- Welcome toUniversity Place Presents
I'm Norman Gilliland
For better or worse,
the image of America around the world is shaped
probably most by Westerns.
And Westerns, of course, are a Hollywood invention.
We're going to look at three key Westerns in particular
and determine how the American myth has been shaped
by those motion pictures.
And my guest is Robert Pippin.
professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago.
Welcome toUniversity Place Presents.
- Thank you. Nice to be here.
- Philosophy and Westerns.
Is there a disconnect there? Or...
[laughs] If not, how does it fit?
- Well, I'm interested in a lot of issues
in political philosophy,
and political philosophy for the last 150 years or so has been
concerned with one central question,
which is the rational legitimacy of state power.
Why do some people get to tell other people
what to do and what not to do?
One of the most stark formulations by Marc Faber
what distinguishes the use of coercive violence
by one group with their own interests
against another group with their own interests
from the legitimate power of the state?
Very important problem.
But in the history of political philosophy,
just as important was the question
of the psychological issues involved
in allegiance to the state,
which is really something that descends from an argument
or an appreciation of the greater power of an argument.
But it has to do with some fundamental human passions
and emotions like fear, love of one's own...
- Loyalty. - Pride, loyalty. Yeah.
So we don't have a good way
in the current language of political philosophy
to discuss the issue of political psychology
the psychological states of human beings
relevant for the success of political allegiance
gripping a group of people in a nation-state, for example.
And it occurred to me that many of the great Westerns
were explorations, in cinematic terms,
of the issue of--
especially the issue of the transition
from a lawless situation, which, in philosophy,
we very often like this state of nature, fiction,
and its transition to a civil order,
a legal order--
not just with police and the apparatus of the state,
but with domestic peace, security,
marriage, families, the kind of thing
that was the topic of most of the great Westerns.
How does this transition work,
and how is it effective psychologically?
How do you get from a tradition
in which the martial values of honor,
violence, and machismo, and so forth,
were the most important things for survival
to a culture where all of that has to be suppressed?
And it's disruptive and anarchic in a civilized order.
And that's an enormously tense situation, psychologically,
not just philosophically.
So a lot of these Westerns, it occurred to me,
are great ways of exploring dimension to that problem.
- The transition from a lawless society
in which a person who can work without law
can cope with the situation-- - Right.
- The transition from that to a kind of a society
which actually makes that person outmoded...
- Exactly. - And supersedes him
and becomes a land of law.
- Exactly. And most Westerns face clearly
the fact that in the war against the unjust,
to adopt means that are restricted by justice
is difficult and problematic, in a way.
So society needs for its founding
men who are willing to face the threat to civilized order
in its own terms, and that produces
a great complication for them emotionally,
especially when the transition, as you indicate, occurs,
the place of figures like that becomes problematic.
And the question is whether they really ever go away,
whether there isn't a continual need for some sort
of vaguely extralegal force or violence necessary
in order to secure the security of a civilized order.
- Well, we see that continuing, don't we, in certainly--
just to skip ahead for a minute--
in police dramas-- you know,Dirty Harry...
- Yeah, sure. - Working outside
the law in order to enforce it.
- Yeah. - And even if you want to talk
about, you know, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
and, again, working outside what's supposed to be legal
in order to come to terms with a very irregular situation.
- Yeah, it's interesting, you know,
the sort of parallel phenomenon to Westerns
which are about the pre-civil order,
the pre-legal order,
arefilm noirsin the 1940s,
just a little bit before Westerns became--
which are a sort of parallel or mirror phenomenon
of what it's like to live in an era that's almost post-legal.
Film noirs present most city governments and the police
as corrupt. - Right.
- And Fritz Lang's great film noir,
The Big Heatwith Glenn Ford
is a movie about somebody who has to step outside the law
in order to ensure that the law be able to
have some sort of grip in the future.
- The difference with Westerns, though,
and film noir or police dramas
is that landscape. - Mm-hmm.
- And how does that play into this whole story
of transcending the law and order
to, at least temporarily, enforce it?
- Well, especially in John Ford Westerns,
where the use of landscape is the most magnificent,
filmed in Monument Valley,
the photography suggests a vast, hostile environment
for diminutive, weak human beings
trying to establish some civilized outpost
in the midst of, essentially, a hostile environment,
not one friendly to human habitation.
So it intensifies the sense of the fragility and difficulty
of the establishment of the civilized order.
- How can you cover this vast territory
with any kind of order?
- Yeah, exactly right. Right. Right. Exactly.
And its very harshness--
the fact that it looks forbidding
and inhuman in a certain way,
is meant by Ford to suggest, again, a greater intensification
of this problem--how do you-- how to civilize life,
get a grip in an environment
that isn't made for civilized life.
- Well, that's true, too, isn't it,
that competition becomes more intense in the West
where the resources, whether it's water
or, you know, minerals, or cattle.
- Well, yeah, that's another great Western plot.
There are seven or eight sort of core Western plots,
but one of the most familiar ones, as you know,
is cattlemen whose cattle range over unfenced land,
who are then forced to have
some sort of compromise with farmers,
who, if the cattle roam free, destroy your crops.
- Right. - So a great,
great Western plot are the cattle barons,
where kind of medieval, feudal institutions--
- Roaming free. - Yeah, wanting all the land
to be free grazing land.
Actually, that's a problem that persists to the present day
with the problem we've had out west
with people who want to keep federal lands open for grazing,
so it hasn't really, ironically, even gone away.
