"between Vladimir Nabokov’s 'Lolita' and Thomas Pynchon’s V' "

[Doug Millison]

“THE Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” John Ford’s great, autumnal  
western, dramatizes a moment of historical transition. No one involved  
quite knows it at the time, but the shooting that gives the film its  
title — the ambiguous slaying of a bad guy played by Lee Marvin — is a  
pivot on which the fate of a half-civilized frontier territory turns.  
A brutal code of justice, personified by John Wayne’s gunman, gives  
way to a social order based on law and political legitimacy,  
represented by James Stewart’s character, an aspiring lawyer who will  
eventually become a United States senator.

An old way of life expires as a new one is born. The process can be  
violent or gradual, vivid or subtle. It can be depicted with nostalgia  
for the world that is lost, an enthusiastic embrace of progress or,  
most often, with an ambivalent mixture of both. This kind of change is  
the subject of many of Ford’s westerns, but “The Man Who Shot Liberty  
Valance,” shot in black and white and mostly on studio sets (rather  
than in open-air Technicolor like “The Searchers”), presents the theme  
with especially stark clarity.

A similar subject is addressed, on a much grander scale and with a  
different (you might say more British) range of nuances, in David  
Lean’s “Lawrence of Arabia,” which tracks, through the complicated  
career of its title character, both the emergence of Arab nationalism  
and the unraveling of British imperial ambition. And the Fordian  
notion of the American West as the place in the modern world where  
traditional virtues go to die echoes through “Ride the High Country,”  
an early film by Sam Peckinpah, who would go on to become Ford’s heir  
and, in some ways, his antithesis.

What these three movies have in common, beyond a shared historical  
perspective, is that they all arrived on American movie screens at  
more or less the same time, in 1962. They are thus part of a moment —  
those anxious, exuberant, transitional years between the Sputnik  
launch and the Kennedy assassination, or maybe between Vladimir  
Nabokov’s “Lolita” and Thomas Pynchon’s “V” — that is enjoying its  
season in the retro-revisionist-pop-cultural sun. …

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/18/movies/18scot.html