The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
Directed by John Ford
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.
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What critics compared The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to
Before long 10 years have passed and the older teen Sammy (played by Gabriel LaBelle) is making all sorts of films, using his friends including Westerns inspired after seeing 1962’s John Ford classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Branagh did an homage to that one as well in Belfast), and World War II epics among others.
We then jump in time to a teenage Sammy, who moves with his family to Arizona and casts all his Boy Scout pals in a makeshift Western inspired by John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
Fast forward 10 years, and Sam (now played by an excellent Gabriel LaBelle) is inspired to make a Western after seeing John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
The subsequent, increasingly ambitious projects that Sam takes on—including a mummy picture, a western inspired in part by John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance , and then a WWII epic titled Escape to Nowhere —all suggest the formation of the kind of showmanship and instinct for popular entertainment that would go on to solidify Spielberg’s legend.
He makes juvenile movies starring his sisters, and moves into short features starring his Boy Scout chums—a western inspired by “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and a war picture called “Escape to Nowhere” (both of which reflect titles actually made by Spielberg).
Back home on telly, High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance echo the morality and violence in the streets, while Star Trek suggests a better future.
“Belfast” is unabashedly sentimental, from the plethora of Van Morrison songs on the soundtrack to the parallels drawn to Westerns such as “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and (particularly) “High Noon.”
Excepts from two other films are shown (but those, matching the films, are in b&w): The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and High Noon.
And Buddy, picking up on real-life trauma and archetypal themes from Westerns like “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “High Noon” on the telly, struggles to make childish sense of it all as Van Morrison songs of the day waft out of radios and well up on the soundtrack.
There are several classic movie references and film clips from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang , High Noon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance are shown.
And Buddy, hooked on movies like “High Noon” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” sees his father as the hero of the day.
Scorsese’s three-and-a-half-hour magnum opus — which reunites him with longtime collaborators Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci for the first time since 1995’s “Casino” — is a gangster movie to end all gangster movies, akin to Clint Eastwood’s “Unforgiven” and John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” in that it finds a filmmaker reflecting on the genre he helped define, issuing what feels like his final word on the subject.
Bostonian film critic Sean Burns is the first I’ve seen that compared “The Irishman” to “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” in his review that espoused that Scorsese’s “The Irishman is the movie to end all gangster movies.”
That is, until they realize that the Wayne movies Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Charles Portis's perfect little novel most evoke are John Ford's The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).
Despite that award, it was not a great performance by Wayne who was a far better actor when under the direction of John Ford in classics such as Stagecoach, The Searchers and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
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The cinematic inheritances of The Dark Knight hardly end there—the ending owes more than a little to John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and the overriding theme is remarkably similar.
But until “News of the World,” Hanks had not broached Stewart’s formidable Western filmography, such as “The Naked Spur,” “Winchester ’73,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and more.
Well, taking a tip from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and its “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend,” it’s no contest.
Similar to Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People (2002) – in a scene that playful paraphrases John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – where the audience is directly told ‘When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend’, Life of Pi favours the legend.
Forty-two years ago, John Ford concluded his film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with the idea, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
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"Dead Man," which stars Johnny Depp as a city slicker caught up in the code of the West, is just about the first black-and-white western since "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" and is perhaps the only western done in the true spirit of black comedy.
Kyle was nicknamed "Legend" by his fellow soldiers, echoing a point made in the classic western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance about the legend being more prized than the unvarnished truth.