny, he says of Dunson, “He was wrong”, but then adds with a conflicted look on his face, “I hope I’m right.” This introspection and self-doubt is in direct opposition to Dunson’s proclamation “I’m the law.”
The emotional vulnerability of Clift is on view throughout the film, but one sees a different sort of vulnerability from Wayne, and it’s especially effective because this is the old-world macho man who doesn’t usually show weakness. Wayne is startlingly good in the scenes just after Dunson leads the shooting of three men who were talking about quitting: watch the paranoid way in which he jerks his head around and says “Where are you going?” when he sees Matt walking away, or the way he looks at another man who he thinks might be reaching for his holster. You get the sense that Dunson inwardly realises he is being unreasonable, but that he can’t swallow his pride. Soon he becomes a control freak, refusing to sleep so he can keep an eye on all the men, all the time (this is, of course, an indication that he realises he can no longer trust anyone).
The sleeplessness motif will be repeated later in the film, when Matt and his men are plagued by nightmares about the vengeful Dunson tracking them down. (“Every time you turn around, expect to see me, because one day you’ll turn around and I’ll be there.”) You won’t see many other great Westerns populated by insomniac and fearful men, but like I said, this film is a genre-bender. The fog in the night scenes also creates a look and atmosphere that is very unusual for a Western – you can cut the tension with a knife.
In fact, some of the later scenes in Red River remind me of two other great films made in the same year: John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (with gold prospectors driven by greed, eventually in danger of losing their sanity) and – would you believe it – Laurence Olivier’s adaptation of Hamlet. Think about the Danish 
prince being approached on a misty night by his father’s ghost, and then watch the scene in Red River where Matt wanders restlessly about on a foggy night, dreading Dunson’s arrival.
In Olivier’s film, the role of Hamlet’s mother Gertrude was played by an actress who was more than a decade younger than Olivier – this underlined the story’s Oedipal theme, turning the Hamlet-Gertrude-Claudius relationship into a twisted romantic triangle. In Red River, the main female character Tess has a similarly ambiguous relationship with both Dunson and Matt.
Men, women and Hawks
Many of Hawks’ movies are about men who live in a confined, emotionally limiting world, surrounded mostly by other men (or, in one memorable case, by dinosaur bones!) until a woman comes along and becomes a disruptive force, or a stabilising influence, or both. (On occasion, it’s possible to read the male relationships as being deeper than just strong friendship – watch the way the young cowboy Cherry Valance looks at Matt the first time they meet, and the subsequent gunplay between them, and tell me it isn’t vaguely homoerotic.)
There are two women in Red River; they are never seen together, but there is a strong symmetry in their roles, and in how they affect the central relationship between Dunson and Matt. Very early in the film, the young Dunson loses his girl Fen in an Indian attack (after he’s told her not to accompany him – he’ll return for her later). The very next morning, the boy Matt comes into his life, eventually becoming his adoptive son. Fourteen years later, shortly after the conflict between Dunson and Matt, Tess (Joanne Dru) enters the picture, becomes romantically involved with Matt, and sets about playing agony aunt and relationship-mender (in a striking scene where she wears a flowing black gown, she looks very much like a maternal, Madonna figure).
When Matt leaves Tess behind, promising to return for her later, it’s a repeat of Dunson’s promise to Fen, but with a twist: shortly afterwards, Dunson arrives and agrees to take Tess with him. He’s showing some flexibility for the first time, which represents a major progression in his character – it should help the viewer prepare for a reconciliation and a happy ending.
Unfortunately, the actual climax – with Tess breaking up a display of machismo between Dunson and Matt – is too abrupt, and jarringly shifts the tone from grand tragedy to homely farce. I think this same ending could have worked better if it had been drawn out a little more, and if the Tess character had been given more importance in the lead up to it. Perhaps she could have been played by a bigger star – someone like Barbara Stanwyck, or even Olivia De Havilland – so that she became the film’s belated third lead. 
