I was not surprised that a short video excerpt of the classic American movie “Who Shot Liberty Valance?” was posted just a few days after the killing of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.
The movie’s theme seeks to justify violence during the early days of the making of small town America. It was directed by John Ford and has become both a Western romantic as well as (to some critics) the greatest American political movie. To me, the movie has become a classic because of its theme. Rule of law or violence is a persisting dilemma in the American psyche. What to do when confronted with evil?
* * *
The film opens in 1910 when Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) who has become a senator and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) return to the small frontier town where they met and married 25 years ago.
The townsfolk ask why an influential and distinguished senator should return to the town? The couple had come to attend the funeral of Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) who was an “impoverished “nobody” as far as the town was concerned.
This is news. So a reporter tracks him down and Stoddard tells him the story why and that is what the film is about. When he first came, he was a young lawyer eager to use his knowledge and bring the rule of law to the town. But he is confronted by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), who has successfully terrorized the town as a trigger happy gangster.
When Valance makes fun and bullies Stoddard and his law books, it is the ignorant but essentially decent Doniphon who saves him. He gives him a lesson that in this town it is the man with the gun that ruled.
The love story is that both men were in love with Hallie (Vera Miles) but to ensure her happiness, Doniphon was willing to give her up to Stoddard.
Stoddard tells the reporter how Liberty Valance challenged him to a gun duel. The young lawyer would have had no chance in such a duel. Shots were fired, Stoddard was alive and standing and Liberty Valance was dead. The pilgrim lawyer became a hero overnight and that launched his political career to get rid of corruption.
Doniphon, in strictest confidence, told Stoddard the truth: It was he, not Stoddard, who shot down Valance but he did not think it necessary that the truth be known to the world. It was more important to Doniphon that a decent, honest man like Stoddard, become a major political figure.
While Stoddard went on to a spectacular political career, bringing extensive reforms to the state, Doniphon quietly faded away.
Richard Brady who reviewed the film “questions the role of myth in forging the legends of the West, while setting this theme in the elegiac atmosphere of the West itself, set off by the aging Stewart and Wayne.”
“The Western is intrinsically the most political movie genre, because, like Plato’s Republic, it is concerned with the founding of cities, and because it depicts the various abstract functions of government as direct, physical actions. It’s also an inherently romantic genre, because of its connection with the nation’s founding mythology. (One of the strengths of Ford’s movie is its depiction of the actual grassroots practical politicking in the Western territories.)
When he finished telling the story the aged Stoddard asks the reporter if he would publish the truth. The reporter answered by saying what has become a classic quotation. He tore his notes and said, “This is the West, Sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
Ford in making the movie “Who shot Liberty Valance?” breaks that promise.
“He prints the facts behind it – and makes a movie about the moral burden of a life lived in the name of a myth and the ethical implications of direct action. Implicitly, the subject of the film is also that of a nation founded in this way,” adds Brady who posted the review in 2009.
* * *
So here we are in 2011 and the direct action of killing Osama bin Laden with comments from New Yorker’s David Remnick. He writes on the day that President Obama announced that Osama bin Laden was dead.
“President Obama striding into the East Room of the White House to inform the country that “justice has been done,” that Special Operations forces had just hours earlier completed a “targeted operation” to kill bin Laden at a lightly guarded compound in northern Pakistan. Soldiers had packed his corpse into a helicopter, the official accounts said, and, from the deck of the USS Carl Vinson, they slid his properly sanctified remains into the North Arabian Sea.”
Bin Laden is the contemporary version of Liberty Valance. As a global terrorist there is no reason why we, not just Americans, should not be better off with him dead.
Yet according to Remnick, bin Laden signed his last will and testament on December 14, 2001, while hiding in the caves of Tora Bora, instructing his children not to work for Al Qaeda: “If it is good, then we have had our share; if it is bad, then it is enough.” That is interesting and introduces yet another aspect of this strange “evil” man.
Remnick thinks that President Obama wanted to maximize on the news when his political opponent Donald Trump made a big thing about Obama’s being a Muslim. “Germophobic and handshake-averse, Donald Trump was an unlikely candidate, yet he won support for expressing doubt that the President was a US citizen. Perhaps Barack Obama was born in Kenya; perhaps he was not the Christian he claimed to be but a secret Muslim. The global jihad that bin Laden sought to inaugurate did not create the xenophobia that buoyed Trump’s ambitions, but it helped to electrify it.”
The killing of bin Laden was more than a successful military exercise. To Remnick it was also a counter political move against Trump. For those who lost loved ones Remnick writes, “there was no glee, no illusion that the lost had been returned.” And that was why he thinks the President made the announcement in a restrained spirit when he called on the country to renew old decencies.
He also asked the State of Hawaii to release his “long form” birth certificate.