One way of defining the relationship of Ford's late films to his previous work would be to compare The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with My Darling Clementine. One's immediate reaction to the juxtaposition may at first seem paradoxical: that the later film is more complex but less rich. In fact, the sense that Clementine is the less complex work proves on reflection to be illusory: the impression derives simply from the fact that its complexities are experienced as resolvable in a constructive way, the different positive values embodied in East and West, in civilization and wilderness, felt to be ultimately reconcilable and mutually fertilizing. There is, it is true, as in all of Ford's westerns a pervading note of nostalgia to be taken into account. But the tone of the opening and close of Liberty Valance is more than nostalgic: it is overtly elegiac.

It is, however...