The Next Best Thing to the Man Who Didn't Shoot Liberty Valance

I've been seein' a lot of movies lately.  For the most part really, really good ones.  I just saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance last night.  My friend Caz talked me into seein' it.  I don't like Westerns and the one time I was forced to watch a Western (in a film class) I hated it.  It was The Searchers.  Had John Wayne playing a racist cowboy who hates Indians.  It was probably more complicated than I gave it credit for but nonetheless it just wasn't my cup of tea. 

But The Man Who Shot Liberty, Caz said, is a "thinking person's Western" and he was right. It was really good.  It's about a idealistic young lawyer named Ransom Stoddard played by Jimmy Stewart who goes west and runs into a town bully by the name of Liberty Valance.  Liberty's pretty much a hired thug: mean, agressive and in-definite-need of reigning in.  John Wayne plays his counterpart, an equally tough violence-prone "good" guy.  He keeps Liberty at bay (haha) and sorta protects the hapless townfolk from his unpredictable rampages. 

But Ransom's a law and order guy.  He doesn't believe in violence.  He wants to arrest Liberty, not shoot him.  And ain't that a perfect setup for a good story?

Although me being who I am, I was wanting it to turn out to be about the Man Who DIDN'T Shoot Liberty Valance.  The man who found the third way between violence and submission: non-violence.  Then what a parable it would be for the post 9/11 world!  To have someone stand up in a world of ever-escalating tit-for-tat violence and say no.  Here's an alternative.

It doesn't turn out that way, of course and for a while, carrying my international relations theory further in the movie I was afraid that the parable was going to be that it was the John Wayne character who represented the U.S. --the user of "restrained" violence, violence as a last resort-- who comes in and saves the law-and-order weakling from the throes of the terrorist.  Fortunately it didn't turn out that way either.

How it turns out (and don't worry if you haven't seen it, this won't spoil anything) is that law-and-order is NOT what prevails against the Liberty terrorist but what makes it a good movie is that this is not portrayed as an uncomplicated good thing.

Now here is a spoiler alert!  If you want to see it stop reading now.  I mean.  Go look at this.

Okay, for the rest of you:  The idea that men get elected to positions of power based to greater or lesser extents on the fact that they have proven themselves capable of violence is something that is definitely has particular relevance to us today.  Just be careful not to say that out loud or you might end up like Retired U.S. General Wesley Clark this past week, who dared to say that military service in and of itself should not qualify someone to be President.

It shouldn't but too often it does.