But in Westerns, it mostly has to do with small farmers
who are trying to establish a different way of life,
because ranching is portrayed as a kind of free and open
cowboy kind of domain,
and farmers-- a much more regulated,
somewhat boring, routine life.
- The sodbusters. - Sodbusters, exactly,
who represent a less poetic or heroic form of life,
more prosaic and humdrum.
- Well, let's look at that John Ford landscape.
And this is actually the first
John Ford/John Wayne movie, isn't it,Stagecoach?
- Yeah, this is the one that made John Wayne a star
when it was first realized what kind of cinematic presence
it had, and this clip--
this is his entrance into the movie inStagecoach,
where you can see by the way Ford decides to photograph him
that he realized he had
something very special in John Wayne--
some cinematic charisma
that no other star in the '40s and '50s
was ever able to match.
[adventurous music]
♪ ♪
[gunshot]
[horse whinnies]
- Hold it!
- Whoa, steady. Ho, ho.
Hey, look. It's Ringo.
- That has to be one of the great film entrances.
I mean, you start with, like, the whole world out there,
and then suddenly there's one man who fills it.
- Yeah, you know, it's interesting--
Ford used Wayne after that,
but it wasn't until 1948
when he saw him in Howard Hawks'Red River,
which is one of the chapters in my book,
that he realized-- he said,
"I didn't realize the son of a B could act."
- [laughs] - So then he started using him
in movies until finally, in '56 inThe Searchers,
he became a major vehicle--
did an unbelievable acting job in that.
So didn't have a great range, but what he could do,
he could do extremely well.
- Well, to maybe risk generalizing
a John Wayne character,
whether it's in a Western or a World War II movie,
as a person who knew his territory
better than anyone else there,
knew the big picture, knew the two sides of it,
and the Western would be
the white side and the Indian side,
and seemed unshakably confident.
- Yeah. Except there's also-- and that's true,
but inRed Riverand inLiberty Valance
the characters played by Wayne are somewhat tragic.
- True. - They can't exist in the world
they helped to make possible.
The most intense treatment of that isLiberty Valance,
where--I mean, it usually has to do with not being able
to have a domestic life with a woman,
not suited for that.
And there has to be a Jimmy Stewart character...
- Yeah. Right. - That comes in and...
- In fact, the family lives are limited, aren't they?
Even if you look atRed River,
and if you look atThe Searchers,
it's not a father/son relationship.
It's a father and sort of wannabe son relationship
or a father and nephew relationship.
- Yeah, that's true.
He's not a traditional procreating father--
sterile, in a certain kind of way.
- He's a loner. - Yeah. Very much so. Yeah.
And inRed River, the movie begins with him
in a very typical way
that people think of as kind of corny or stale,
but it's actually an indication of the great costs
of what that character is about to do,
saying good-bye to a woman.
You know, "I'm gonna head out on my own."
From the wagon train, he makes his way
away from the long line of wagons
and starts to establish
what historically was the King Ranch in Texas:
a vast stretch of land that the original settlers just seized
from the Indians and from the Mexicans.
But it begins, again, with this tragic sort of recognition
that he won't be a settled, domestic husband and father.
That sort of life is not for him.
- Of course, as the plot develops, the tragedy deepens.
- Yeah. - But, yeah, he has
to almost literally peel himself away
from this devoted woman. - Yeah.
- And that's kind of a theme, too, isn't it?
The man who has to distance himself.
- Same thing inLiberty Valance.
I mean, he's in love with Hallie.
- Yes. - Until Jimmy Stewart comes in--
the lawyer who's gonna teach her how to read,
who's gonna teach her what he says, "a real rose looks like."
Not just a cactus rose.
And John Wayne realizes he's toast,
that, you know, he's not gonna be able to compete with that.
but he sacrifices himself, in a way,
for them to be happy together.
It's, again, a kind of tragic situation for that character.
- Yeah, he becomes obsolete.
- Yeah, in a sense.
Although, there are plenty of Westerns
in which the aging gunfighter who's trying to escape,
like Shane being sort of the classical man of the West,
The Gunfighter, Henry King's great movie.
They're trying to cease being the target of some--
- They are trying to make the transition.
- And they can't.
Usually it's because the community needs them
one more time, likeShane.
You're not gonna be able to get rid of Jack Palance unless...
- Or even Gary Cooper inHigh Noon.
- Yeah. Oh, absolutely Gary Cooper.
- Just one more time. - Yeah. Exactly.
And no support from the community.
That's another interesting thing about Westerns:
people think of them as just unendingly patriotic
and chauvinistic.
ButHigh Noonis a kind of subversive film.
- But the last thing you see him do
is to stamp out-- throw the badge on the ground
and grind it with his boot.
- Yeah.
It's a remarkable scene for an American popular movie.
- [laughing] - This rejection--
this sense of contempt for the community.
What's symbolized by the badge--
it doesn't stand for anything for them.
He throws it away.
John Ford--I mean, yeah, John Ford
and John Wayne were so--
Howard Hawks and John Wayne were so angry about that movie
that they madeRio Bravo... - [laughs]
- Just so that John Wayne could say
when the citizens come and offer to help,
"No, no. That's my job. I'm the sheriff.
You don't have to do it,"
as if a refutation ofHigh Noon.
- Well, we could get into, of course,
the parallels, the symbolism, the parables, even,
of some of these films likeHigh Noon,
representing, actually, the Red Scare of the early '50s,
and how endlessly you could interpret,
you know, the symbolism in the films.
- Yeah, there were some people who took it as a critique
of Americans for not rallying around civil liberties.
- Right. - And there are other people
who took it as a defense of the lone opponent of communism,
whether the community was behind him or not.
