"I Shot The Sheriff But I Did Not Shoot The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance"

In his forty years as a notable cinematic leading man, Jimmy Stewart had more variety in terms of the types of characters he played and films he appeared than you might expect given how the default version of the guy is the "Aw, shucks" good o'l boy he played in his earliest works, most notably It's A Wonderful Life. But Stewart also played darker roles in Alfred Hitchcock fare like Vertigo and Rear Window that allowed the guys versatility as an actor to shine. Once the 1960's rolled around, he got to do a couple of collaborations with another iconic Hollywood director, John Ford, with one of their efforts being the 1962 motion picture The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

A sense of wistfulness permeates The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance from the get-go as it introduces a framing device set after the railroad has become commonplace and upended all conventions of the Western landscape in the process. Traveling out to a small town he briefly called home is Senator Ransom Stoddard (Jimmy Stewart), who, in his older form, incorporates a bit of meta-commentary on the passage of time as he wipes dust off a stagecoach, the very object that was the subject of the title of one of John Ford's earliest westerns that was already 25 years old at the time of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance's time of release. Just as time had marched on in the west in the 19th century, so too has the unstoppable force of time weighed on Ford's mind.

With this wistful atmosphere properly established, Stoddard proceeds to tell a tale from many years prior that starts out with him traveling across the West as s a young man and getting robbed in the stagecoach that he's riding in by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). That leaves him stranded in a small town where he procures the help of some of the locals, including Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a man who tries to lure the vengeance-hungry Ransom Stoddard into accepting violence as a way to get revenge on Liberty Valance. It's a tempting offer but Ransom Stoddard instead decides to help introduce both an education system, primarily literacy-based courses, and greater Senate representation into the town.

Compared to John Ford's prior Westerns The Searchers and Stagecoach, which each had a grand-in-scale approach to depicting people traveling across the untamed Western plains, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a smaller-in-scale character piece examining Ransom Stoddard rising in power and influence in this new town he's inadvertently ended up in while also trying to avoid any further confrontations with Liberty Valance. The same sort of sturdy character work that marks the best of John Ford's bigger-in-scale movies comes in mighty handy here as there's plenty of more intimate types of entertaining drama to be found in this here feature film.

Interestingly, Ford does retain his distinctive panache for noteworthy visuals even in a smaller-scale environment as he and cinematographer William H. Clothier smartly make the choice to shoot the film in black-and-white (a bold choice given that the film was released in 1962 when colorized movies were the norm in most corners of American cinema) which lends itself well to some outstanding shots, particularly nighttime scenes where a subtle sense of menace is conveyed visually in shadow and lighting choices. Put simply, the more intimate settings of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance turns out to be just as remarkable a venue for top-notch camerawork as the massive vistas in The Searchers.

It's not just the modus operandi for memorable imagery that returns from John Ford's earlier work in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. John Wayne, a man impossible to detach from the conventional notions of American Westerns, also returns for one of his many collaborations with Ford and while he certainly possesses the sort of knowledgeable, tough and rootin' tootin' persona he carries in many of his films (he even calls Stoddard the term"Pilgrim" more than once!), I found it interesting what his dynamic with Jimmy Stewart turned out to be in the film proper. Wayne's character is more intimidating than the one Stewart plays to be sure but Stewart's no push over for sure and the fact that both of their characters have a discernable backbone makes their interactions all the more interesting. 

Per the usual, Jimmy Stewart is great here, he does such an excellent job at portraying the more naive and optimistic younger version of his character that the viewer returning to the older, wearier and more battered older version of his character has true emotional impact since Stewart's able to make the distinctions between both versions of the character go deeper than make-up tricks. Like Wayne and Stewart, Andy Devine also returns from earlier John Ford movies and provides ample amounts of humor as a local Marshall who loves food and hates confrontations. He's like the Rex The Dinosaur of the Wild, Wild West. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is full of delightful supporting characters like the one Andy Devine plays and that's just one reason among many why it's such a sublime motion picture.