(And how about Lauren Bacall, who had stood up so well to Humphrey Bogart in two earlier Hawks classics, To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep?) But the role as it’s written is too marginal – almost an afterthought – to sustain such an idea. Tess isn’t quite the equal of the “Hawksian women” from other films. (While on that, see this piece by Germaine Greer.)
If it were possible for an otherwise great film to be ruined by its last one minute, this would be a candidate. But Red River is such a complex and satisfying movie in other respects that it almost doesn’t matter; when you think about it a few days after watching it, you’ll only remember the good bits. And wish you could see it in 70 mm.
Related posts: on the John Wayne star persona in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance; and on A Streetcar Named Desire (which also had two leads who represented different acting styles – also see the comments discussion).
This month sees the hundredth birth anniversaries of two iconic actors of the last century, both of whom also happen to be personal favourites. I became closely interested in the careers of Laurence Olivier and Katharine Hepburn around 16 years ago, when I first started watching old American and British films. My interest in birth dates being just as strong back then, I knew Olivier was born on May 22, 1907, but I’d always thought of Hepburn as being a November-child and was confused by the subsequent revision of her birthday to May 12 (you expect actors to change years, not months!). There’s an explanation in the Wikipedia entry: apparently, for much of her life she passed off her long-deceased brother Tom’s birthday as her own and revealed the truth only recently.
Hepburn and Olivier were friends, or at least close associates (in fact Hepburn was the impromptu maid-of-honour at the hush-hush late-night wedding ceremony of Olivier and Vivien Leigh in 1940) and their long acting careers came close to intersecting on a couple of occasions, especially after Olivier overcame his initial disdain for cinema. However, they acted together only once, late in their careers, in a lightweight made-for TV movie titled Love Among the Ruins. It’s probably just as well; too much star power can cause film stock to ignite.
As expected, these centenaries are being celebrated with the release of special DVD box-sets (if only I’d had more time in that HMV store last week...) as well as screenings and festivals in many parts of the world. To mark the occasion in my own small way, here are notes on two cherished, dog-eared books.
Tracy and Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir
by Garson Kanin
“We do not remember chronologically but in disordered flashes,” says playwright/screenwriter Garson Kanin in the Preface to this tender, wonderfully personal account of his long friendship with Hepburn and her favourite leading man Spencer Tracy. What Kanin achieves in this book is astonishing, especially considering that it isn’t a structured account of two lives. Instead, he hands the page over to his free-flowing memories of Hepburn and Tracy over a 30-year association with them. This results in a collection of seemingly patternless anecdotes that add up to much more than the sum of their parts, with the two giants coming alive in a way that wouldn’t have been possible in most conventional biographies.
As a friend and confidant, Kanin was uniquely placed to comment on the quirkier aspects of Hepburn’s personality, the things that made her a willing misfit among the media-savvy, politically correct movie stars of her time. (She was designated “The Most Uncooperative Actress of the Year” by the Hollywood Women’s Press Club a number of times, which, given the nature of celebrity journalism then as now, we can take as a high compliment.) This vantage point also allowed him to relate delightful little stories such as the one where she raises her hand dramatically and swears on her mother’s life while telling a blatant lie (to Cary Grant), and later coolly says to Kanin: “It’s an arrangement I have with my mother. She swears on my life too. All the time.”
What eventually emerges is a picture of an very private person living, usually on her own terms, in the public gaze; a maverick in the truest, most un-put on sense of the word – this was a woman who wore trousers and smoked on Hollywood sets (unheard of for an actress in the 1930s) without turning it into a statement – and, of course, an outstanding actress.
Laurence Olivier: A Biography
by Donald Spoto
But if we’re talking conventional biographies, they don’t come much better than Spoto’s comprehensive, well-researched but compact account of Olivier’s life and career. This book is equal parts a life history and a psychological profile of a very complex man who was always trying to raise the bar for himself and for his profession. Almost by default, it’s also an illuminating portrait of the English theatre (and, to an extent, Hollywood) in the 20th century, especially between the 1920s and the 1960s.
