Standing Up For Liberty Valance
An exclusive analysis of John Ford’s next-to-last Western by Kevin Costner.
By: Henry Cabot Beck 04/01/2009
Off the floor—
And did you see Lee Marvin? He did not want that fight to occur. You saw that Wayne really did. Wayne took that second line, that second line is more important than the first one. “You pick it up, Liberty.” Right? That’s an important line. But that second line is the most important line, “You don’t have a fight here.” Then Wayne says, “I’m makin’ it my fight.”
I’m not saying the lines exactly right, but it’s that second line, which really changes the staged picture. It’s like Boom! You go, “Now, what will Marvin do?” That’s glacial right there. It’s frozen. That staged picture is frozen right there, until somebody does something.
Wayne, letting Marvin know he’s willing to die over a steak.
Right. And what it is, it’s a miscalculation for a bully. It doesn’t make Lee any less of a bully, because we know he’s formidable. But it’s not where he wants the fight to occur. Right then, the bully is thinking, “I should have shot him in the back 100 f---in’ times before now, and I wouldn’t be having this problem right now.” But there he is.
In the original short story, the Wayne character says to the Stewart character, “You faced him. You went to meet him. If you got to be proud of something, you can remember that. It’s a fact you ain’t got much else.”
That’s my point. I think Stoddard is haunted forever by that moment, but he has to live with it. The truth was, he wasn’t the Robert Vaughn character in The Magnificent Seven, hiding behind the wall. That was never him.
He wasn’t weak; hysterical, maybe.
No. It’s adrenaline. It’s out of your league. It’s like, “What’s going on here? I’m a man of principle; how did I f---ing get drawn into this?” There’s a point where a man doesn’t care if he dies, and that’s where Jimmy Stewart went.
It doesn’t help the film that Stewart’s character was meant to be much younger than 54-year-old Stewart.
What happens is that you can’t always find formidable actors. Films are fraught with those mistakes. In fact, Wayne put those characters in a lot of his terrible movies. You see these Ricky Nelsons and The Sons of Katie Elder, these guys, they’re not formidable young guys. They don’t even seem like his younger brothers. What happens is you realize you have to have somebody who’s substantial. If you can find them at the appropriate age, you do it; and if you can’t, you keep going up until you find someone who can carry the weight of the part.
Comments (4)
The Costner interview was great but still I felt that some parts were missing.
Doniphan and Valance are Titans and symbols. John Wayne and Lee Marvin are powerful screen personae that eclipse the fact that their two characters are one dimensional.
Doniphan is the romantic western vision that even John Wayne was shedding at the time.
Valance is a ruthless and almost mindless tyrant and a front for nefarious (unspecified) corparate interests. He seems to represent unrestrained liberty hence his name. Lee Marvin was born for this part and IMHO no modern screen actor could play Liberty.
Stoddard's role I think is to keep these two forces from confronting each other because a victory by either one would destroy any hope of progress. The conflict over the steak brings this to a boiling point. Jimmmy Stewart's earlier career (It's a Wonderful LIfe, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) reflect the idea of reason and good will as the way to construct a future society. As the article pointed there weren't any younger actors around Hollywood with the gravitas for the part
A victory by Doniphan would probably led to a stagnant, reactionary west mired in romanticism. He does not notice that Halley is illiterate. She would only be another piece of furniture for his whitewashed cottage dream.
The story hinges, I believe, on the gunfight and introduces moral ambiguity.
Doniphon shoots Valance unseeen from the shadows (essentially shooting Liberty in the back) violating every canon of the western movie genre. Doniphon's decline is inevitable after this.
I would like to point to three other actors in this film who weren't mentioned in the Costner interview.
Burgess Meredith, as the newspaper editor who says,"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend" which is an underlying theme.
John Carradine as the attorney at the statehood convention whose verbal attack on Stoddard leads to the unwinding on the secret. Carrradine's role seems like a cliche but Carradine wrote the roles that would become cliches.
Woody Strode as Pompey. It's sad to think that if Strode's career had come twenty years later he would have been recognized as a great Black film star with such as James Earl Jones and Denzel Washington, a universal actor.
The Costner interview by Beck and Costner's observations were classic. I've re-read it several times. I believe "formidable" and proper actor selection in a role to insure "formidability" recalls the movie "A Few Good Men". There was real concern in casting Tom Cruise to go up against Jack Nicholson in the court room scene. Could Cruise stand up to Nicholson? (He did in spades) How much better to consider this while casting rather to have it considered by critics after the movie is released.
Doug McLeod
Liberty Valance is my most favorite western movie of all time - I saw it at the drive in with my parents when I was nine years old! Jimmy Stewart was 54 years old when he played Ransom Stoddard? I never knew that he was not as young as he depicted in the film. Which means that Stewart is the supreme actor that he was. Bravo! Speaking of age depiction in movies, I really hate it when a film is made of a book where the book character seems older and then a younger actor is cast for that part probably because of sheer sex appeal for a younger audience. I really hate that. But westerns always seem to me to be created with the right actors for the job. I especially like the movie, Dances With Wolves, because the film gets deep into the humanity of all races, showing that Indians as well as whites have positive and negative characteristics. No one is more evil than anyone else.
"You see these Ricky Nelsons and The Sons of Katie Elder, these guys, they’re not formidable young guys."
I don't know about that, Kevin. I think Nelson was pretty formidable as Colorado. I believed him, believed Colorado was every bit as smart, competent and dangerous-when-he-needed-to-be-dangerous as the character--clearly based on Billy Bonney--was supposed to be.
Nelson's acting chops weren't the best but he WAS charismatic, and I suspect charisma (or lack of it) has a lot to do with an actor's "formidability" quotient.
What you're really talking about here is Alpha males vs. non-Alphas, I think, and I'm convinced that no matter how skilled an actor is, no degree of acting chops will turn a non-Alpha into an Alpha convincingly. Alphas are by definition charismatic, and how do you "act" charisma? You either got it or you don't...
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