I’ve been searching for the “best” western, and a couple of people recommended this one. It does bring up some interesting issues, but I’m still searching.

The movie, besides being stuffed with the usual cliches of the genre and the usual shoddy production values (obviously the whole thing was shot in a studio except for the train scenes at beginning and end), is a muddle.

What exactly is the message? It seems to be that we need to murder bad guys in order to control them, and that what passes for civilization is just a lie. This would seem to support the silly interpretation of the film as an allegory for our war on terror, but that doesn’t quite work either. Liberty was out in the street and easily identifiable, whereas most terrorists are in hiding or are unknown. “Taking the law into our own hands” is what Valance’s thugs try to do after he’s killed, and look where it gets them.

Finally, neither way of life–the old Wild West nor the new more civilized West–looks like a very desirable condition. If we can believe this film (that is, take it as a metaphor), then in the old West everyone was too cowardly to stand up and face the bad guys except for the ineffectual representative of the new civilization, but Valance finally had to be shot from the shadows in a side street by the supposed “manly” John Wayne character–not a very nice allegory to base our country’s behavior or character on.

However that may be, it’s another second-rate Western. I’m beginning to believe that the whole genre is second-rate.

There is good reason to believe that the reviewer M. S. Anderson, who generously awarded this film three stars, is as right as rain. As the editor of an encyclopedia concerned with the Old West, I can confirm that the professorial class is eager to keep this movie alive. After several months of reading seemingly hundreds of worshipful citations of this film and especially of its signature cliché–the pretentious, meaningless line about printing the legend when the legend becomes fact (as if newspapers routinely print the truth!)–I began watching (in vain, as it happens) for references to the film that pointed out that the sets looked like fiberboard structures on the studio’s back lot, the characterization was shallow and predictable, the script was trite and sounded clumsy on the tongue, O’Brien and some other supporting players were inadequate or worse, and Stewart and Wayne were not alone in being about thirty years too old for their parts.

Can anyone tell whether audiences were or weren’t supposed to laugh at Lee Marvin’s villain, who is so cartoonishly evil that not only is he clad in black but he carries a whip! Surely this characterization was in Elliot Silverstein’s mind when, several years later, he cast Marvin in an Academy Award-winning double role in the still amusing Cat Ballou. Though the connection is clear, not a single Amazonian admirer has drawn attention to it. Perhaps one of them could explain why.

The judgment of most of those who saw The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for the first time in its initial run was right: let this undistinguished movie–less an ornament than an embarrassment to its director and stars–ride off into the sunset, never to be heard from again. What a shame that the members of the professoriate, the radical environmentalists of American popular culture, insist that this waste matter be forcibly recycled through the captive minds of America’s young, a large number of whom seem now, alas, to be reviewers and commenters devoted to bestowing five stars on one-star films here at Amazon.com and to proclaiming unhelpful everyone who disagrees with them.