The Story Archive

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

John Ford · 1962 CE · Film · Modern / American · Contemporary

A United States senator returns by train to a small western town for the funeral of a man nobody there remembers, and tells the local newspapermen why he came. In flashback he arrives as a young lawyer beaten half to death on the road, opens a schoolroom, and sets himself against the gunman the cattle interests keep on hand. Ford's last great western, shot on soundstages, audits the stories the genre told about itself.

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