Spoto is particularly good at contrasting “Larry” with “Lord Olivier” – that is, setting the humbleness of Olivier’s origins against his eventual status as a revered public figure and a knight of the British Empire. In making this contrast, he captures the man’s deep-rooted insecurities about being under-educated (which led him to indulge in much grandstanding later in his life - making florid, often incomprehensible speeches at ceremonies under the belief that this was how a Peer was expected to talk), his obsessive need to be the very best in his field and his often churlish attitude towards his great rival John Gielgud, who was of more genteel stock.
In fact, Olivier’s unorthodox approach – spitting out Shakespeare’s words instead of reciting them mellifluously; interpreting Iago as a homosexual driven by his feelings for Othello – probably came from the need to defy the classical tradition that Gielgud was a flagbearer for. Here’s an account of the famous 1935 production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Gielgud (an established actor at the time) and Olivier (still the young upstart) alternated the roles of Romeo and Mercutio:
The settled tradition was to stress the poetic lyricism of Shakespeare’s verse. But from the first reading, Olivier spoke his lines as if they sprang from blunt feeling and were not lines of venerable iambic pentameter: he was clearly preparing to play Romeo as a hot-blooded adolescent seething with sexual eagerness. Cast and director heard the verse as if it were not verse at all, but a spontaneous rush of passionate desire, impossible to suppress. “He felt that I was too verse-conscious and exhibitionist,” Gielgud reflected years later. “Of course, he was a great exhibitionist himself, but in quite a different way – daring, flamboyant and iconoclastic.”
Rereading these books, I realised that this was what Hepburn and Olivier had in common apart from the levels of excellence they achieved: they were both nonconformists, both way ahead of their time. It’s hard to believe they would have been turned hundred this month, so fresh are their legacies and personal styles.
P.S. John Wayne was yet another Hollywood legend born in May 1907. I admired a lot of his work – especially in Red River, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Quiet Man – without being a big fan. Coincidentally, Hepburn’s only film appearance with Wayne (in Rooster Cogburn) was the same year in which she did Love Among the Ruins with Olivier. Wayne and Olivier never acted together – indeed, it would be difficult to imagine a film of any quality that could accommodate both of them, though they each appeared in bloated multi-cast war dramas late in their careers.
On my DVD of Robert J Flaherty’s pioneering 1922 quasi-documentary Nanook of the North, about the lives of the Arctic Inuit, I just saw a special feature I’d overlooked: a short black-and-white TV interview (probably recorded sometime in the 1950s) with Frances Flaherty, the director’s widow and occasional screenwriter. Though only 7-8 minutes long, it has some interesting material, especially in light of later controversies about the methods Flaherty used to depict the Inuit’s day-to-day existence.
The interviewer is himself a documentary filmmaker, I forget his name, and the exchange is recorded in the studiedly informal style typical of the period. Gazing somewhere off-camera, Mrs Flaherty speaks in a measured voice.
Interviewer: What are your thoughts on your late husband being called the father of the documentary film? Is that title misleading?
Frances Flaherty: It has become misleading now, because the term documentary has come to be associated with short 16-mm films that are made for very specific sets of viewers. But Robert made his films as features, and for theatrical audiences – back then, remember, there were only theatrical screens.
Int: Was Nanook of the North a commercial success?
FF: Yes it was, and that’s the amazing thing about it, because it was simply a story about ordinary people doing ordinary things. And yet, it became so popular that when Nanook died two years later the news was published in places as far away as Tokyo and Singapore. In Malaya, there was a new word for “strong man” – Nanook. In Germany 10 years later I bought an Eskimo pie called Nanook with a smiling Nanook face on the wrap.”
Int: Your husband started making films quite late in life, didn’t he?
FF: Yes. He thought of himself as an explorer first and a filmmaker much, much afterwards. All art, he used to say, is a kind of exploring.
Int: What kind of exploration was he interested in?
