138: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (with Scout Tafoya)

The writer and filmmaker Scout Tafoya, author of the new book But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, joins the show to discuss one of Ford’s greatest films, the 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, starring John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart and Lee Marvin.

Made in the twilight of Ford’s career, the downbeat Liberty Valance is an example of what we would now call a filmmaker’s Late Style: a veteran director taking stock of their own legacy in their final works. Liberty Valance is a preview of the conclusion of the classic era of the Western genre in the tumult of the sixties, the end of the Old West as represented by Wayne, the cowboy archetype finally replaced by constitutional order and modern progress as embodied by Stewart, as a young eastern lawyer who travels west to the town of Shinbone, intending to introduce education and order to a lawless place approaching statehood, and is soon targeted for death by feared local outlaw Liberty Valance (Marvin).

Scout has seen every one of John Ford’s surviving films; we discuss Liberty Valance in the context of Ford’s career and worldview, grapple with the ongoing question in our age of assessing the art of the problematic artist, and consider what this film has to say about the consequences of violence and the media’s role in reinforcing the official version of historical facts.

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Scout’s book, But God Made Him a Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century is available now.

Trailer for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962)