Volu m e II - Purdue University Calumet

Stanley Corkin examines the popularity of the Western genre from the 1940’s into the 1970’s. Aiming to
define how Western films connect to the Cold War, particularly in America, he grafts Western myth on to
modern reality. He studies many films, but specifically focuses on John Ford’s The Searchers and The Man who
Shot Liberty Valance. In his study of The Searcher’s Corkin mainly focused on containment and nationalism. He
considered this the golden era of the Western and explains how the film can be explained in terms of
liberalism. Corkin believes that liberalism had been “shifting during the late forties a period which recodified
in ways that accommodated the persistence of militarism and the limiting of civic discourse,
developments fostered to support the goals of hegemony and the security state.” (10) He places heavy focus
on John Ford’s grafting of Cold War liberal values and beliefs associated with containment onto ideological
symbols that once were symbols of McCarthyist nationalism. In this way Corkin stresses how John Wayne’s
character has turned the idea of the old western hero into a villain.
Corkin’s study of The Man who Shot Liberty Valance examines a cultural prevalence of anxiety in the
nation. His focus on this film is explaining how the Vietnam War affected the way America viewed itself
and also to articulate the cultural nostalgia of the 1960’s. Corkin focuses on the flashback aspect of Liberty
Valance as an expression of how Ford viewed the past as being better than the present.
In his anaylsis of The Searchers, Corkin fails to address the subtleties in Ethan. He proclaims him to
be a hero and a model of Cold War hegemony. Yet, Ethan and The Searchers should be read from a domestic
perspective. The domicile is the ultimate representation of the American home front. It is a bastion of
civilization, and through examine it one can see the way American’s viewed themselves in the era. Corkin is
firmly entrenched in the idea that the film is commenting on international politics, particularly drawing
connections between MacArthur and Ethan Edwards. He misses Ford’s social implications completely. The
Searchers and Liberty Valance need to be examined to analyze the role of the American individual rather than
America’s role in the outside world.
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