At night, on the main street of a town called Shinbone, a lawyer who has never fired a gun picks up the revolver he just dropped. He is bleeding from one arm. Across the street a gunman takes aim and tells him the next one goes right between the eyes. Two shots ring out, so close together they sound like one, and the gunman falls. The lawyer's name is Ransom Stoddard, and from that night on, as far as the whole territory is concerned, he is the man who shot Liberty Valance.
The film itself opens twenty-five years later, with a train pulling into Shinbone. A senator steps down with his wife. They have come from the East for a funeral nobody cares about, that of Tom Doniphon, a rancher the town has long forgotten, who is about to go into the ground in a cheap coffin with no boots on until the senator asks for them to be put back. The local paper sends someone to find out what a senator is doing at a nobody's funeral. While he deals with the reporters, his wife rides out with the old marshal to a burned-down house outside town and comes back carrying a cactus rose. By then Stoddard has already started talking.
Ford shot it in 1962, in black and white, barely leaving the Paramount lot, a long way from the Monument Valley of his classic westerns. He called it a close-up picture. What interested him by then was the lie, and you film a lie up close. The original story, by Dorothy M. Johnson, had run in Cosmopolitan in 1949, back when Cosmopolitan still printed western fiction. Sergio Leone said it was the only film in which Ford learnt about something called pessimism.
Stoddard's story starts with a stagecoach hold-up. He is a young lawyer heading west with his law books packed in his luggage, and Liberty Valance, the same man who will later drop on that street, horsewhips him while shouting that he'll teach him law, western law. There are two kinds of law in that scene, the kind in the books and the kind on the end of the whip. Ford takes two hours to show how you get from one to the other, and he does it in the least reassuring way available.
The beaten lawyer is hauled into town on Tom Doniphon's wagon. This is John Wayne at his driest, a rancher who happens to be the one man in Shinbone that Valance would rather leave alone, and who knows it. To Doniphon the law is a luxury, something people can afford when they have somebody like him nearby. When Stoddard, still in bandages, announces he is going to put Valance in jail with the statute book in his hand, Doniphon gives him the only lesson in jurisprudence that works in Shinbone: out here a man settles his own problems.
Between them stands Hallie, who waits tables at the Ericsons' restaurant and cannot read. Doniphon courts her in his own fashion, which means bringing her a cactus rose now and then and adding rooms to his ranch house for a wedding he takes for granted. Stoddard teaches her her letters. Then comes the business with the steak. Stoddard is waiting tables in an apron to pay his keep, Valance trips him, and the plate that goes flying is Doniphon's, so Doniphon stands up and tells Valance to pick it up. There they are, two grown men squaring off over a piece of beef with their hands near their guns, until Stoddard, furious with them both, picks it up himself. He is right and he understands nothing, because in Shinbone a steak on the floor can end in gunfire.
Stewart came with twenty years of playing the decent institutional man, the one who talked himself hoarse for a lost cause in Capra's Senate. Wayne was the West, and he was the West because Ford had invented him. They had never made a picture together. Ford sets them staring at each other over a steak, and what squares off there is two whole American mythologies, built by the same industry. Years later he told Bogdanovich that Wayne was the real lead, even though Stewart had nearly all the dialogue.
And there is the school. Stoddard gathers the town's children, a couple of adults and Hallie into a classroom and writes on the blackboard that education is the basis of law and order. Pompey, Doniphon's hired man, recites the Declaration of Independence and forgets the part about all men being created equal. A lot of people forget that part, Stoddard tells him. Ford was too old and too Irish to let it pass that in the room where equality is being taught, the only black man present is the armed servant of the man who holds the town together.
The big cattlemen want the territory to stay open range, and they pay Valance to make sure the election goes the way it should. It doesn't. Doniphon turns down the nomination at the town meeting, and the delegates sent to the territorial convention end up being Stoddard and Dutton Peabody, the drunk and eloquent editor of the Shinbone Star. Valance loses the count and calls Stoddard out. That night his men wreck the printing press and leave Peabody half dead for having printed that Valance murdered a farmer. Stoddard takes the revolver and goes looking for the man who taught him western law with a whip. All he knows about shooting comes from one lesson at Doniphon's ranch, which ended with paint all over his suit and a punch thrown.
Ford films the gunfight with the coldness of an execution. Valance toys with his prey, puts a bullet in his arm, makes him stoop for the gun and announces the next shot between the eyes. Again the two reports that sound like one. Valance drops with a look of surprise, the town embraces the lawyer, and Hallie chooses him that same night as she dresses his arm. Doniphon walks in, sees it, and understands. The legend is printed before any newspaper gets the chance.
At the convention a spokesman for the cattle interests accuses Stoddard of building a career on a dead man, and Stoddard, who thinks the same, withdraws. Doniphon, drunk, finds him in a side room and tells him what happened. Ford films the whole gunfight again, this time from across the street, and from there you see what the first version hid. Doniphon is standing in a dark alley with Pompey's rifle, and he fires at the very instant Stoddard pulls the trigger. Cold-blooded murder, he says, but he can live with it, because Hallie wanted the lawyer alive. He orders Stoddard to take the nomination on grounds no statute covers (he taught Hallie to read, so now he can give her something to read about) and walks out without another word.
For half the film Ford lets us believe the first version, which is long enough to become one more citizen of Shinbone and to vote, like everyone else, for Stoddard. By the time the camera crosses the street it is too late. The legend and the fact are the same scene shot from two sidewalks, and legality depends on where the camera stands.
Doniphon is left with nothing. On the night of the gunfight he had ridden home drunk and set fire to his house with the new room inside it, the one he was building to marry Hallie in, and stayed to wait for the flames. Pompey dragged him out. That is the last we see of him until he turns up twenty-five years later in that cheap coffin, the one the undertaker stripped of its boots.
Stoddard finishes his confession. The governorship, the Senate, the embassy in London, the vice-presidential nomination now on offer, all of it rests on a shot another man fired. Maxwell Scott, the paper's editor, takes his reporter's notes and drops them in the fire. This is the West, sir, he says. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. That line is how the film got into the language, and it usually gets quoted as an example of newspaper cynicism. To me it reads more like the unwritten constitution of any political order. Shinbone went from territory to state, and from wilderness to garden, on the back of a crime committed one night in an alley, a crime the new order cannot acknowledge without coming apart.
Any order that believes it is made of nothing but law (treaties, courts, parliaments, paper) has an alley of its own, and it usually handles it the way Stoddard handled his, with gratitude in private and amnesia in public. The order the West has taken for granted since 1945 is the biggest case there is, and the man holding the rifle in that alley does not work out of Brussels. The Bible got there before Ford, and put it more drily. The first city in Scripture is founded by Cain. A crime at the origin does not invalidate the city; the trouble starts when the city forgets and talks itself into believing it founded itself, which is the most dangerous kind of innocence.
That leaves the train back to Washington. Stoddard suggests giving it all up and moving back to Shinbone, and Hallie's face lights up as it has not once in the whole picture. Then he asks what he has been chewing on since the wake, who put the cactus rose on Tom's coffin. I did, she says, and nothing more. Stoddard thanks the conductor for the railroad's courtesies and the conductor answers with the film's last line: nothing's too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance. Stoddard says nothing. The sentence hangs in the car, exact and false at the same time, like every order that works.