FF: His great search was for the spirit of people and their relationship with their environment, which is why he lived with the Inuit for long periods. He became fascinated with their lives. He used to say, “with fewer resources than any other people on earth, and living in a country where no other race could survive, they were still the happiest people I’ve met”.
It’s difficult to miss the romanticism of this last remark, especially given that the real-life Nanook died battling a snowstorm (and starvation) shortly after the film was released. And sure enough, Nanook of the North is unabashedly idealised in places, starting with the first title card superimposed on a postcard image of the Arctic: “The mysterious, barren lands – desolate, boulder-strewn, wind-swept – the illimitable spaces which top the world.” (Love that “illimitable”!) But it’s also a deeply humanistic work, a genuine attempt to reach places that the “civilised world” knew very little of and to present distant lives in such a way that they became immediately familiar.
Nanook begins by introducing us to its protagonist, the proud Itivimuit chief, in an unforgettable close-up (the shot prefigures Hollywood’s golden age and the cult of 
the movie star; this could be John Wayne posing heroically for the camera). We meet Nanook’s family: Nyla the Smiling One, the children, Comock the dog and a few baby huskies. We follow them on their summer journey to a trading post, “the white man’s big igloo”, and watch as polar bear and Arctic fox skins are exchanged for knives, beads and coloured candy. A series of disjointed episodes follow: Nanook negotiates perilous ice floes, catches fish with his harpoon, killing the bigger ones with his teeth; a walrus stakeout culminates in a ferocious tug-of-war between man and beast before the “Tiger of the North” is finally reeled in; the building of an igloo is capped by a luminous scene where Nanook makes a window for the house by carefully measuring and cutting an ice slab from the ground; the family goes to bed, rises, children are taught how to use a bow and arrow; a seal is captured; and the group narrowly escapes death in a terrible blizzard.
The film was acclaimed as the first full-length documentary, a claim that later led to controversy – for there were elements of artifice in the actual shooting. For starters, Flaherty’s intention was not to present these people as they really were at the time the film was made but at an earlier, more primitive time when they had not yet acquired shotguns and motor-operated kayaks. Accordingly, these modern tools were kept out of the camera’s range. At one point during the tug-of-war with the walrus, when things get difficult, you can briefly see one of the hunters turning around and shouting something at the camera. (“Throw me that gun, you idiot director”?) Even a casual viewer can make out that a couple of scenes (such as the seal-hunting one) could easily have been staged, and apparently some of the members of Nanook’s family were paid actors (though equally importantly they were real Inuit, who did live in these conditions).
I don’t see how any of this affects the film’s essential integrity; you’d have to be a rabid literalist to condemn it on these grounds. None of the artifice can detract from the larger, more important truths about Nanook of the North: that Flaherty took his bulky shooting equipment to this inhospitable (and at the time, extremely difficult to access) part of the world, spent months living with and observing the Inuit, and constructed a (partly fictitious) narrative around the very real possibilities of their lives. The Arctic landscape isn’t a giant prop. The dangers of hunting are real, as are the hunting methods, the savage dogs and the details of communal living. And that really IS an igloo being built from the ground up (though the interior shots were filmed inside a specially constructed igloo with one side missing, so Flaherty’s camera would get the light it required).
For me, the most telling part of the interview with Frances Flaherty is where she relates that her husband had made another Eskimo film before Nanook, “but he said it was a bad film. He had learnt to explore but he didn’t yet know how to reveal. He knew the people whose lives he was studying, but he didn’t know his camera.”
It was then that Flaherty hit upon the idea of using a single character and his family as representative of the Inuit, and so Nanook, a film with a definite narrative trajectory, came into being. The implication is clear: at some point, Flaherty had to choose between unblemished authenticity on the one hand and the requirements of good filmmaking on the other. He had to sacrifice a few literal truths for deeper, more poetic truths.