- [laughing] Which I don't think is
what the writers had in mind.
- I don't either. But Fred Zinnemann, I think,
was not on that side, but it was taken that way by many people.
- Which tells you a lot about film in general,
doesn't it, that there is room between the lines?
- Films are-- and Westerns especially--
are fantasies, or in this case, mythic.
That is to say they represent fundamental human problems
retold over and over again as a way of exploring them
with one new inflection or another new emphasis
or something like that.
So this repetition of the basic plots of Westerns
is not just like a formula film thing for Hollywood.
The problems they discuss, especially the relation
between civilized and pre-civilized life,
or the anarchic elements in human life
and the quest for order
are fundamental issues that get explored over and over again,
as well as expressing certain kinds of fantasies
about their resolution, about their possible resolution.
- There's an interesting scene early on inRed River
where they're-- John Wayne plays this character
who's a rancher, and he's about to initiate
the first big cattle drive north to the railhead,
and he gets a little casual about which cows he's branding.
- Yeah. I mean, John Wayne in that movie represents
a kind of feudal landowner from the middle ages--
somebody with a duchy or a fiefdom or something like that--
who regards himself as the supreme law of the land,
able to make decisions on his own
about which property is his and which property--
and Matt Garth, the one who plays his kind of adopted son--
the character Matt Garth--
represents a far more civilized,
democratic, consensus-building, modern human being.
He doesn't like this idea of it being no real differentiation
between property of one rancher and another.
But he yields to Dunson.
He accepts the fact that his--
the order necessary in the wilderness
requires this kind of strength.
Then he comes to change his mind
at a crucial point in the movie when the men mutiny.
- Here's the branding scene.
- And another Meeker.
- Turn him loose.
- Hold it.
Put a brand on him.
- It's a Meeker steer. - I said brand him.
- He's wearing a Meeker iron.
- I can't see it.
- Brand him.
- All right. But the next one up's another Diego.
- Brand him.
- An interesting and surprising thing about that scene
is that it does come to consensus
because the John Wayne character says,
"Well, okay, I'll just represent you guys and your herds
when I go north." - Mm-hmm.
- So it is diffused in a way,
which, historically, is more accurate...
- Mm-hmm. - But also dramatically is
just more surprising.
- Well, it's interesting to think
about what happens on the drive.
I mean, what happens is the Civil War has occurred,
and the South is bankrupt,
and there's no market for meat in the South,
so he has to take the herd north to Kansas
or someplace even further north
to get them on the trains and to the slaughterhouses.
So they form a kind of union
with an official signing ceremony--
a contract-signing ceremony--
which I believe we have a clip of.
- Yeah, we'll get to that.
- And then because of that,
thinks he has a union that's unconditional.
But as the drive goes on, more and more problems happen.
There's a stampede.
They lose several hundred head of cattle
He becomes more and more tyrannical
and focused on-- almost Lear-like,
a kind of crazed king.
And it's at this point that there's a democratic revolution
within the group of men.
And as we were talking about before we started,
this is also a kind of mythic depiction
of the problem of secession,
a crucial problem in the United States, obviously.
- Because there's a contract. It begins with a contract.
- Right. - And then that contract
is dissolved.
- Yeah. As one of the mutineers says,
"Sure, I signed the contract,
but you ain't the man I signed it with."
And in the same way that the South said,
"Sure, we entered the Union,
but the union we entered was a slave-holding union."
And so it raised a very delicate issue
of what's necessary to keep a union together
when the conditions of its original formation
have changed, historically.
And Matt assumes that he now has the responsibility
to be the voice of the new order,
the more democratic, consensus-oriented,
non-tyrannical, more legal order.
But I think the most interesting thing about that film is
that it subtly suggests that the transition is not that radical,
that Matt simply represents, in a way,
a more sophisticated, clever way of exerting authority
for the sake of profit.
Then he's just cleverer
than the sort of he-man type John Wayne character.
- Yeah. Instead of blunt force, it's just a more--
- Persuasion. - More persuasion.
Yeah. Reasoning.
- Acting as if he's just their instrument, and, yeah,
as a matter of fact, he's simply a more successful leader.
a more successful-- not tyrant,
but certainly a more successful owner of capital.
- So, in a way, it's sort of a play between democracy
versus dictatorship.
- Something like that. Yeah. Certainly.
Strong man, tyrannical. There are a lot of people--
and democracy's greatest danger is that the majority of people
in some tense election
will opt for non democratic representation.
- Yeah. So true. That's happened. Yeah.
- It's something people are worried about to this day.
[both laughing]
- This is the contract scene fromRed River.
- Fine. And the rest of you--
that means you're all coming along.
Good.
Matt here will sign you on.
We'll start at sunup.
- All right. Come on.
Sign your name, or make your mark.
- Let me sign first, Matt.
- So everything's okay there. It's legal.
But again, the conditions change,
and we have--I like to use that word, "mutiny,"
because this film always reminds me ofMutiny on the Bounty.
- Sure. Of course. Yeah.
Yeah, and what's really interesting about it--
we have two clips: one at the very beginning of the mutiny,
and then the intervention by Matt.
And what you can see is Dunson, essentially crazed,
he says at one point, "I am the law."
A real personalized notion of political power.
And that leads to a moment where--
the deserters in the past, he's shot and buried,
and now he says, "I'm gonna hang you."
And that's a very interesting point--
- Because it's a legal distinction, isn't it?
- Yeah. It's like hanging them means he's executing them
as if he were the law.
And Matt said, "No. That's too far."
