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- He’s forced to stay in Shinbone after he’s robbed and severely beaten by the villainous outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and his criminal gang.
Sep 26, 2022 · Erich von Stroheim didn’t live to see John Ford’s classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), but it’s easy to imagine that if he had, he’d have offered up a wry smile at the local newspaperman’s immortal exit line: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (/ ˈ v æ l ə n s /) is a 1962 American Western film directed by John Ford and starring John Wayne and James Stewart. The screenplay by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck was adapted from a 1953 short story written by Dorothy M. Johnson.
Sep 22, 2020 · Stroheim recalled a shot from Greed which gave a momentary glimpse into the workings of his temperament. Towards the end of the film, there is a shot in which Marcus Schooler hurls a knife at McTeague: the knife misses, piercing the door behind him inches from McTeague’s ear.
Dec 28, 2011 · Valance and his two sidekicks hold up a stagecoach on the way to town, and when one of the passengers, Ransom, stands up to him Liberty nearly whips him to death. In town, he’s nursed back to health by Nora and Peter Ericson, two recent Swedish immigrants who run the local chowhouse.
- Overview
- Production notes and credits
- Cast
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, American western film, released in 1962, that was John Ford’s poetic and sombre look at the end of the Wild West era. Although atypical of his usual works, it is widely considered Ford’s last great movie and among his best westerns.
The story opens with the return of elderly U.S. Sen. Ransom Stoddard (played by James Stewart) and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), to their small hometown of Shinbone in the American West. They are there to pay their respects to their old friend Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), who is being buried in a pauper’s grave. Stoddard, who rode to fame as a tenderfoot lawyer credited with having fatally shot the notorious gunman Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), makes a startling confession to local newspaper reporters. In a tale told in flashback, he relates how he arrived in Shinbone hoping to establish a law office but found the town terrorized by Valance and his gang. Although Stoddard was meek in nature, Valance’s continued harassment of him resulted in an impromptu showdown in which Valance was shot dead. Stoddard thus became a local legend, and he was subsequently elected to the U.S. Senate. However, he confesses to the local reporters that he had learned years ago that it was Doniphon who actually fired the fatal shot at Valance and later allowed Stoddard to be credited with the deed. Despite his confession, Stoddard finds the press uninterested in publishing the revelation, preferring instead to let his myth remain unaffected. As one journalist says—in the film’s famous tagline— “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
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•Studio: Paramount Pictures
•Director: John Ford
•Producer: Willis Goldbeck
•Writers: James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck
•Music: Cyril Mockridge
•Running time: 123 minutes
•James Stewart (Ransom Stoddard)
•John Wayne (Tom Doniphon)
•Vera Miles (Hallie Stoddard)
•Lee Marvin (Liberty Valance)
- Lee Pfeiffer
May 25, 2022 · Over the decades, he made a number of beloved and critically acclaimed Westerns including The Searchers and My Darling Clementine, but none are as large in scope and as beautifully realised as his 1962 masterpiece The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
Outside of the town, the stagecoach holding the novice attorney-at-law Ransom was stopped by sudden rifle gun-blasts - it was surrounded by the gang of a tyrannical and ruthless masked outlaw, ironically named Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin).