In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), John Ford plunges us into an atypical Western, heavy with melancholy, memorable dialogue and the awareness of an era ending. Far removed from the adventurous optimism of his early films about the West, Ford looks at the genre here with a twilight gaze, almost valedictory. His classic narrative style takes on a disenchanted tone, a farewell to the Old West. It is no coincidence that Ford chose to shoot in stark black and white even though colour dominated the period: he fought for it, masterfully exploiting the play of light and shadow to bring out the sombre psychological profile of each character. The result is an intimate, nostalgic Western that dispenses with the grand Monument Valley panoramas without our missing them. Nearly all the action unfolds in the small fictional town of Shinbone, in interiors and sets that heighten the sense of claustrophobia and imminent change. Ford sacrifices the genre's usual visual grandeur in favour of a well-told story that grips through its characters and its message, not through shootouts or open landscapes. In fact, the film barely shows a single gunfight; explicit violence is minimal and always carries dramatic weight, never gratuitous. It is a Western of dialogues, of glances and silences, where the moral dilemma matters more than gunpowder. Ford was closing a cycle: almost as if he knew that with this film he was drawing the curtain on the epic of the classical Western, bidding farewell to his old heroes once and for all.
The film opens on an elegiac note: Ransom "Ranse" Stoddard (James Stewart), now a veteran United States senator, returns with his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) to Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend, Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Nobody in town seems to remember much about Doniphon; it is a modest funeral, ignored by the younger generation. From the outset we sense the sadness: who was Tom Doniphon that a senator would cross the country to see him buried? A local reporter, intrigued, asks Stoddard to tell him the story. And so Ford launches us into a long flashback that makes up the bulk of the film: the chronicle of a frontier town in transition, of the collision between the law of the gun and the law of the book. In that backward glance, Ford explores the blurred lines between legend and reality in the West. We see a young Ranse Stoddard (a James Stewart perhaps too old for the role of "junior lawyer," but whose genial presence makes up for it) arriving in Shinbone with a law book under his arm and an idealism he believes to be bulletproof. Soon Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) crosses his path, a brutal outlaw who rules the territory at gunpoint. He also meets Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), the tough, quiet rancher who, in the absence of formal law, is the only man capable of standing up to Valance. Doniphon embodies the classic strong man of the West: brave, somewhat rough, armed, with a code of honour all his own. Stoddard, by contrast, represents the civilisation that is dawning: an idealistic lawyer, champion of institutional justice, almost a naive character out of a Frank Capra morality tale. Ford chose these two iconic actors despite their age for good reason: Stewart was associated in the popular imagination with the honest, idealistic American, while Wayne embodied the tough, silent man, a lover of his own freedom. The chemistry between them works beautifully; their personalities clash but complement each other. Ranse is all principles and words; Tom is a man of action and tradition. Every tense exchange between them, whether in Hallie’s kitchen with that famous steak through which Tom "teaches manners" to the Eastern lawyer, or on the dark porch where Tom advises him to go back home before Valance kills him, is charged with meaning about the fate of the West.
The political heart of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance beats precisely in that symbolic duel between Tom and Ranse, between two visions of life in society. Ford shows us a primitive Shinbone: a dusty town where "force will always be above the law," as they warn Ranse the moment he arrives. It is an illiterate settlement, accustomed to being ruled by the revolver and the whiskey bottle. Ranse represents the wager on progress: he opens a makeshift school to teach people to read, insists that Valance must be arrested and tried according to the law, and even participates in local politics when the territory debates whether to join the Union as a state. Tom, for his part, distrusts these "new ways" but deep down understands their importance. He lives by the old code of the West, justice by his own hand if necessary, yet he recognises that violent world is reaching its end. Ford is divided: it has been said that his heart sympathises with Tom Doniphon (that noble cowboy condemned to the past), while his head understands that the hour has come for men like Ranse Stoddard, book in hand and a political future ahead. At the territorial convention, the clash becomes explicit: the people of Shinbone must vote between remaining a lawless territory (dominated by powerful open-range cattlemen) or joining the United States as a state, with government, taxes and republican legality. Winning that debate requires a hero who embodies the new order, and that hero is Ranse, "the man who shot Liberty Valance." Paradoxically, for law and institutions to triumph, an act of clandestine violence had to occur. Because in this story progress ultimately prevails over frontier barbarism, Stoddard turns out to be the standard-bearer of progress against the gunman, but he achieves it with the help of the very Code of the Colt he sought to replace. Ford makes it clear that the nascent civilisation is stained by the gunpowder of the Old West. There is no ideal without rough edges: Ranse wins the political and moral victory, yes, but he carries on his shoulders a legend built on a merciful lie. And Tom, the strong man from another age, must sacrifice himself and step aside so the future can arrive.