It's as if he were to say, "I'll let you shoot them,
"but you can't hang them.
"You're not a judge, jury, administrator, legal owner.
That's not gonna happen."
So that's what prompts the intervention
in the clip where Matt simply inserts himself
and says, "No, you're not,"
and he shoots the gun out of his hand,
and we have a whole new leadership in the herd.
- And so this is the mutiny.
- Besides being deserters, you're common thieves.
- Well, the law might see it differently--
- I'm the law. You're a thief.
You too, Teeler.
Anything more?
- I know what you're gonna do to us,
but first I want to tell you something.
- Go ahead. - You're crazy.
You've been drinking and you ain't been sleeping.
If you ain't crazy, you're skin-close to it.
- Are you through? - No.
You want to get this herd to market?
Well, so do all of us.
There's a good way to Abilene, but you won't listen to that.
- So that's how this mutiny begins,
and now we'll have a look at how it plays out.
- I signed the pledge, sure,
but you ain't the man I signed it with.
- You finished?
- Yeah. Now you can get your bible
and read it over us after you shoot us.
- I'm gonna hang you.
[tense music]
- No. No, you're not.
- What?
- You're not going to hang them.
- Who will stop me?
- I will.
- However, now, we come to a confrontation, of course,
because the premise for the film is that you have
these mutineers who have, in effect, stolen the herd
from John Wayne's character, leaving him behind,
but he is both determined and-- more determined
and traveling more lightly than they are,
so he can catch up to them at the railhead in Abilene.
- Yeah.
- But the confrontation-- the inevitable confrontation--
also surprises us, I think.
- Yeah, the buildup is to a classic duel
at the end of the movie,
which is a very typical way for Westerns to end.
And the first clip we have of the buildup
is he and his men riding into Abilene--
all staged in a kind of mythic way
with vast vistas and huge numbers of cattle--
and he starts riding through the cattle,
and then after that, in the next clip,
we see what is supposed to be this confrontation
between Wayne and Matt Garth-- the Matt Garth person.
But after a bunch of punches and rolling around,
one of the women in the film fires a gun and says, you know,
"This is ridiculous. You're not going to hurt each other.
Any fool can see you clearly love each other."
Which I've always understood to be
a very ironic way of saying
there really is no conflict here,
that Matt is just another Tom.
- Uh-huh.
- They're not these opposed civilizational forces
of tyranny and feudal order and modern consensus politics.
One is just a version of the other.
- Uh-huh, uh-huh. Kind of an update, you might say.
- Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There isn't really any conflict here.
And that means that just as Tom can be like Matt,
Matt can be the twin of Tom.
As I said before, he's just a more effective leader.
And then that leads to the last scene in the movie
where Tom, or John Wayne character,
tells him he's gonna change the brand...
- Right. - So that his D and Matt's G
will be both on the brand,
which is another way of indicating
that there hasn't really been any transition
from one to the other-- they're both, in effect,
still in place.
- And, actually, back at the beginning of the film
when the Matt character is still a boy,
John Wayne's character promises him
that "When you earn it, we'll change this brand."
And so you get the alpha and the omega that way in this film.
- Yeah. Another interesting point about that beginning
is something you mentioned before
about the sterility or non-procreative nature
of some of these male heroes.
After the Indian attack, John Wayne and his partner
only have a bull-- they don't have any cows.
- Yeah, that's right. Yeah. - And Matt happens
to have one animal left from the Indian attack,
and it's a cow.
He's the procreative one,
the one who can actually have the babies.
- There's kind of the defender and the procreator.
- Exactly. Exactly. Exactly.
- Well, let's look at the cinematic quality of this
one clip at a time here,
the finale ofRed River.
[solemn music]
- I told you all where you stand in this.
See that you remember it.
♪ ♪
- Now, according to rumor, Robert,
Marion Morrison, later to become John Wayne,
was discovered-- he was working as a stagehand
and somebody saw that kind of swaggering walk of his
and said, "We got to do something with this."
And he really made an art of that, didn't he?
- Yeah. He practiced it. He knew it was his trademark,
and in the clip from Red River,you'll see,
as he walks through the cattle, how distinctive a walk it is.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- You know that young man isn't gonna use his gun, don't you?
- Yeah.
But I haven't any such notion.
- And what that swagger leads to in this case
is a reconciliation, and this time it's actually--
it's a family.
They become a family over this talk about the brand.
- Right. And the brand indicates that both of them,
both forms of authority: charismatic authority
and consensus democratic authority,
can be made compatible
rather than democratic authority simply superseding
and eliminating charismatic authority.
Democracies will still need charismatic leaders.
They're not just rational, technology-fueled institutions.
- When we get back the ranch, I want you to change the brand.
It will be like this.
Red River D,
and we'll add an M to it.
You don't mind that, do you?
- No.
- You've earned it.
- I don't think we quite see
that sort of complimentary relationship
when we get to a film
likeThe Man Who Shot nLiberty Valance.
That's 1962. - Right.
- And again, it's John Wayne,
this time with Jimmy Stewart as the...
- Civilizing force. - Yeah. Civilizing force.
- Yeah. - Right.
- No, that's a much more tragic,
melancholic, elegiac film.
largely about the end of the West.
The town, at the beginning, is a kind of riotous town
with mixing of races,
and an enormous kind of joie de vivre in the town,
but the movie opens in the present--
that's the town of the past. - 25 years later.
- Yeah. In the present... and everything is
just completely sterile, still.
There's no energy, no life in it.
In order to make it safe,
they've obviously had to kill it.
- In fact, it starts with a funeral.
