The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

The first thing that strikes me about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is how similar it is to The Searchers, especially in terms of its John Wayne character. In Valance, Wayne plays Tom Donophin, a goodhearted and decent, but dangerous, farmer who is the only man in town not afraid of the titular villain. Donophin is, like Ethan Edwards, on the same side as the communitarians - he's for making the territory into a state, for democracy, for some sort of advancement of African-American rights, etc. He eventually fights for the side of good, shooting down Valance when he's facing off with the tenderfoot Ransom Stoddard, that Donophin's former girlfriend loves. In other words, Donophin is Ethan Edwards: he's the muscle that the community needs to protect it from the outlaw, but he doesn't end up getting his own family, he provides that muscle technically outside the law, and the film ends with him being shut outside the community. In fact, in Valance the final scene of Searchers is reenacted twice: first, just after Donophin tells Stoddard that he secretly shot Valance when Stoddard was facing him down, but Stoddard should continue to take the credit for it. Stoddard, henceforth "the man who shot liberty valance," walks back into the crowded meeting hall and accepts political appointment as the man who vanquished the rancher's hired gun and who will make the territory into the state. Donophin is left looking into the community meeting, then walks away. This is the final scene of the flashback that occupies the bulk of the film; in the next scene, Stoddard and his wife leave Donophin's casket, and the casket remains, just as in the earlier scene, behind the doors after the community builders have walked out.

Valance is most different from The Searchers in that it presents a stronger alternative to the "good bad man" than Searchers does. Although Stoddard is constantly mocked, as a dishwasher who can't shoot straight, he eventually becomes a well-known teacher and lawyer, and, in the frame story, a multi-term senator, governor, and ambassador who brings railroads and irrigation to the desert and truly civilizes it. In The Searchers we see all these things as distant promises at best, but in Valance Jimmie Stewart's Stoddard brings them all to pass and embodies them, sometimes forcefully. He still needs Donophins (aka Ethan's) gun, but only in the past - in the present day, we hear that Donophin hasn't worn a gun for years. The Community, at last, has come to pass.

The strangest part about this film, when compared to naturalist literary texts, is the reversed position of the ranchers and the railroads. As in Shane, the villains are the cattle ranchers and the true community is made up of small farmers trying to band together against the giant villainous specter. As people repeatedly point out in Valance, the railroad brings both progress and civilization, and promises a better life in the future for the small farmers. This is a vast contrast from The Octopus where the big ranchers, growing wheat instead of raising cattle, are the sympathetic figures, and the railroad brings not progress but the destructive corporatization of the West. I've already noted this as a strange feature in Norris' text to begin with - for all that that novel, especially in Presley's poem "The Toilers," attempts to embrace the proletariat, its heroes are mostly giant land barons of the kind scorned in Valance and Shane. This might just underline Norris' fundamental conservatism, or at least his disconnect with the common people as displayed in McTeague, but it certainly bears further investigation.