The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: Difference between revisions

** This film does echo ''[[Fort Apache]]'' with the theme of [[Based on a Great Big Lie|needing our heroes more than the truth]]. But where the earlier film ended [[Your Mileage May Vary|on an uplifting]] [[Bittersweet Ending|note]], the later film holds no such illusions.

* [[Dawson Casting]]: Played with. Wayne, Stewart and most of the others are playing characters well younger than the actors, but it's justified by most of the movie being a flashback.

* [[Eagle Land]]: Played with. The movie suggests that our [[Manifest Destiny]] of moving Westward was not as clean and heroic as the school books want us to think.

* [[Exactly What It Says On the Tin]]: The title.

* [[Foregone Conclusion]]: Liberty Valance is going to get shot. By a man.

** {{spoiler|The plot twist is that the man who got the credit ''did not do it''.}}

* [[Heroic BSOD]]: Played straight, both ways. Ransom feels guilty enough about shooting a man, even if it was a monster like Liberty Valance. {{spoiler|Tom doesn't feel guilty about ''really'' shooting Liberty, but his life falls apart anyway when Hallie switches her affection to Ransom, whom Tom despises AND respects.}}

* [[Heroic Sacrifice]]: {{spoiler|Tom refuses to take credit for killing Liberty Valance because Hallie loves Ransom now, and because Tom knows that Ransom can do better - and provide for Hallie better - with that reputation than Tom can.}}

** Tom's sidekick/servent/BlackBestFriend (heck, only friend) Pompey is Woody Strode (from ''Spartacus'', ''Sgt Rutledge'' etc..

* [[Hypocritical Humor]]: The orator arguing for the cattle barons' desire that the territory remains a territory (that they can control) denounces the settlers' attempt to promote Ransom as the Congressional representative to get them statehood. He argues - while wearing the Confederate officer's uniform no less - they shouldn't send the man who killed Liberty Valance to the same place where [[Abraham Lincoln]] died like a saint.

* [[What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic]]: The movie plays out the entire theme of The American West: The coming of civilization to tame the wilderness. Peabody's [[Rousing Speech]] for statehood towards the end of the film underlines the whole story.

** It can also be read, [[Your Mileage May Vary|should you wish]], as a treatise on America's love affair with the Gun: while the progressive politics of Ransom Stoddard have made the real changes, what is remembered - perhaps even pined for - is the myth of a single well-placed bullet making all things right.

 

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