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Gene Pitney :: (The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance

Without question, rugged dudes beset with a wide range of military, political, economic, and cultural conflicts have come to epitomize both the history and myth of the Wild West. The most influential literary depiction of frontier manhood under duress originates from Owen Wister’s fictional work The Virginian, which was published in 1902. In this seminal novel, the Virginian is a transplanted ‘Southern gentleman’ who enters an industrializing and consequently disordered Old West. As he faces challenges and threats unique to this nebulous environment, he discovers that preserving dignity and defending wealth are challenges best met by enacting equal measures of prudence and aggression. In this emergent survivor, this dual-natured manly man, Wister arguably fashioned the very first in a long line of ‘good’ cowboy heroes. This particular brand of hero is one whose ethos translates roughly to an uneasy marriage of virility and virtue. Broadly speaking, one can ague that American foreign policy in no small way continues to bear this paradigm’s indelible mark. But when it comes to the lore of Manifest Destiny, masculinity remains a convenient distraction that recasts the frontier’s violent seizure as some kind of valiant civilizing crusade.

In this vein, some form of the Virginian - the quintessential arbiter of masculine progress and power - recurs throughout a manly bounty of both fictional and factual Western texts. In a more recent phase of this expansive tradition, we find John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) celebrating brave and principled men, eulogizing an Old West unspoiled and, at the same time, begrudgingly endorsing the modernizing process that killed it. As Ford’s final Western, the film is set in the generic boomtown of Shinbone, where the dastardly Valence, played masterfully by Lee Marven, terrorizes the good-natured locals as they endeavor to obtain statehood. Valance is not the Wisterian version of a noble cowboy; he is the prototypical ‘bad’ cowboy: a man without honor, an uncivilized thug. In a surprising narrative twist, Valance’s nemesis is not the local Virginianesque rancher called Tom Doniphan. The chief rival is instead the newly arrived, bookish lawyer Ransom Stoddard, played by the venerable Jimmy Stewart. Riding in on stagecoach, Stoddard wields nobly the scepter of democratic order and feels its power greatly outweighs that of an obsolete pistol. But after Valence robs Stoddard and beats him to a bloody pulp, Stoddard realizes that “with force threatening, talk is no good anymore.” As such, realizing the sheer impotence of the law forces Stoddard to accept Valence’s challenge to meet in a good old-fashioned duel after which “only one man comes home.”

Of course, when Stoddard enters the contest and quickly finds himself on the verge of a humiliating defeat, the ‘truly’ capable Doniphan - a mock-up of the Virginian - emerges from the shadows and smokes Valance. John Wayne plays Doniphan. So in a way, this song is more or less about what John Wayne took himself to be: a just man who remained “the toughest man south of the picket wire.” But in a larger and more important sense, Gene Pitney’s 1962 top-ten hit, which Ford intended to use as the movie’s theme song, is the nearly perfect encapsulation of prevailing Western motifs, tidily arranged in a three minute package. In the context of the film and the song, the frontier’s successful transformation from a lawless libertarian utopia into a regulated democratic civilization requires not only Stoddard’s legal expertise but also Doniphan/Wayne’s calculated brawn. Moreover, the song extols those enduring traits many continue to ascribe consciously and unconsciously to the meaning of manhood. In conclusion, the degree to which one recognizes just how intimately linked conventional masculinity is to the legacy of the Wild West is another dense matter entirely and, quite frankly, a query that is as relevant as ever (see Crawford Ranch).

(The Man Who Shot) Liberty Valance
Gene Pitney (homepage)

(note - Part of what inspired this piece is a NPR feature that discussed the life of Gene Pitney, who passed away recently.)

claire said on tuesday, april 22nd, 2008

Domenico said on wednesday, april 23rd, 2008