- It does. Yeah. They've come back to town
for the funeral of this man Tom Doniphon,
who was very important in both their lives 25 years earlier
when he first came as a lawyer.
So the movie's all built about this central problem
of how to get rid of a murderous, deadly force,
Liberty Valance--probably the greatest role of Lee Marvin.
besidesCat Ballou.
- Well, my personal favorite,
but a delicious role.
- Yeah, just unbelievably over the top
with the vest and the silver-handled whip,
and all kind of doodads.
that make him a special character.
But he's absolutely murderous.
And it's--clearly, there's no way
Jimmy Stewart or the town
is going to be able to withstand him,
and again, it's a settler versus rancher movie.
They want statehood, the settlers,
and that means fences, barbed wire.
- Right. - So the ranchers have
hired Liberty Valance
to essentially terrorize the settlers
so that they won't vote for statehood
and John Wayne's character, Tom Doniphon,
wants nothing to do with this fight.
He thinks of himself not as a citizen,
but as a private man, completely self-sufficient.
Something ironically undercut in the movie very cleverly
by having him depend crucially on what he calls his boy,
Pompey, played by Woody Strode-- - Yeah. Another great part.
- But it's constantly the case
that he can't do what he wants to do without Woody,
although he pretends to be
this absolutely self-sufficient power.
He will not act to protect the town against Liberty Valance.
He lets it go
until Hallie, the woman he loves,
played by Vera Miles, clearly wants him to help
so that Jimmy Stewart, her new love,
won't get killed.
So the movie races towards a crucial duel
between the completely outgunned and outmanned Jimmy Stewart
and the murderous Liberty Valance,
and what we see in the first part of the movie as the duel
looks like a straightforward duel.
- Right.
- All right, dude.
This time, right between the eyes.
[gunshots]
- I've heard that that duel couldn't have worked
if it was in color.
- Well, the shadows and the staging of it--
it probably helps it a lot that it's in black and white.
I mean, it's a late film,
so they could've done it in color.
There's something about the sort of elegiac,
nostalgic, melancholic character of the movie
that works very, very well in black and white
that probably wouldn't have worked in color.
- And then we see it again from a different angle.
- Pompey.
- All right, dude.
This time,
right between the eyes.
[gunshots]
- And this is Truth with a capital T.
- Yeah, when-- well, you know,
I've come across people-- just as a sort of footnote--
I've come across people who believe
that there are indications in the movie
that John Wayne's character couldn't have
shot Liberty Valance with a rifle
and gotten away with it, so what he's doing
in the scene where he tells Jimmy Stewart he did it
is voluntarily taking the burden of guilt off Jimmy Stewart
and putting it on himself
for the sake of his unrequited love, Hallie.
- [laughing] - I don't buy that.
I think it's pretty straightforward
that he killed Liberty Valance...
- It's a little overconstructive.
- In cold blood. I mean, this is another--
violates every code of the West.
- That's true. It's not face-to-face at all.
- No. He shoots him from an ambush position
straightforwardly, without being at any risk himself.
Complete violation of the code of the West.
Again, a kind of interesting comment
on what's necessary to rid the world of the Liberty--
the Liberty Valances of the world.
But he doesn't tell Jimmy Stewart's character
Ransom Stoddard, the truth
until it looks like Stoddard is going to abscond,
not run for office,
not be involved in the statehood process.
Then he tells him what he thinks Hallie wants.
Namely that he didn't do it and that John Wayne did.
But they keep that secret
because it's very politically valuable...
- Yes. - For Jimmy Stewart to be
the man who shot Liberty Valance.
So he builds the rest of his career on, essentially, a lie
that he knows is a lie... - Yes.
- Which is a kind of civilized version
of what the gunfighter has to do
in order to suppress the anarchic forces of injustice.
He has to lie about the myth of the original founding,
the killing of Liberty Valance,
and he's willing to live with that
given the benefits to society that accrue
that we see happening.
- And there's a newspaper reporter--
there's a scene at the end of the film
where a newspaper reporter comes to this conclusion
about this lie and its utility.
- That's right. Jimmy Stewart tells the story--
the true story-- for the first time.
to a newspaper editor in Shinbone, the town.
But at the end of the-- as we'll see in the clip,
at the end of it, the newspaper editor
rips up the paper that he'd written the story on,
which, were we to see the whole movie,
we'd know is a very important sort of symbol in the movie.
It starts with Liberty Valance
stuffing the papers of a law book,
or tearing them out of a law book and strewing them
over the beaten Ransom Stoddard. - Right, yeah. Right.
- And Peabody, the newspaper editor,
is also assaulted by Liberty Valance,
who also tears up paper and stuffs it in his mouth.
So all of these efforts
to ensure the freedom of the press,
and then you get this dramatic scene
of voluntary self-censorship.
He's not going to undermine the lie...
- That's true. - That they need
in order for the town to go--
Now, a lot of people criticize Ford
as if he's approving of this,
but he can't be approving of it.
We've just seen the truth.
There's nothing about the newspaper editor's action
that will protect us from knowing the truth.
So it doesn't--it's like the end ofFort Apache
has a similar kind of problem.
People shouldn't identify Ford's view
with the view of a character in the film.
So I don't think their criticism of that is warranted.
But he makes this bizarre statement that this is the West:
"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
Well, I mean, how can a legend become a fact?
Facts are facts. - By being repeated.
- It could be treated as a fact.
- Yeah, it's that old saw
about a lie repeated often enough becomes the truth.
- Yeah. But we know it's still a lie.
