First and only time I ever saw John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a theater was during writer/director Edgar Wright's programming at The New Beverly Cinema. Basically, Wright selected two weeks worth of films he'd never seen before and experienced them with an audience. 1962's Liberty Valance is a classic western about big ideal lawyer Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), who travels to the wild west and gets brutally whipped by the outlaw Liberty Valance (a really mean Lee Marvin) during a stagecoach robbery. Setting up in town, Stoddard is saved and schooled by manly man Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) and told that western law doesn't adhere to what's printed in a book. Stoddard works to turn the territory into a state and civilize the land but a confrontation with Valance just keeps trucking towards him.
During a busy dinner scene, Stoddard is doing women's work of serving food to help out the folks who took him in. Valance and his cronies (young Lee Van Cleef and Strother Martin) waltz in, scare off some cowboys and sit down for a huge steak dinner. Still bearing the scars from Valance's whip, Stoddard steels himself and goes about his work but Valance just won't let him and trips him, spilling a tray of steak, beans, potatoes and deep dish apple pie. That's when Doniphon stands up and delivers "That's my steak, Valance" and a true, defining movie Macho Moment is upon us. I remember laughing and applauding in the theater because it was just too perfect a scene. Valance is set up to be this hardcore outlaw but you're not sure if he actually is because he always has back up. Doniphon isn't the type to back down and is more or less just looking for a reason to put Valance six feet under. Stoddard can't believe how kill crazy these people are and picks up the steak himself.
Liberty Valance was a critical and commercial hit upon release, grossing $8 million bucks off a $3.2 million dollar budget, making it the 16th highest grossing film of 1962. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume Design and spawned a Top Ten hit for singer Gene Pitney. But the James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck scripted film wasn't a very pleasant shoot according to some of it's stars as Ford, who was a big part of Wayne's rise to stardom, needled the actor endlessly for not making it in the NFL like co-star Woody Strode or enlisting in World War II like Stewart. The two had been working together for over a decade and would reunite just a year later for Donovan's Reef. In 2007 the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".
Welcome to Macho Moments, a look at some of my favorite random scenes in movies that just make you go, "oh shit!" or "somebody's gonna get it!". Our first installment takes us back to 1953's From Here to Eternity. Based on the best selling novel by James Jones, the 800 page tome was thought to be unfilmable. Director Fred Zinnemann and writer Daniel Taradash proved that wrong as the film was a huge hit of the decade and won 8 Oscars (we saw one of them at the Sony Lot this week, nice timing eh?). Playing on Turner Classic Movies this past Memorial Day weekend, I sat down for the flick and somehow enjoyed it even more than in the past. Chronicling the daily military base drama of Pearl Harbor before the 1941 attacks, Eternity boasts a stellar cast that includes Burt Lancaster as a Sergeant falling for his Captain's wife, Deborah Kerr as the suffering trophy wife, Montgomery Clift as a bugler and boxer who won't fight anymore, Frank Sinatra as a wise-cracking trouble maker and Ernest Borgnine as a mean and violent military prison boss.
While the film is known for it's iconic beach scene of Lancaster and Kerr smooching in the surf, the scene I remember most is the bar fight. Sinatra's Angelo Maggio and Borgnine's "Fatso" Judson have already butted heads over choice of music and racist taunts. Enjoying the bar scene during a weekend pass, Judson makes a crude remark about Maggio's sister which leads the whipper snapper to smacking the larger man in the back of the head with a bar stool! Judson whips out a knife and it looks like someone is going to the hospital until badass and oh so cool guy Sgt. Milton Warden aka Burt Lancaster steps in. Apparently Warden is one of the best soldiers around having already fought in Asia. When Judson fails to back down, Warden kicks it into badass mode and breaks a bottle, ready to get the killing started. Phew! Great scene by all involved as you're just waiting for the shit to go down. Especially Lancaster, who was headlining his first big studio feature and would go on to box office and award glory in roles like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Sweet Smell of Success and Elmer Gantry in the ensuing years.
