Justified and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Raylan Givens of the FX drama Justified is not one’s typical modern day law enforcer. The US Deputy Marshal dons a full size cowboy hat, for instance, to go along with his stylish suits and completes the outfit with boots and a forty-five holstered around his waist. His demeanor is both polite and courteous but he is also not above casually telling a suspected criminal that “I don’t pull my sidearm unless I’m going to shoot to kill.” In the pilot episode of the series, meanwhile, Givens informs a gun thug for a Miami drug cartel that he has twenty four hours to leave town or risk the consequences. The Deputy Marshal follows through on the threat in the opening moments of Justified, killing his prey as the clock ticks down and the thug inevitably draws first.
“You do know that we’re not allowed to shoot people on sight anymore?” his superior asks him afterwards. “And haven’t been for, I don’t know, maybe a hundred years.”
Despite an obvious respect and understanding of the law, Raylan Givens is a throwback to the US Marshals of the Old West and their “shoot first, ask questions later” mantra. “More like The Fugitive,” he remarks of his profession when it is compared to Gunsmoke. In reality, however, Raylan Givens is more akin to Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok than Samuel Gerard, as well as a direct descendent of John Wayne rather than Tommy Lee Jones. Just as the Duke was the epitome of the classic Hollywood Westerns of yesteryear, Raylan Givens is representative of the more complex Twenty First Century and a deep-rooted desire for a return to simpler times.
While John Wayne is best remembered for such big screen classics as Stagecoach, The Searchers and True Grit, his small screen counterpart Raylan Givens is more comparable to Tom Doniphon from the 1962 film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The epic is an exploration of the shifting winds of society in the 1800s as the West evolved from the justice of a gun to the rule of law. Like Givens, Doniphon finds himself at the crossroads between those two worlds as he struggles to balance his impending irrelevance with the better future he believes in.
“Now I wonder what scared him off?” Tom Doniphon asks east coast attorney Rance Stoddard (portrayed by James Stewart) when outlaw Liberty Valance is chased from town under the threat of Doniphon’s gun as opposed to Stoddard’s law books. Raylan Givens no doubt shared the same sentiment after shooting Tommy Bucks—the law, after all, may not scare organized crime syndicates like it did in the past but an unholstered firearm still has an entirely different effect.
In the rugged western town of Shinbone, meanwhile, the local sheriff is ineffective against the likes of Liberty Valance and while John Wayne’s character has no legal standing, his reputation as a quick draw makes him the only viable counter to the lawlessness of the region. Despite his tough exterior, however, Tom Doniphon has a courteous and compassionate nature as well. He is the one, for instance, who rescues Rance Stoddard when Valance leaves him for dead early in the film and offers to pay his room and board until the newest member of the Shinbone community can get back on his feet.
The same is true for Raylan Givens. His speech is often peppered with “sirs” and “ma’ams” and he even goes out of his way to look after a fourteen year old girl who had recently been kidnapped. “I need you to know, if you find yourself in trouble of any kind, you can call me,” Givens tells her during season two of Justified. “I’ll drop whatever I’m doing and I will come for you.”
His courteous nature, on the other hand, is established in the pilot episode of the series. “You don’t walk into a person’s house unless you’re invited,” Givens scolds a white supremacist gang member when they barge into someone’s home.
Rance Stoddard from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, meanwhile, is as intense about his belief in the law as Tom Doniphon and Raylan Givens are low-key in regards to their outward demeanor. He sets up a legal practice within the offices of the local Shinbone Star newspaper and teaches residents of the town both American history and how to read and write. Stoddard also advocates statehood for the region, something the ranchers in the area are against. In fact, the opposition has hired Liberty Valance to intimidate the townsfolk into voting “nay” on the proposal. The film thus sets up Valance as the personification of the lawlessness of the Old West that stood against the tide of change, with Stoddard representing the rule of law that eventually swept the landscape.
When the citizens of Shinbone gather to select representatives to a convention on statehood, Liberty Valance attempts to usurp the proceeding by having himself elected instead. The plan fails, however, and it is Rance Stoddard, as well as newspaper publisher Dutton Peabody, who get the nods. Valance retaliates by ransacking the offices of the Shinbone Star and beating Peabody to near death.