- Of course. - It doesn't become the truth,
which is what he says,
but I think this is a subtle way of saying,
"All right, you didn't
physically shoot Liberty Valance, but you--
with irrigation projects, schools,
hospitals, civil order, government--
you did overcome what Liberty Valance represents.
So the legend that you destroyed
or overcame Liberty Valance has become a fact.
You made it a fact in a way that it--
not a gunfighter would do, but the way in which a senator,
a governor, a vice presidential candidate would do.
- Yeah. You just needed that one little lie to jumpstart it.
- Yeah. - Now, we haven't really gotten
too much into the love triangle aspect
ofThe Man Who Loved nLiberty Valance,
but it's very much a driving force.
- Yeah. The choice how he makes for Ransom Stoddard is,
in a way, a kind of rational choice.
We don't see her after the duel.
She drops out of the film.
But later, when she comes back, they're leaving town.
They've gone, finally, to see the coffin of Tom Doniphon.
- This is 25 years later. - Yeah.
And she's brought a huge hat box
with her from St. Louis that's empty,
and she goes out to Tom's old ranch,
and takes a cactus rose, puts it in the hat box,
brings it back, puts it on the coffin,
which puzzles Ransom Stoddard
because there had been a very important conversation earlier
where he told her,
"And someday I'll show you a real rose,"
as if cactus roses are not real roses.
She goes back, gets the original cactus rose
that she was so fond of, puts it on his grave,
and that leads him to ask a question
that he probably wishes he hadn't asked
in this clip.
- I guess my heart is here.
Yes, let's come back.
Look at it.
It was once a wilderness.
Now it's a garden.
Aren't you proud?
- Hallie,
who put the cactus roses on Tom's coffin?
- I did.
- Definitely that triangle is still very much in force
after 25 years, as she never fell out of love
with the John Wayne character.
- He just seems to realize that for the first time. Yeah.
- Despite all of his excess in politics.
And the title of the film, of course,
is just loaded with irony.
- Yeah. Exactly.
We see the irony one last time in the last scene in the film.
You know, he's finally decided to tell the truth.
It doesn't matter.
Nobody wants to listen to the truth.
- Nobody wants to hear it. - Legend's become fact,
so his whole life has been haunted by a kind of duplicity
that Ford seems to suggest is necessary for politics,
but has this tragic consequence as well
that you don't feel like you're ever yourself.
- Exactly.
- You're what the public needs you to be.
And this last scene sort of testifies one last time.
And what's really poignant about it is
the look on her face--
it's not clear that she actually knows the truth.
So there's just a little flicker of recognition
in her face,
and then his face is just full of sorrow
as he--as the match, the fire of his own energy
as a politician seems to go out
with this last phrase.
- We wired ahead to Junction City.
They're gonna hold the express for you.
Ransom, two days and two nights,
you're gonna be right back in Washington.
- Oh, thank you, Jason. Thank you.
And I'm going to write a letter
to the officials of this railroad
and thank them for their kindness
and for going to all this trouble.
- You think nothing of it.
Nothing's too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance.
- The Jimmy Stewart character has kind of lost doubly,
hasn't he, because he's lost the ability to be himself.
He has to live this legend.
People won't listen to him otherwise,
and he realizes that all these 25 years,
his wife has been in love with another man.
- Yeah. The irony is that he's had to play a role
rather than be himself publicly
and it turns out he's been playing a role
rather than being himself for her in the marriage.
You know, Ford is a great reader of Irish literature,
so I'm almost positive-- I can't prove it--
that he was thinking of James Joyce's great story
"The Dead,"
where a man finds out that his wife has been
in love with another man... - Right.
- Just by virtue of her behavior at the funeral.
Your whole life can change in a second
when you realize that everything
you think you've been living is false.
But, again, it's tragic rather than ironic
because Ford presents this as necessary
for a civilized order to have the mythology
necessary to sustain itself.
- I can't help wondering how many actors would,
as they say, relate to that, too.
- Yeah, of course. Yeah.
- Including John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.
- It's been a role-- it's been an issue--
I'm teaching a course on Hitchcock right now,
and there's many, many times in Hitchcock's films
where the question of who somebody actually is
versus whom they're taken to be by others
and how that is negotiated
and whether who they take themselves to be is
a fantasy or real
and whether what others take them to be
is a result of what they need to believe
rather than what they see.
I think the master of this kind of issue is Hitchcock.
- Yeah, he liked to do that kind of counter-casting, didn't he?
- Twins, you know,
like Guy and Bruno inStrangers on a Train,
or Charles and Charlie inShadow of a Doubt,
these two sides of one character.
- And Joseph Cotten playing, you know, nice guy, shady guy...
- And turns out to be a serial killer.
- Yeah. - Exactly.
- That's as...
exciting--as taut as it can get
when you pull that kind of casting.
- Absolutely. Yeah.
- Let's go into the wonderful world of color.
[laughs]
- Beautiful color. - You know,
which had to have been an important part of films
not just because of overall technological advantages
or advancements,
but competition with television
by the time we get into the '50s.
- Yeah. - And brought about
not just the color, but the wide screens,
VistaVision. - Yeah.
- And what better use for it than a Western?
- Yeah, and what better photographer than John Ford,
who really pioneered the use of this, you know,
3/4 of the screen horizon,
sort of epic shots that suggest a kind of grandeur
that also suggests, just cinematically,
that great, great issues are at stake.
This is fundamental. The life/death,
civilization/anarchy kind of issues
are just suggested by the landscape.
And when you've got color this vivid, this good,
I think it's even a more intense experience
than the other Monument Valley films he could do before.
