‘When the legend becomes fact, print the legend...’
As a budding cinema completist, one soon realises that if you want to sample the very best of what cinema has to offer then you will have to sit through a bunch of crap westerns to get to the six good ones. Picture the scene. It’s Saturday afternoon. You’re bored of playing Sonic the Hedgehog on the Sega Mega Drive. Your mates are busy. It’s raining. You go downstairs to see what your dad is up to. Well, he’s probably watching a Saturday afternoon western. And by god, does it look boring. As a kid, I couldn’t imagine a more stupefying, obscenely dull experience than sitting through one of those black and white abominations. Now, in the year of our lord 2022, I would give just about anything to sit and watch a western with my dad. And if I were to choose just one, The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance would probably be it…
A man has died in the town of Shinbone. I mean, this is a western after all. Senator Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), returning after many years away, arrives in the town to honour the man who has died and to tell his story. It’s a story of violence and betrayal. Of card games and whiskey. It’s the story of Stoddard, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and Liberty Vallance (Lee Marvin). And boy, is it a doozy.
On the whole, westerns are either great or unspeakably tedious. The Man Who Shot Liberty Vallance falls squarely into the former camp. James Stewart. John Wayne. Lee Marvin. You’ll struggle to find a better trio of actors fronting any movie anywhere. And all three of them are electric here. Stewart clearly enjoys being able to veer ever-so-slightly away from his usual all-American hero, Marvin has a lot of fun also as the biggest dickhead in the west, and John Wayne… well John Wayne is just John Wayne. He might have been a Nazi fuckhead, but he was also an incredible onscreen presence. To see Wayne acting alongside Stewart, one of the other all time greatest leading men, is truly a sight to behold. Imagine sharing a beer with them… Yikes. Remarkably, Edmond O’Brien nearly blows all of them out of the water as drunk newsman Dutton Peabody, but this is truly an ensemble effort – not just from the cast, but from the steady hand of John Ford behind the camera. This is a film of legends.
There are more celebrated westerns, and there are even westerns that are probably superior on a purely cinematic level… but this one? This one is my favourite. A true masterpiece.