The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

The coming of civilisation brings an end to the wildness of the west in John Ford’s elegiac late film teaming John Wayne and James Stewart.

John Ford’s recent westerns, such as The Searchers (1956), had luxuriated in Technicolor open spaces, but for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance he returned to shooting on sound stages and in monochrome. Fittingly so, as this late work is a sombre reflection on what was lost when education and morality – incarnated by Stewart as East Coast lawyer Ransom Stoddard – crept westward as civilising influences.

Told within a flashback framework, as Stoddard comes clean to the press about who really shot outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), Ford’s classic waves a bittersweet adieu to the bygone values of the Old West, typified by the rough justice of rancher Tom Doniphon (Wayne). The paper-men ultimately opt to “print the legend” – famous words that have been taken as a maxim for Ford’s own myth making.

1962 USA
Directed by
John Ford
Produced by
Willis Goldbeck
Written by
James Warner Bellah, Willis Goldbeck
Featuring
John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles

Ranked in The Greatest Films of All Time poll

Sight and Sound

Who voted for The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Critics

Marcelo Alderete
Argentina
Maria Bonsanti
Italy
Serge Bromberg
France
Elisabet Cabeza
Spain
Alejandro G Calvo
Spain
Godfrey Cheshire
USA
Andrew Collins
UK
Richard Combs
UK
Jordan Cronk
USA
Louise Dumas
France
Paula Felix-Didier
Argentina
Filipe Furtado
Brazil
Charlotte Garson
France
Mara Guevara
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Eulàlia Iglesias Huix
Spain
Aleksandar S. Janković
Serbia
Dave Kehr
USA
Isaac León-Frías
Peru
Tara Lomax
Australia
Santiago Navajas
Spain
José Maria Rodríguez Armada
Spain
Yal Sadat
France
John Semley
Canada
Will Sloan
Canada
Malena Solarz
Argentina
Grégory Valens
France
Ivan Velisavljević
Serbia
Nicolás Zukerfeld
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Directors

Homer Etminani
Colombia/Spain
Axel Kuschevatzky
USA/Argentina
John Landis
USA
Santiago Mitre
Argentina
Philippe Mora
Australia

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