- So this gives you--
this is the first of a couple of examples--
this is the first of a couple of examples
of how small these human problems are...
- Yeah. That's right. - In the vastest gain
of time and place.
- That's right. And what's really interesting
aboutThe Searchers, which I think is
one of the two or three greatest movies ever made,
is in the opening sequences ofThe Searchers,
as we first see him see a woman coming from inside a house,
and what's inside and outside, what's civilized
and what's barbaric on the outside--
- And he frames these things often, doesn't he?
- Exactly. Like a movie frame as well.
- In a door frame kind of thing.
- As his brother's wife comes out of the house
in the--first, we see her waiting for him,
and as we see him approaching,
a look of incredible consternation
comes over her face.
And it isn't long before we figure out
that there had been some illicit attraction between them
that the brother wasn't aware of
that is--becomes an intense focus of the movie
when she's killed--raped and killed--by the Indians,
and her two daughters are stolen.
John Wayne's task is to find them.
But what we don't know as an audience
is that he's searching for them in order to kill them.
- Yes. - Because he's a racist,
and he regards-- - They become "feral."
- They become contaminated
by living with the Comanches.
- Changed race. - Yeah.
But as I said, you'll see in the opening scene,
the stateliness, almost operatic quality
of the way we're introduced to the plot,
and then in the second clip, you can see her face
indicating that his coming home is going to be a lot of problems
for her and for her husband.
[peaceful music]
♪ ♪
- We have I think what's called in movie parlance
this POV: point of view.
- Mm-hmm. - Or what she sees.
So we've seen her from behind, and now we see
what she's looking at.
And it's another kind of classic
John Wayne/John Ford entry likeStagecoach,
because he comes from a distance,
but there are some other things going on in this image.
- That's right. That's right. We learn from his remarks
very quickly in the movie
that he's an Indian-hater, a racist.
And one of the reasons why is he was--
when he was an Indian fighter,
the second lead in the movie,
the boy he goes searching with,
whose whole family was wiped out,
so there's a lot of bitterness involved
in the war with the Indians
that these, essentially, colonialists
were engaged in.
But the Civil War has happened,
and he's ended the Civil War,
but he doesn't know how to stop fighting.
So he goes to Mexico
and is a mercenary for the French in Mexico
and comes back--
we know all this very indirectly by the dates
and by the fact that he has a French army uniform on
with a red stripe down the side. - Right. Right.
- But the other thing that's very interesting
about the opening, as he comes forward,
is you see-- he's framed in the foreground
by an Indian blanket,
and as you see him, he's got an Indian scabbard on his rifle.
- Yes. - And it turns out in the movie
that he knows more about Indian ways of life,
and is, in a way, kind of more sympathetic with them,
than anyone else in the movie.
So you begin to realize
in a feat of great psychological subtlety by Ford
that his self-- his hatred of Indians
is a form of self-hatred. - Mm-hmm.
- That he thinks of them as one of them:
wild, uncivilizable,
unrestrained by civilized life,
something connected with his guilt
over his lust for his brother's wife.
So he thinks of himself as outside the civilized order,
hates himself for it,
and hates the Indians for being like himself.
So all the Indian trappings and knowledge he carries around
is a kind of indication of this intense self-hatred
that racism often is, in some paradoxical way.
- Well, the irony in this is
in this vast, open, free countryside
he's trapped.
- He's trapped. Yeah. - Within himself.
[peaceful music]
♪ ♪
- Ethan?
♪ ♪
[dog barking]
- Quiet, Prince.
- You mentioned racism,
and there are a couple of scenes--
well, a couple more scenes
where it comes up in dialogue.
- Yeah. They end up searching for seven years
before they find Debbie.
And they come in for a break at one point,
and the boy's--
Jeffrey Hunter's beloved
or "promised" is fed up,
so she's gonna marry somebody else,
so she's in a white dress.
- Because he's been gone for seven years.
- He's been gone for, you know,
three or four years at this point,
and they go out for another three or four.
At one point, she's pleading with him not to go,
that maybe they can make a life anyway.
She's not gonna marry this really,
completely unacceptable hayseed in the movie.
She tells him, "You're not going this time."
And he says, "I've got to go. I've got to go.
"She's sort of my half-sister, my adopted sister.
I have to go find her."
And then we see this scene that indicates
that the racism we see associated with John Wayne
is not limited.
There's a very shocking scene in the movie
when you hear this girl that we had thought would be
a sort of young, innocent girl
turns out to have these kind of views.
- You're not going. Not this time.
- Are you crazy?
- It's too late. She's a woman grown now.
- But I got to go, Laurie. I got to fetch her home.
- Fetch what home?
The leavings of Comanche bucks,
sold time and again to the highest bidder,
with savage brats of her own? - Laurie, shut your mouth!
- Do you know what Ethan will do if he has a chance?
He'll put a bullet in her brain.
I tell you, Martha would want him to.
- More irony hearing that the man she's talking to is,
what, 1/8 Native American?
- Yeah. Right. - And, of course, I mean,
it comes up-- it's not a subtle thing,
'cause John Wayne is constantly dissing him for it.
- John Wayne brings it up all the time, you know,
that "you're a half-breed"... - Yeah.
- He says bitterly.
So their relationship is also something
worthy of a lot of discussion,
but they really don't have a reconciliation ever,
because once he realizes
that John Wayne is looking for Debbie in order to kill her,
he knows he has to stay with him to stop him.
- One of the things we tend to overlook is
that a lot of directors of talkies
also directed silent films. - Oh, yeah.
