The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

film by Ford [1962]

Written by Lee Pfeiffer

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Article History

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, American western film, released in 1962, that was John Ford’s poetic and sombre look at the end of the Wild West era. Although atypical of his usual works, it is widely considered Ford’s last great movie and among his best westerns.

The story opens with the return of elderly U.S. Sen. Ransom Stoddard (played by James Stewart) and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), to their small hometown of Shinbone in the American West. They are there to pay their respects to their old friend Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who is being buried in a pauper’s grave. Stoddard, who rode to fame as a tenderfoot lawyer credited with having fatally shot the notorious gunman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), makes a startling confession to local newspaper reporters. In a tale told in flashback, he relates how he arrived in Shinbone hoping to establish a law office but found the town terrorized by Valance and his gang. Although Stoddard was meek in nature, Valance’s continued harassment of him resulted in an impromptu showdown in which Valance was shot dead. Stoddard thus became a local legend, and he was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate. However, he confesses to the local reporters that he had learned years ago that it was Doniphon who actually fired the fatal shot at Valance and later allowed Stoddard to be credited with the deed. Despite his confession, Stoddard finds the press uninterested in publishing the revelation, preferring instead to let his myth remain unaffected. As one journalist says—in the film’s famous tagline— “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

At the time of its release, the film was not well received by critics, many of whom found it claustrophobic. With mostly interior scenes, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance eschews the lush landscapes and widescreen cinematography that were hallmarks of Ford’s movies. The cast was uniformly superb, even if Wayne and Stewart were arguably too old for their roles. In addition, the film features a host of scene-stealing character actors—including Andy Devine, Woody Strode, Edmond O’Brien, Lee Van Cleef and John Carradine—and Marvin’s Valance is one of the screen’s most notorious villains. The top-selling theme song by Gene Pitney does not appear in the film.