The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

John Ford regularly made such clear-eyed, unsentimental assessments of the Old West and the lies that forged its mythology that one may wonder how the concept of a “revisionist western” ever took root when the original was already so bleak.

There's much to say about it; the simplest is that it's both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.

There is a purity to the John Ford style. His composition is classical. He arranges his characters within the frame to reflect power dynamics -- or sometimes to suggest a balance is changing.

John Ford and the writers have somewhat overplayed their hands. They have taken a disarmingly simple and affecting premise, developed it with craft and skill to a natural point of conclusion, and then have proceeded to run it into the ground.

A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous.

A remarkably complex and nuanced take on the Western.

Many believe “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to be John Ford’s greatest film. It’s somewhat of a farewell letter to a way of life that has faded into history...

The finale gives you so much to chew on in the way of deconstruction of Western myths and the eternal conflict between anarchism and civilized society...

... A pensive yet ripely entertaining film — proof that he [John Ford] was himself one of his country’s great myth-makers.

Perhaps John Ford's most layered and haunting Western, boasting one of John Wayne's most despicable characters and a decidedly nonstandard approach to the genre more concerned with speechifyin' than shootouts.