Realizing that law and order will never truly come to the region as long as Liberty Valance is around, Stoddard challenges the outlaw to a gunfight and in effect embraces the form of justice he himself detests. Despite limited gun skills and being heavily outmatched, Rance Stoddard somehow hits his intended target in the final showdown—killing Liberty Valance and turning “the man who shot him” into a local legend. Stoddard rides his newfound notoriety to the statehood convention and beyond, serving as congressman, governor and senator for the unnamed western state. It is revealed at the end of the film, however, that he did not shoot Liberty Valance after all. Tom Doniphon was hiding in the shadows that fateful night and the John Wayne character fired his rifle at the same moment that Jimmy Stewart’s pulled the trigger on his own gun.
“Cold blooded murder, but I can live with it,” Doniphon tells Stoddard afterwards, even though such actions are rare for the man. Throughout the film, Tom Doniphon uses the threat of the draw to intimidate the criminal element and it was only when faced with the prospect of Rance Stoddard’s death that he finds it necessary to take the appropriate action. That action may indeed be considered murder in the eyes of the law—it wasn’t Doniphon who was in the gunfight, after all—but as far as the man himself is concerned, it was both necessary and justified.
The same holds true for Raylan Givens and his killing of the Miami gun thug. “I watched as Tommy Bucks stuck a stick of dynamite in that poor man’s mouth, taped it so he couldn’t spit it out, lit the fuse,” he remarks in regards to an earlier encounter that led to his motivations. Tommy Bucks thus got what he deserved in the same manner as Liberty Valance.
Givens was banished to the backwoods of Eastern Kentucky afterwards. “We have TVs down here now,” his former coal mining partner Boyd Crowder jokingly tells him but the Harlan County of his youth is still as rugged and dangerous as the Shinbone of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Boyd’s father Bo, for instance, controls a criminal organization that offers “protection” and supplies drugs to the community. Mags Bennett, meanwhile, is a marijuana grower who likewise operates a vast illegal enterprise.
While Liberty Valance was not above beating a man to death with his silver-handled whip, Bo and Mags have equally violent tendencies. When Boyd Crowder interferes with one of his father’s drug smuggling endeavors, the elder Crowder hangs his followers upside down from trees and has them shot. Mags is more subtle when she poisons a widowed father for stealing but later exhibits a unique form of “tough love” when she pounds her son’s hand with a hammer as punishment.
State and federal law enforcement agents are just as powerless against these backwoods villains as Rance Stoddard was against Liberty Valance. Thus enters Raylan Givens, who not only knows the people but the region as well. In the pilot episode of Justified, for instance, he immediately locates the home of a local resident even though others had been unable to find it. “I guess some places haven’t been entered into the system, like North Korea and Raylan’s hometown,” his boss Art Mullen observes at the time. Later, Mullen tells Givens, “You’re like the Hillbilly Whisperer.”
Raylan Givens may be a throwback to the US Marshals of the Old West, but on the FX drama Justified he is in the right place at the right time nonetheless. Despite being the Twenty First Century, the Harlan County of the series is as lawless as Shinbone and it takes a special kind of enforcement officer to sweep in the winds of change. “I know these law books mean a lot to you, but not out here,” Tom Doniphon tells Rance Stoddard in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. “Out here a man settles his own problems.” Although that observation eventually changed, it was—ironically enough—Doniphon’s gun that was catalyst.
The same may ultimately hold true for Raylan Givens and his time in the backwoods of Kentucky. The man is indeed a modern day John Wayne after all, from the hat on his head to the boots on his feet to how he handles himself as well. Givens is polite and courteous in much the same fashion as the Duke and while he respects the law he has sworn to uphold, he is also willing to serve the form of justice that Wayne did in countless western films from yesteryear. To a certain point, at least.
“Normally, I would have just shot you myself the second you pulled,” the US Marshal tells a sexual predator on Justified. “But I am doing my level best to avoid the paperwork and the self-recrimination that comes with it.”
No doubt John Wayne would have felt the same way.
Anthony Letizia (March 23, 2011)
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