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

[Joe Allonby]

"Valance" and "Searchers". Wayne's character in the former shoots the
villain from the alley to save the lawyer and let's him take credit
for it thus launching his political career as "The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance" instead of just a wimpy lawyer. The lethal act is
combined with a noble deceit; he acknowledges the passing of his own
time and usefulness. He makes way for the coming of the new civilized
order but does so by acting with brutality toward the uncivilized
nemesis who also must go.

"The Searchers" is the flip side of the coin. The perceived hero is
revealed to be a racist villain whose motivation is evil. The two
films taken together form an interesting commentary on the nature of
heroism, public perception of the same, and how it changes with time.




On Sat, Oct 17, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Doug Millison <dougmillison at comcast.net> wrote:
> “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
>