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The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

1962

John Ford

John Wayne, James Stewart, Vera Miles, Lee Marvin ...

8.3

35,222

Western Congressman Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) returns with his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) to the tiny town of Shinbone to bury an old friend, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), and tells reporters the truth about how he came to be known as 'the man who shot Liberty Valance.' Many years before, as a dishwasher and aspiring lawyer, Ransom had encouraged Shinbone to stand up against the highwayman Valance (Lee Marvin), a thug who also enforced the ... [+]

	Author	Review
United States	Richard Brody The New Yorker	"It's both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie"	POS
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous"	POS
United States	The New York Times	"Their basically honest, rugged and mature saga has been sapped of a great deal of effect by an obvious, overlong and garrulous anticlimax."	NEU
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"[From the] templates of the Hollywood Western (...) 'Liberty Valance' was the most pensive and thoughtful (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Variety	"[It] is an entertaining and emotionally involving western. Yet, while it is an enjoyable film it falls distinctly shy of its innate story potential."	NEU
United States	Len Sousa Slant	"There's something about Wayne's on-screen performance that's still captivating nearly half a century later (…) Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Keith Phipps AV Club	"The late ’60s and ’70s found filmmakers demythologizing the Old West; with 'Liberty Valance', Ford beat them to it, offering a bittersweet look at the closing of the frontier"	POS
United Kingdom	Nigel Floyd Time Out	"Ford's purest and most sustained expression of the familiar themes of the passing of the Old West, the conflict between the untamed wilderness and the cultivated garden, and the power of myth."	POS
United States	Marjorie Baumgarten Austin Chronicle	"Arguably, the best John Ford film ever, certainly one the very best, 'The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance' is an American classic. Ford addresses the complexity of heroism in a poetic manner"	POS

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