Just Curious

The true hero

Here's a review of "The Man who shot Liberty Valance," from the internet movie database:

"Other reviewers, aside from seeing this as the end of the classic western, saw the plot as myth granting to one man that which was rightfully another's. I disagree. I see TMWSLV as a tale of a man stepping aside for the sake of a better man and a better world, at great personal cost.

I view Tom as someone who has lived a cynical life--kill it before it kills you. With the advent of Ransom he recognizes that there is a better way, and that Ransom, by defying evil from a position of weakness, is far braver than Tom, who has merely defied evil from a position of strength. Additionally, Ransom brings about an answer to the question "must the sword rule forever?" with a resounding "no," a denial that at first seems foolish to Tom, but who then realizes that things really should be Ransom's way.

And so Tom, knowing that one of them is the better man, allows that better man to receive the fame attendant to heroism; and in fact Ransom, for daring what Tom never did dare, is the true hero of the tale. Like all honest men must, Tom steps aside for the better man, knowing what it will cost him to do what is right.

An earlier reviewer said that the depiction of the politics was a parody; in fact, the politics of the early portion of the republics was even more lively (read: pugnacious) than is depicted in the film."

It was by reviewer "evilsnack" from Idaho, and I thoroughly agree with her/his points. Yes the "slave" is the hero of history, for it is she who through her work transform the eternal mother nature and thereby catalyzing human progress. I like the parody in the earlier part of the movie too. There was this scene in which Jimmy Stewart told his student Woody Strode, who played a top-notch yet illiterate African-American gunfighter (and servant of John Wayne's character), to recite the beginning sentences of the Declaration of Independence in the literacy school Stewart had founded. It was ironic, since Strode's character was an African American living in the Postbellum West: a place which wasn't exactly the most enlightened when it came to racial relations, and where many public facilities were segregated. Nice ironic touch, as John Ford made the movie in 1962, a year before Martin Luther King Jr.'s March on Washington.

posted by James Chang @ 10:51 PM