Take your best shot, Pilgrim. The lawman trains the lawyer.

Senator Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?
Reporter Maxwell Scott: No, sir. This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

The lines were delivered in the 1962 film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, in which John Ford directed John Wayne, Lee Marvin, and Jimmy Stewart.  I saw the film over Memorial Day Weekend at the magnificently restored Stanford Theatre--www.stanfordtheatre.org--which has been showing classic Hollywood films to Palo Alto audiences since 1925.

As a child, teenager and young adult living in New York City, I was never a fan of American westerns.  Woody Allen, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorcese presented the legends and the facts that I was most interested in.  But now that I have actually lived in the west since 1996, I have sat around countless Weber grills, sharing Napa wine with the descendents of those brave pioneers. How I have come to be friends with so many fit, good looking people, who know how to hunt, fish, shoot and ride horses is beyond me and my  east coast family. When one fine San Anselmo evening, my mother was offered smoked venison prepared by the host who hunted the deer, she took me aside and whispered, "Lauren, this is the first party I've ever been to where someone shot the appetizer!"

My respect for the pioneer spirit increased further when I toured the states of Arizona and New Mexico--suffering altitude sickness just from walking around in National Parks. So when the Stanford Theatre offered a series of John Wayne double features on the big screen for seven bucks--with an organist playing Home On the Range--I seized the opportunity to check out the history of my new homeland, from no higher than the balcony.

Now, having seen The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (filmed, by the way, in black and white), I want everyone else I know to see it too! You can get it on Netflix and you can get in on DVD at many libraries. Why should everyone see it? Well, I'd have to give away the ending to really and completely explain why. But here are some teasers:

• It's the first time in film that John Wayne calls anybody "Pilgrim"--which I finally understand to be a derrogatory term for east coast intellectuals.
• It's a western that questions its own "old school" values...but  treasures them, too----in the years before Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone took over to show us the bad and the ugly--and entire decades before the nihilism of No Country For Old Men.
• It shows a western code of conduct that is being shaped by all kinds of men--the gunfighters, the outlaws, the politicians, the farmers, the ranchers, the newspapermen, the restaurant and saloon owners.

Where were the women?  Well, there's the center of the love triangle-- the Swedish immigrant and waitress Hallie, who is played by Vera Miles. But the most important woman on the scene--was Montana author and journalist Dorothy Marie Johnson (1905-1984)--the woman who wrote The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Johnston did not write the screenplay. But, the opening credits listed her as the author of the short story that the film was based on.  In fact, other than the costume designer, Edith Head, she was one of the few women in the credits. Always on the lookout for film/literature tie-ins, I sat up and took notice!  Who was Dorothy Marie Johnson and why did Hollywood buy her story? I don't have an I-phone yet, so I had to wait until I got home to look her up.

Here's some of what I learned. According  a Web posting by the Montana Newspaper Hall of Fame: Johnson was well-known for her painstaking research on the period and place she most frequently portrayed in her work--The West up to 1890. She often said she preferred the 19th century to the 20th century because "we knew how it came out."

Johnson spent her early thirties and forties as a women's magazine editor in New York City. But she was homesick. And she coped with her homesickness by seeing a lot of western films in Manhattan cinemas. And when she wasn's at the movies--she read a lot about western history.  Finally,  in 1950, she headed home to Whitefish, Montana, to write and share the west with the rest of the country. In 1953,  Ballantine published her first collection of stories in an anthology called "Indian Country".  Along with the story "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence", the collection contained the short story, "A Man Called Horse," which would also be made into a Hollywood film. In 1957, Ballantine published Johnson's second collection of short stories. The title story,The Hanging Tree, became a 1959 Warner Brothers film starring Gary Cooper.

A posting from the University of Montana School of Journalism, where Johnson taught and studied, said that she liked to take traditional Western plots and add a "what if" twist. http://www.umt.edu/journalism/special_projects/hall_of_fame/johnson.html

Like--what if one of the guys in the shootout never learned to shoot?  What if, rather than giving up completely or shooting everyone in sight, strong men and weak men just do the best they can? 

And what if, instead of roses, a suitor presented his intended with a flowering cactus? Would it go in a vase or would someone have to plant it?

I didn't learn a whole lot more about Dorothy Marie Johnson's personal life from the Web. I don't know if she was married or had kids or  was gay like Willa Cather, my other favorite female chronicler of the West.  I don't even know yet  if she is a really good writer.  But I am about to find out. That's because  in 2005, Riverbend Publishing, issued a paperback entitled The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: The Four Best Stories of the American West. I am ordering it today--and if I like the prose as much as the screenplay--you can be sure that at least one of the stories will be on my book group reading list this fall.