This duality, full of sorrow and honour, culminates in the famous duel sequence with Liberty Valance. Ranse, pushed to the limit, faces the gunman in the main street. A shot rings out, Valance falls dead, and the timid lawyer becomes a legend overnight. Everyone believes he was "the man who pulled the trigger," the brave vigilante who freed the town from its tyrant. That reputation catapults him: we see him hailed as the territory's hero and the ideal candidate to represent the region in the Senate. However, Ford then reveals the truth in a brilliant twist: Ranse did not kill Valance. It was Tom Doniphon, hidden in the shadow of an alley, who pulled the trigger to save his idealistic friend. Tom, who loved Hallie in silence and understood that Ranse meant the future, gave up glory and love to make way for civilisation, knowing that the Old West and he himself were already an anachronism. That heroic and bitter decision is the narrative and emotional centre of the film. Ford dismantles the myth of the gunslinger hero even as he shows it to us. He forces us to reconsider the entire story we have just watched: the rise of Ranse Stoddard was built on a convenient fable.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance thus plunges into the mythology of the West to examine how legends are born and how, at times, historical truth gets pushed aside. When, back in the present, Stoddard finishes telling the reporter the truth about the duel, the editor decides not to publish it. "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," he says, in one of the most famous lines in cinema. With that cynical pragmatism, the editor sums up the central dilemma: in the construction of collective identity, the legend matters more than the fact. In the end, the story of the hero who never was is printed as official truth, because it is the legend that inspires the people and sustains the new order. Ford poses a forceful reflection on founding myths: the modern United States, institutional, juridical, urban, was built on heroic narratives that were often embellished or outright invented, necessary to forge a united nation. Liberty Valance lays bare that mechanism without renouncing emotion or respect for its characters.
All of this makes The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a profoundly melancholic Western. It is a swan song. John Ford, master of the West, saying goodbye to his own myth. In every frame you feel the longing for a time that has passed, mingled with the acceptance of a different future. John Wayne's performance is essential to conveying that dignified sadness: his Tom Doniphon carries a quiet heaviness, the heaviness of a man who knows he belongs to an extinct era. Wayne, the great American hero, has here perhaps his most vulnerable moment under Ford's direction. In his eyes we see the pain of sacrifice and the loneliness of the one left behind. He ends his days alone, living on the margins while Ranse and Hallie build a new life together; his half-built ranch (the house he dreamed of sharing with Hallie) goes up in flames after a moment of despair; and finally he dies forgotten, to the point where barely a handful of people attend his funeral. The cactus flower Hallie places on Tom's modest coffin is a small but devastating detail: it symbolises the love and gratitude she always held for him, a private gesture in the midst of the public recognition he never received. James Stewart, for his part, delivers a warm performance as Ranse Stoddard, showing the evolution from naive idealism to the weight of guilt and political commitment. Stewart gives Ranse a humanity and decency that make us believe in this upright man who genuinely wanted a West with laws and schools for everyone. His chemistry with Wayne reflects a mutual respect between characters (and between actors who were legends in their own right). At the end, when Senator Stoddard hears that final line on the train, "Nothing is too good for the man who shot Liberty Valance," we see on his face a mixture of pride, shame and sorrow. He knows that phrase holds a cruel irony: society honours him for an act he did not commit, while the true hero lies buried in oblivion. That is the last stroke of bitterness with which Ford closes the tale.
With a tone that is casual yet laden with meaning, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance speaks to us about the passage of time and how legends are made. John Ford, in the twilight of his career, delivers something more than another Western: he offers a commentary on truth and fiction in the history of America, on the price of civilisation and the anonymous sacrifices behind every myth. Without resorting to sermons, he makes us ask uncomfortable questions: how much of what we call history is merely an agreed-upon story? How many Liberty Valances fill the books whose true executioners and heroes we will never know? Ford gives no closed answers; he prefers to print the legend and leave us with the bittersweet taste of his reflection. At the end of this dusty road, we are left with the image of a solitary, honourable man riding off into oblivion, and of another man, younger, more educated, more modern, heading to the capital by train, bound for the Senate. Between them they have laid a bridge across time, across opposing but complementary values, that forged the birth of a nation. In that crossing of bullet and ballot, of spurs and constitutions, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance finds its greatness: it is the elegy of a director who understood the legend of the West like no one else, and who in his final song chose to reveal the truth hidden behind the legend... only to let us know, a moment later, that sometimes it is better to go with the printed legend. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.