Popular reviews

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  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 5

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  nothing i can say that hasn't been said a hundred times before, it's brilliant in many ways but here's what stuck with me most: can you fuckin imagine walking into an empty room, lighting a lamp, and the lees marvin & van cleef are waiting for you in the dark? mindblowing that john ford managed to stick a 10 second horror movie into his western.

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  Review by Neil Bahadur ★★★★★ 7

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  "When force threatens, talk's no good anymore."
  -
  "Votes don't stand up against guns."

  The impossibility of a democratic system to contain what seems an irrepressible & inherent violence of the American psyche. Marvin's Liberty Valance and Wayne's Tom Donovan are the two most charismatic cyphers to ever grace a movie screen - both seem two sides of the same coin..but Valance's other side is actually Stoddard - Valance condones force, Donovan does not. But both acknowledge it's existence - Stewart's Ransom Stoddard refuses too, finally has to realize it exists, but brings civilization to the West with a lie - that it doesn't. Visually puny in comparison to the Monument Valley westerns, but this is one of Ford's hugest, most…

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★

  Not sure I'd ever quite clocked the moment near the beginning when Ransom Stoddard demands that Tom Doniphon be buried with his gun and holster, and it's pointed out to him that Doniphon hadn't carried a gun in years. No need to. Stoddard may or may not have shot Liberty Valance, but he definitely killed Tom Doniphon.

  This is a powerfully ambiguous movie in which, every time he pedantically corrects someone's grammar, Stoddard reveals himself as the secret villain. Liberty Valance probably needed to die, but at what cost? Is what has replaced him any less violent? Now that Stoddard's vision for the west has won, Liberty Valance is reborn every day as a lobbyist for some Silicon Valley tech…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 3

  83

  "You knew where I wanted to go, didn't you?"

  "Well, you said you wanted to see the cactus blossoms..."

  At once yet another crystallization of John Ford's frontier community, as well as a brutal examination of the mythic ramifications of 'The West' as it is known, and not how it actually was. Very much a definitive late-Western, echoing tendencies of Noir and realism from Anthony Mann and proceeding the revisionist era. But John Ford was already ahead of the game, and The Man who Shot Liberty Valance defines itself as a haunted portrait of a dying world, with gestural significance aplenty. Even before the titular story begins, the prologue is packed with pain and melancholy, and it establishes a story of political transition, of moral righteousness, lawlessness, and the apathy amidst America's construction. Vera Miles provides one of the greatest performances in any John Ford film.

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  Review by nickusen 1

  now listen here pilgrim, this is one of the most moving & melancholic films ever made

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  Review by Jake Cole ★★★★★ 3

  Leone said this was the film where Ford discovered pessimism. Apparently this is the only Ford film Leone ever saw, but never mind that for now. It is certainly the bleakest in a canon typified by failures in victory, forced retirements, and the burial of truth to maintain a false but reassuring sense of order. The latter comes to the fore here with even more force than in the resigned iconization of the Custer figure in FORT APACHE, as a man who comes to the West to bring law must instead defend it with a gun. The fallout presents him with the relief of not having taken a life but being tasked for exploiting that death for good, a dab…

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 2

  Ford’s bookend to Stagecoach, a reimagining of the mythic westerns he perfected over the years, only weathered with cynicism. Thoughtful and gritty, political and pessimistic, Liberty Valance feels like a bridge that connects the golden age western to the violent, bleakness of the sun soaked spaghetti realm—Makes sense that this is Leone’s favorite Ford picture.

  This feels like the end of a cycle in a way... the aging monolithic actors and the examination of heroic irony, the wrestling with the myths Ford himself helped create while deconstructing it all with one of Hollywood’s greatest lines:

  “This is the West, Sir—When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
  
  
  Also, Lee fucking Marvin and Lee Van Cleef.

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★★ 2

  The American movie.

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★★

  idealism corrupted and transformed into soulless bureaucracy. tale as old as time. hopefully we can break the cycle.

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★ 2

  The appearance of John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance accentuates the diverse concepts in play in this western directed by John Ford. It’s adapted from a 1953 short story written by Dorothy M. Johnson, and it principally examines the evolution from rugged frontier individuality to enlighten law and order. With a script by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, it’s one of Fords masterpieces and intrinsically one of the cornerstones upon which his huge reputation’s constructed. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is beautifully shot and stars two actors in the September of their years delivering sterling performances.

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  Review by ScreeningNotes ★★★★★ 8

  "You know what scared 'em—the spectacle of law and order here, risin' up out of the gravy and the mashed potatoes!"

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance presents the Wild West as a flashback about a dead guy. This narrative framework is crucial to Ford's deconstruction of his own mythology (as Sergio Leone proclaimed, this is where Ford "learned pessimism"): the Western hero's fate was always already sealed because his history/fantasy was only ever a retroactive narrativization. John Wayne is much more than just a dead guy in a coffin, he's a vanishing mediator, a symbol of the unacknowledged violence of the foundation on which society rests. The town has changed so much since the arrival of the railroad (a…

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  Review by 𝙿𝚊𝚘𝚕𝚘 𝙼𝚊𝚌𝙶𝚞𝚏𝚏𝚒𝚗 | 🇮🇹 ★★★★★ 6

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance uses a long flashback to tell the story of Senator Ramson Stoddard, who returns to the frontier village where his political rise originated to attend the funeral of his friend Tom Doniphon. During a meeting with a reporter, the politician reveals for the first time how, many years earlier, he began his career by taking credit for killing the fearsome bandit Liberty Valance, who was actually eliminated by Doniphon, an old-fashioned cowboy who always believed more in the power of a gun than the power of written laws. However, the journalist refuses to publish the story as it happened, because «This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend».

  Nostalgic…