The results of his decision are there for anyone to see today. You can’t deny the simple power of some of these visuals, more than 80 years after they were captured on film. My favourite scenes include the Inuit family emerging one by one from a kayak’s underwater interior, Nanook reaching into an underground trap and pulling out a white fox, the droll shot of the “sentinel walrus” looking about for signs of danger while its mates sleep, and the haunting images of the dogs howling in a snowstorm at the very end.
Flaherty’s tireless quest for the spirit of a people comes through in every scene. “I have a theory about the film’s success,” his wife says at one point in the interview, “I believe that when Nanook and Nyla and the other Inuit smile at us from the screen, we smile back – at that moment all the differences between us fall away and we become one with all people.” This is again a slightly ingenuous remark (I’m not sure that all cosmopolitan viewers around the world would have felt deep kinship during the scenes where Nanook and his family bite into raw seal meat and grin up at the camera with blubber on their lips), but it’s a remark that fits in with Flaherty’s own idealism. The film is a testament to his faith in the deep connections between people everywhere, and his then-revolutionary attempt to use the movie camera to bridge cultures.
P.S. Here's an essay by Flaherty: How I Filmed Nanook of the North.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of pow'r,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave,
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour.
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
(from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, by Thomas Gray)
There’s a harrowing scene late in Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory that help bring the film’s real concerns into clearer focus. Three soldiers of the French army have been condemned to death by their own superiors, for alleged cowardice in the face of a mission that we know was suicidal and unreasonable from the start. Their commanding officer, Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), stands helplessly by: a lawyer in civilian life, he had tried to defend his men in the army court by pointing out their shows of courage in past missions, but to no avail.
Of the condemned men, one is relatively stoical about his fate; another is barely conscious because of an accident in his prison cell the previous night (leading one of the senior officers to tell a warden: “Make sure his eyes are open when the firing squad takes aim”). But the third man bawls all the way to the execution area. “Don’t kill me,” he wails, “I don’t want to die!” He squirms and flinches until the very last second of his life, and watching him we squirm too; weaned as we have been on war films founded on heroism and panache, we are now face to face with anti-heroism of the bleakest kind. And it’s much easier to identify with.
Up to this point, Paths of Glory had seemed to be a film about grave injustice; about three good soldiers being made scapegoats for the callous games of their power-mad superiors. The main question seemed to be: are they shirkers who had to be punished as an example, or brave men who were asked to perform an impossible task? But watching the terrified soldier resist the meaningless ending of his life, we realise that this is beside the point. The real question is: in the face of war’s insanity, is it reasonable to expect a sane person not to be a coward, to choose death over life? ("I can't understand these armchair officers, fellas trying to fight a war from behind a desk, worrying about whether a mouse is gonna run up their pants," says the callous General Mireau at one point. "I don't know, General," replies Dax. "If I had the choice between mice and Mausers, I'd take the mice every time.")
The question has of course been addressed before, in film and literature. One thinks of great comic works such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H* and Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, and it’s often been suggested that war is best treated as a horror-comedy. Paths of Glory is a rare example of a great anti-war film, indeed a great anti-heroic film, that is dramatic and austere on the surface and yet creates its own subversive comedy. How can you not smile in disbelief when Dax’s senior officer tells him not to quibble over fractions (they’re discussing whether the expected casualties would be 30 or 40 per cent of the squad). Or when two soldiers discuss whether it’s preferable to be killed by a bayonet or a machine gun. Or when Mireau, sealing the fate of his own soldiers, snaps, “If the little sweethearts won't face German bullets, they’ll face French ones!”
This was Kubrick’s breakthrough film, though by all accounts it was Kirk Douglas, the producer-star, who insisted on the downbeat (and un-Hollywoodish) ending. Given 
that Douglas began his career as a hunky leading man who specialised in physical roles (as in Champion; picture on left), it’s notable that this film, which stands in opposition to every idea of swaggering machismo, was so close to his heart. But then, he was always a much more interesting actor than a casual glance through his filmography would suggest: by the early 1950s, he had already started to expand his range, playing anti-heroic roles even within the framework of genre films such as Detective Story. Watching Paths of Glory helps me put in perspective his disagreements with John Wayne, who wanted macho leading men to play tough heroes, not “wimps”, onscreen (more on that in this post). If ever a film made a good case for “wimpishness” over “heroism”, this is it.
