John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Ford virtually abstracts the physical backdrop of Liberty Valance to heighten the importance of dialogue, the emotional language of faces and bodies, and the symbolic use of gestures and objects.
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford (St. Martin's Press, 2001).

Filmed in black-and-white on mostly studio sets The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a return to Ford's silent Westerns, a retreat from the modern world of exteriors and color.  Even many who love Ford are perplexed by this Western, made by the man who brought the Western outdoors, with Stagecoach, in 1939.  It is a summary of an old man's pessimistic feeling about America, summing up many of his themes.  The villain wears a black hat and doesn't even have the minimal feeling for his family of other Ford villains, such as Scar (The Searchers, 1956) and Ike Clanton (My Darling Clementine, 1946); he is simply the hired gun of the big cattle ranchers, fighting the sod-busters and statehood.  The days of rugged individualism are ending and laws and lawyers are taking over.  The desert has turned into a garden but we have paid quite a price for this and anarchy, represented by Liberty Valance, can only be defeated by violence.  The railroads have brought not only progress but also pollution and The Iron Horse is no longer seen as just positive progress, as it was in Ford's 1924 film about the transcontinental railroad.

Ford's film not only looks back to his earliest films, it looks forward to the violence and pessimism of future Westerns (a genre some think has come to a dead-end), with its presence of Strother Martin (from future Peckipah films) and Lee Van Cleef (from future Sergio Leone films) as henchmen of Liberty Valance. The legend has become that a lawyer (played by James Stewart) has shot Liberty Valance, but actually it was Tom Doniphon (played by John Wayne) who shot him from the darkness across the street and gave up his girl in the process.  The film starts with Stewart arriving for Wayne's funeral and then telling the whole story to the local newspaper, the editor refusing to print it.  "This is the West.  When the legend become the truth, print the legend."   Ford created many of the legends, but always knew the truth.