Arriving in Shinbone, an untamed town in the open range of the old West, Ransom Stoddard, Attorney at Law, (Stewart) is robbed at gunpoint and beaten to within an inch of his life by brutal outlaw Liberty Valance. Stoddard demands justice as he has been taught it: Valance tried and then jailed. But he quickly finds the law in Shinbone a joke. The Marshall (Andy Devine) is an overweight coward, terrified of outlaws and uninterested in arresting them. Though everyone in Shinbone is aware of Valance’s cruelty, they are helpless to stop him. In fact, the only man in town who isn’t terrified of Valance is the man who finds Stoddard in the desert after he’s left for dead, a rancher named Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). He calls Stoddard “Pilgrim,” emphasizing his nature as a stranger in the West, and warns that hanging up his shingle as an attorney in town is a surefire way to end up dead. Unless, of course, Stoddard leans how to fire a pistol.

Many of Ford’s Westerns explore the notion of the forces of the East coming to tame and settle the West. In MY DARLING CLEMENTINE, the title character, a school teacher from Boston, arrives in town as Marshall Wyatt Earp (Henry Fonda) is ridding Tombstone of the menace of the Clanton gang. After the showdown at the O.K. Corral, Earp leaves, but Clementine stays to start a new school, and the idea is the town has been made safe for “good” society. The great twist in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is that the civilizing agent is a man, Stewart’s Ransom Stoddard, who has been trained in the law and who cherishes it above all else. Throughout, Ford intentionally feminizes Stewart's character. With his money stolen, Stoddard earns his keep washing dishes. Later, he serves as a “waitress” just as Valance enters the saloon.

Ford’s a man I wish I knew more about. His name and career were made on some of the most famous Westerns of all time; among them STAGECOACH, FORT APACHE, and THE SEARCHERS. By emphasizing the settlers as heroes of the Old West he typically cast the Native Americans as the villains in many of his films, yet by this stage of his career, his portrayal of this conflict had become far more ambivalent. In one of his last films, CHEYENNE AUTUMN, Ford even made the Native Americans his stars and cast the Whites as the villains and buffoons. Placing Stewart’s character in the lead role and casting Wayne as his opposite accentuates Ford’s deepening confliction; with two popular, dynamic actors in both roles the audience can be made to see the validity of both sides of the argument.

The closest cultural comparison I can draw to this element of LIBERTY VALANCE is to the dilemma at the heart of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original construction of The X-Men, and the classic battle between the pacifistic optimism of Professor Xavier and the pessimistic might makes right mentality of Magneto. Bryan Singer even borrowed from Ford by casting two very charismatic, equally powerful actors, Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellan, in the lead roles, to fully engross the audience in the morality of their conflict. The best part of this comparison is that The X-Men debuted just a year after LIBERTY VALANCE, giving credence to a theory I give a great deal of weight to: that a society has an undeniable impact on its popular culture and vice versa. Whether Ford or Lee & Kirby intended, they both tapped into the same debate that was raging through the Civil Rights debates of the 1960s. By peace or by force? Martin Luther King or Malcolm X?