Paths of Glory is beautifully shot, justly famous for George Krause’s black-and-white photography, the long tracking shots in the trenches (the setting is WW1) and the performances, especially by George Macready as the power-hungry Mireau and veteran actor Adolphe Menjou as the manipulative General Broulard. To an extent, it suffers from the artificiality of American actors speaking in English while playing Frenchmen (it’s understood that this is cinematic licence, but it does get jarring, especially today, when we are more accustomed to realism – or at least to the idea of realism). Still, it was an enormous achievement for a film like this to even get made at a time when Hollywood was awash with gung-ho war movies that made guns and cannons look exciting. The biggest testament to its effectiveness is that it was banned in some countries (including France) for decades, and that it is still looked at askance by extreme right-wingers and by those who like to romanticise war. Luckily, the DVD is now widely available.
[Did an edited version of this for the New Sunday Express.]
Also see this lengthy analysis by Tim Dirks.
The very first shot in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is of a train pulling into a little railway station. Anyone familiar with the grammar of classic movie westerns will know that the railroad plays a very special role in these films: it’s a symbol of advancement, the bridge between the Old West and the New West; in some ways a bridge between savagery and civilisation. American mythology has it that before trains connected the Midwestern towns and frontiers with the East Coast, the rule of the gun prevailed. Authority figures were often irrelevant; the winner was usually the fastest draw.
On the train are the US senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles), who have come to visit the small town of Shinbone where they had first met a long time ago. They are received at the station by an aging former Marshall, and one immediately senses the nostalgia in the air. “The place sure has changed, Link,” Hallie tells him, “Churches, high schools, shops…who would have thought it?” “The railroad’s done that, Hallie,” he replies. The tone of this conversation is telling. They are talking about the markers of civilisation, of human progress, yet there’s a residual sadness, a sigh of regret beneath the words. There’s something almost grudging about the acknowledgement that change has, on the whole, been for the better.
Stoddard and Hallie have come to Shinbone for the burial of an old friend named Tom Doniphon, a man hardly anyone in town even knows about. The editor of the local newspaper, thrilled at the chance to interview a possible future vice-president, presses Stoddard for details. Who was this Doniphon and why was he important enough for a US senator to take time off from his important schedule?
In flashback, we get the meat of the story: Ransom’s arrival in Shinbone as an idealistic young lawyer decades earlier, eager to bring education to the boondocks; his encounter with the savage outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) who has the townsfolk in perpetual fear; his arguments with the rugged Tom (John Wayne), who believes that the only way to deal with Valance is with a gun; his attempts to get the people to organise themselves into a community governed by proper laws; and finally, his reluctant confrontation with Valance – in a shootout scene that lays the ground for the film’s most famous line: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Star personalities
John Wayne and James Stewart were 54 and 53 respectively when this film was made, and one of the standing criticisms of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is that they were far too old for their characters in the “flashback sequence” (which is, after all, 90 per cent of the film). Makeup helps to an extent, and one of the most notable things about Stewart’s performance as the young Ransom is how he quickens his reactions and physical movements without making it very obvious. He’s a lot more alert and sprightly than he presumably was in real life (in fact, even as a young man, Stewart’s stock in trade was a shuffling, slow walk and a Midwestern drawl – so this performance, given in his 50s, is probably among his most energetic ever!).
The criticism about age is of course justified from the point of view of verisimilitude, but it’s impossible to imagine this film without these men in the leading roles, for their screen personalities are crucial to its effect. Stewart, a more nuanced actor, was the modern man – vulnerable, complex, unafraid to show a feminine side (in fact, he spends some of the key scenes in this film in an apron, which has led to much critical analysis of gender roles!). This was reflected in the roles he played in middle age, especially in films by Hitchcock and Anthony Mann. Wayne, in contrast, was repeatedly used by Ford in their many films together as an emblem of the Old West – the macho cowboy who survived by his shooting skills. By all accounts, the screen image was not very far from the man’s real-life persona, for Wayne was known to be jingoistic, brow-beating, politically on the far right, pro-Vietnam War, full of notions about what “real men” must be like.
