Shooting Liberty Valance

By Michael Patrick O’Brien–

Did you ever wonder what your life might be like if you lived during another era? Fortunately, I don’t have to guess blindly. Legendary film director John Ford may have provided me with a hint in one of his acclaimed movies.

No, it’s not John Wayne as Sean Thornton going home to Ireland, wooing redheaded Maureen O’Hara, and living in a whitewashed cottage in The Quiet Man. I wish. I love that 1952 classic.

I am thinking about another John Wayne movie, but John Wayne does not play me. Jimmy Stewart got that role, in an April 1962 movie that now is almost as old as me.

In Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Wayne stars as local rancher Tom Doniphon. Stewart plays Ransom “Ranse” Stoddard, a lawyer who migrates by stage coach to the fictional town of Shinbone in an unidentified territory of the United States.

Stoddard learns right away how unsuited he is for the Wild West. A thug named Liberty Valance (portrayed with convincing menace by Lee Marvin) and his gang hijack the coach. Stoddard tries to stop Valance from robbing a woman, and Valance beats him brutally in response.

Doniphon and his ranch hand find the unconscious Stoddard and take him to Doniphon’s friend Hallie (Vera Miles), who works at a steakhouse in Shinbone. Hallie nurses Stoddard back to health.

Robbed of everything except his law books, Stoddard starts working at the steakhouse too. In his spare time, he researches how to bring Valance to jail and justice, despite the reluctance of the local marshal (played by actor Andy Devine) to help. 

Stoddard teaches Hallie and the townsfolk to read and write, while navigating ongoing threats from and confrontations with Valance. Soon Stoddard and local newspaper publisher Dutton Peabody are leading a campaign for statehood. 

Clouds appear on the horizon. Local cattle ranchers hate the idea of statehood and hire Valance to stop the effort. Doniphon, upset that Hallie seems to be falling in love with Stoddard, warns him he better learn to shoot a gun and then mocks his efforts to do just that. 

Stoddard tries to follow Doniphon’s advice, but never quite masters the old handgun Peabody gives him. Meanwhile, Valance and his gang assault Peabody and vandalize the newspaper office. 

An outraged Stoddard calls Valance out, but Valance quickly and easily disarms him during a street fight. Valance is about to kill the young lawyer when Stoddard somehow grabs his gun from the ground and shoots it. Soon after, Valance dies from a gunshot wound.

Although now revered as “the man who shot Liberty Valance,” Stoddard withdraws from public life because he does not want fame derived solely from having killed a man. Doniphon later tells Stoddard that he (Doniphon) was the one who shot Valance from the shadows, knowing Stoddard would fail in the gunfight if left to his own devices.

With Doniphon’s encouragement, Stoddard rejoins the statehood campaign, which succeeds. The now-popular Stoddard marries Hallie and goes on to a successful career as governor and then senator of the new state. 

The movie starts and ends at the same flashback scene occurring years after these operative events. An aged Stoddard attends Doniphon’s funeral and tells the truth about his misunderstood history to a news editor. The editor, however, refuses to print the real story. 

Stoddard asks why. The editor says, “This is the West sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

How would I do in such a world?

I am not sure that I’d survive very long in the rough and tumble old American West. I hate bar room fights. I like my whiskey with ginger ale. And I cannot shoot a gun. None of this bodes well for a late nineteenth century me.

Yet, for obvious reasons, I can readily identify with a lawyer who befriends a newspaper editor, seeks justice from words and books instead of fists, and tries to help people around him. And I’ve had (and needed) plenty of help standing up to bullies myself.

Ultimately, of course, my quality of life in another era is unknowable. Wondering about it is an interesting, but academic, exercise. This does not mean, however, that I cannot learn something in the process.

Reviewing Ford’s 1962 classic work, the great movie critic Roger Ebert wrote, “The film takes place at that turning point in the West when the rule of force gave way to the rule of law, and when literacy began to gain a foothold. It asks the question: Does a man need to carry a gun in order to disagree or state an opinion?”

In Ford’s old American West, legend trumps fact, educated opinion is rare, fear is widespread, brute force walks around openly on the streets, and the pen rarely is mightier than the sword. Although Ford sets his saga in the late 1800s, the dysfunction he portrays seems strangely familiar even 150 years later.

Consider Russia’s brutal attacks on Ukraine. Culture wars. Tyre Nichols. Uvalde. Will Smith at the Oscars. Alex Jones and fake news. The apparent Saudi Arabian murder of journalist Jamal Ahmad Khashoggi. Social media echo chambers. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene’s call for a “national divorce” between red states and blue states.

As I think more about it, I guess I don’t need to time travel to test my mettle. Liberty Valance also lurks around twenty-first century street corners. 

When I run into him, just like Ranse Stoddard did, I hope someone like John Wayne has my back too.

*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.