- And that was true of John Ford...
- Absolutely. - Who cut his teeth
on just the image,
and often just the eyes of a character
to say so much.
- Yeah. John Ford and Alfred Hitchcock--
really, their whole careers parallel the history of movies.
You know? They were at the ground floor
in figuring out how movies work cinematically, visually,
and they were at the ground floor of talkies.
And in this movie,
they're willing to use very subtle hints.
The scene we're going to see of Ethan talking
with the Indian who took Debbie, Scar--
it doesn't really-- they talk about whether--
he says to John Wayne's character,
"You speak pretty good Comanche. Someone teach you?"
And John Ford says, "You speak pretty good English.
Someone teach you?"
What he's referring to is the fact of miscegenation.
Scar's eyes are blue. This actor is a German actor
who was well-known for playing Indians.
- [laughs] - But he had these blue eyes
that Ford obviously wanted to make a point about,
that this idea of the opposition of the races
was ridiculous.
that there was so much...
miscegenation in the past
that the idea of one pure race versus another pure race
is ridiculous.
But it's just a subtle way of indicating
that the underlying current of the movie is something
like the impossibility of sustaining racism
in any kind of-- in any way, with any honesty,
'cause given the way Scar looks.
[dark, dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Buenas tardes, jefe.
Caballeros.
This is the great Cicatriz, war chief--
- Scar, huh?
Plain to see how you got your name.
- Resolution now.
You know, we've seen that after seven years,
John Wayne's character has been
searching for Debbie in order to kill her
because she has become a Comanche
through these years of captivity.
And didn't even want to go back, in fact,
when he first found her,
but she runs away during a confrontation,
and he finds her again.
- And, yeah, there's a chase.
We have no reason to believe he's changed his mind,
that he's gonna "put a bullet in her brain,"
as was said by the other character before.
And Jeffrey Hunter tries to stop him at one point
and he's thrown aside,
and there's this very dramatic chase
that's framed in a way
that sort of indicates an isolation,
and an absolute decision has to be made.
He gets off the horse, goes to her, she cowers,
and then he repeats a scene from the beginning of the movie
when he first entered the house and picked up Debbie.
She's seven years older now, and she's Natalie Wood,
but again he picks her up,
and you still don't know if he's gonna just throw her down.
But he says, "Let's go home, Debbie."
It's just a heartbreakingly sincere moment in the movie
when he gathers her to him
and she puts her head on his shoulder.
I mean, you could call it a Hollywood ending,
but you have to have seen the whole part of the movie
to know how complicated it is for him--
- The character, how he has these currents of sentiment.
- That he's not even aware of, himself.
- Right. - That's what's so subtle
about the scene.
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Debbie!
- No, Ethan! No!
[calm music]
♪ ♪
- Let's go home, Debbie.
♪ ♪
- Similar to the end ofRed River,
but more convincing,
and I think it just has much more emotional depth to it.
- Melancholic. Very tragic.
I mean, the frame that we'll see is--
before this frame, everyone involved has been
streaming into the house,
out of the harsh, unhospitable outside world,
except for John Wayne-- except for Ethan Edwards.
He can't leave.
And we see him in a way recognizing
that he'll never be part of this world
and just walking slowly away.
[melancholy music]
- ♪ Ride away ♪
♪ ♪
- Well, the question about literal versus figurative
in Westerns:
I mean, if we look at this ranch
where this tragedy has unfolded over the years
inThe Searchers,
it's like the surface of the moon.
You couldn't raise cattle there.
You couldn't--there's not even a vegetable garden
There's not water within sight.
What the heck are they doing there, in literal terms?
- Yeah. - But as a kind of
a state of mind,
it has significance.
- Yeah. Yeah. I mean, most of the great Hollywood directors
really strived for verisimilitude.
They weren't indifferent.
There's a lot of implausibility in Hitchcock too.
I mean, the plot ofVertigo is a murder plot
that only a madman would dream up.
- [laughing] - You know, to pretend
that his wife committed suicide
by finding a guy who has vertigo who can't climb the stairs--
I mean, it doesn't make any sense at all.
But at some point, they realized the power of cinema was such
that they could override any kind of minor objections
to the plot.
And, you know, Hollywood movies are commercial products
made by studios interested in profit.
And that's one of the reasons intellectuals sometimes tend
to be suspicious of Hollywood movies
and prefer independent or European film.
But from the very beginning, there were directors
who could figure out how to really make two movies at once--
make a movie that had a very fast-moving--
in the American style of editing--
very fast-moving plotline
that was gripping, entertaining, funny, thrilling,
adventurous, exotic, erotic,
but at the same time, they could, in a way,
build a kind of trapdoor in these--a false bottom,
you know, that without obtruding on the surface plot,
they could also begin to suggest these large, mythic themes,
about civilized life, the family, foundings,
the nature of political order,
the problems of political psychology.
And they made them there
for people who wanted to look for them to see.
But all of these films have to be seen more than once.
If you really get intrigued by them, you realize
as you see them more and more
that they're unbelievably more carefully made
than, say, your run-of-the-mill Hollywood Western.
And it takes great directors to do that:
people like Hawks and Ford
and Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann, Delmer Daves.
There were very few
of the thousands of directors of Westerns
who achieved this sort of parallel film structure
in which a very, very serious film could be presented
as an adventure story.
- Well, it's been an adventure
going through these three films in particular with you.
Robert Pippin, a great pleasure,
and I hope we get to do it again.
- My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
- I'm Norman Gilliland,
and I hope you'll join me next time around
forUniversity Place Presents.