Watching him in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I remember a story told by Kirk Douglas in his autobiography The Ragman’s Tale. Douglas, who himself frequently did macho-man roles early in his career, had just stretched himself as an actor by playing the tortured Vincent Van Gogh in Lust for Life. In his book, he recounts an incident involving Wayne, who was present at a private screening of the film:
[John] kept looking at me. We hadn’t worked together yet. He seemed upset. He had a drink in one hand, motioned to me with the other. Out on the terrace, he berated me. “Christ, Kirk! How can you play a part like that? There’s so goddamn few of us left. We got to play strong, tough characters. Not those weak queers.”
I tried to explain. “Hey John, I’m an actor. I like to play interesting roles. It’s all make-believe. It isn’t real. You’re not really John Wayne, you know.” He looked at me oddly. I had betrayed him. I took it as a compliment; the picture had moved him, or at least disturbed him.
This is one side of the story. For the other side, you need to watch Wayne in some of his best roles in films like The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Red River – movies where he betrays a vulnerability, even a lack of self-confidence, beneath the posturing. Though a limited actor in many ways, he had the ability to convey the sadness and disaffection of a man who knows deep inside that his beliefs and values have no place in a rapidly changing world. Some of this can be seen in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: note the many scenes where Wayne watches Stewart with a curious little smile on his face, trying to figure him out. Or the way he observes 
the growing closeness between Ransom and Hallie and realises that he is losing “his girl” (another phrase that has its roots in an old patriarchal system) to a more sensitive man, a symbol of progress. Above all, note Ford’s seeming iconizing of Wayne in scenes like the key conversation between him and Stewart near the end of the film (the slow dissolve where, for a couple of seconds, what we see on screen is the sort of image that would be perfect for a postage stamp). But what Ford is doing here is more complex: he’s inverting the myth. This isn’t a Wayne character who will ride off triumphantly into the sunset; he’ll fade away quietly, spend his later days forgotten and alone.
This great film is about the passing of an old world. Despite some sentimentalising (as in the suggestion that Hallie continued to carry a torch for Tom; that she made the practical decision to marry Ransom and become a modern woman, but on some level was still in love with the rugged, uneducated frontiersman), it isn’t a mere elegy, for it recognises that many things about that old world were undesirable – who would argue in favour of the “let’s settle this with guns” brand of machismo? However, it gently makes the point that even when change is for the better, it’s possible to mourn the passing of a simpler time. It reminds us that the present is, after all, built on the bones of the past, and that various phases of transition have seen the crushing of the dreams of decent, well-meaning people. (In the context of the story, the implication is also that law and order in the West might never have been set down if it hadn’t been for the heroes of an earlier time, who went about things in a less “civilised” way. “Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance,” is the film’s ironical last line; but by this point we know better.)
Like many of the best Hollywood classics, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance can be appreciated foremost on narrative terms. The story, the dialogue and the performances (including Andy Devine as the cowardly Marshal Link Appleyard, and of course Lee Marvin as the petulant outlaw whipping his victims with a belt – a Method performance that's delightfully incongruous to this film) are of the highest order, and held together by one of the greatest of movie directors. John Ford made so many superb films that one tends to take his oeuvre for granted – rarely is there a singling out of this or that movie, the way one often sees done with Welles or Kurosawa or Hitchcock or Bergman. But this latter-day film is undeniably among his very best work.
[This is a much longer version of a piece I wrote for the New Sunday Express earlier in the week. A few previous posts on classic films: Strangers on a Train, Yojimbo, M*A*S*H, 8 1/2, Spartacus, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Twelve Angry Men, Peeping Tom, The Passion of Joan of Arc.]