ViewGuide

Created Mar 10, 2012 08:08PM PST • Edited Jan 02, 2023 08:06AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Perfect 5.0

   Greatest Western? The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence is certainly in the running, given how it plays with Wild West myth-making, features three iconic stars along with a passel of great costars and wields a humdinger of an ending. “Nothing’s too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance,” the last line portentously declares. The same could be said of the praise that can be heaped on this John Ford classic.

   The story unfolds in flashback after a grey-haired Jimmy Stewart returns with his wife to the little town where they met decades earlier. Reflecting back, he tells the tale of a vile outlaw named Liberty Valence, a rugged horse trader named Tom Doniphon, a love triangle, and a political struggle between cattlemen and farmers. “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” a newspaperman says to the now distinguished Jimmy Stewart. Western legends get no better than this one. Print that.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart are each at the top of their game, even if they’re 50ish playing 20ish.

   The Duke’s boisterous big man-about-town encapsulates his career. It’s all here – the rugged individualism, the roughhewn decency, the easy quips, plus a notable first. Every John Wayne impersonator calls people “Pilgrim.” The real thing introduced that sobriquet in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence.

   Jimmy Stewart’s courtly lawyer is also a quintessential role for this icon of American decency. Stewart ably plays the character’s early uncertainty and mature confidence in a virtuoso performance that spans several decades of storyline.

   Lee Marvin’s Liberty Valence is a black-hat villain for the ages, right up there with Jack Palance’s in Shane. Interestingly, Marvin appears less lean than he became in his later career.

   The great costars:

   • Vera Miles as the love interest torn between John Wayne’s local hero & Jimmy Stewart’s refined decency.
   • Woody Strode as Wayne’s companion, presumably an ex-slave. Strode was a close friend of director John Ford, a position that apparently irked the Duke. He is also one of the four black players who broke the NFL’s color barrier.
   • Edmond O’Brien as the drunken newspaperman.
   • Andy Devine as the cowardly Marshall. Devine’s squeaky voice should be in the Smithsonian.
   • Ken Murray as the drunk Doc Willoughby. Called to treat a man who was just shot, he demands “Whiskey, quick,” takes a slug and declares the man dead.
   • John Carradine as a pompous orator. The great thespian is always a wonder to behold.
   • Jeanette Nolan and John Qualen as a cute old Swedish couple.
   • Strother Martin and Lee Van Cleef as Liberty Valence’s henchmen.

5. Male Stars Perfect 5.0

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Perfect 5.0

10. Film

    Perfect 5.0

    Brilliantly structured, the film creates intrigue early on, slips easily into its flashback and saves its secrets till the end. Its most brilliant aspect is how it plays with the irony of Wild West myth-making, where dime-novelists and newspapermen were always ready to create legends, deserving or not.

    In this regard, it sets the stage for such Western debunkers as Unforgiven some 30 years later.

11. Direction Perfect 5.0

    John Ford oddly shot The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence on a soundstage in black-and-white. This from the director who pioneered and nearly monopolized Monument Valley location shoots and in an era when B&W was already archaic. Who cares. The result feels iconic and not at all phony by the standards of the time.

    How does it compare with Ford’s peerless Stagecoach? Right up there, even if Stagecoach was seminal in a way that later films couldn’t be.

12. Play Perfect 5.0

    Scads of classic lines and a cleverly surprising story make Dorothy M. Johnson’s story perfect.

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.5

    Tame by 21st Century standards, but not without plenty of tension and percussive violence.

17. Sex Innocent 1.0

18. Violence Fierce 1.8

19. Rudeness Salty 1.7

21. Reality

    Glib 1.5

    Where is it set? Seems to be an amalgamation, kinda sorta Southeastern Colorado with some Arizona thrown in for good measure. Mostly, it seems set in John Ford’s Western imagination.

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.9

23. Biological Glib 1.4

24. Physical Glib 1.3