The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence (Ford, 1962)
I like watching John Ford Westerns because they make me feel like a Fox News anchor. John Wayne can say the same thing Sean Hannity spends an hour a day obnoxiously yelling at a camera, except when he does it you think it's awesome. John Ford Westerns take place in that mythical world 'When things were better'. You see a guy trying to steal your horse, you shoot him. Sheriff comes by, "Why did you shoot him?" "Because he was trying to steal my horse." "Alright then. Have a nice day." Liberty Valence doesn't deserve a trial, just shoot his ass! All these things, as a modern individual, you might have problems with in real life, are totally awesome when they happen in a movie. Kind of like how when you watch a Tarantino movie, murder and torture are deemed awesome so long as it's the protagonist doing it, and when you watch 24, you quietly accept that Jack Bauer is right about everything.
For a gun toting western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is remarkably nuanced. It's like a less glamorous and non-overrated version of The Dark Knight. (With John Wayne as Batman, Jimmy Stewart as pre-explosion Harvey Dent, and Liberty Valence as Joker). The most memorable line of the movie 'When the legend becomes fact, you report the legend' has compounded meaning. Besides the meaning for the characters in the movie, it feels like John Ford making a late career statement "This isn't how the Old West really was, but it doesn't matter, because the mythology is more important than the fact." Idealized visions of the past may not be true, but they have the Stephen Colbert-coined quality of 'Truthiness'. Shinbone's transformation from a dusty backwater town to a flourishing city was based on a lie, but John Ford says, why should you care?
Rating: **** / 5
15/100
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