Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Questions arise when Senator Stoddard attends the funeral of a local man named Tom Doniphon in a small Western town. Flashing back, we learn Doniphon saved Stoddard, then a lawyer, when he was roughed up by a crew of outlaws terrorizing the town, led by Liberty Valance. As the territory's safety hung in the balance, Doniphon and Stoddard, two of the only people standing up to him, proved to be very important, but different, foes to Valance.
Ford's late-career masterpiece earns top marks for its thematically rich plot—the tension between law and violence, civilization and the frontier, myth and truth is handled with rare sophistication. The cast (Wayne, Stewart, Marvin, O'Brien) delivers some of the finest ensemble work in the Western genre. The black-and-white cinematography is competent but deliberately spare, lacking the visual grandeur of Ford's Monument Valley color work—a conscious stylistic choice that keeps it from being cinematographically exceptional. The film is exceptionally novel in its meta-examination of legend-making ('print the legend'), its elegiac, revisionist tone predating the revisionist Western wave, and its structural complexity via flashback. The ending—both the immediate resolution and the devastating final irony—is among the most celebrated and meaningful in American cinema.