The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Reviews
TV Guide's Movie Guide
A solid, if overrated, Ford western, one with its share of cliches and predictability. It's still fascinating to watch Wayne and Stewart deal with hellion Marvin in a changing West.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/4
Film4
John Ford's last great film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is also one of the last classic Westerns to come out of Hollywood.
Top CriticThere's much to say about it; the simplest is that it's both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.
Contactmusic.com
The Citizen Kane of westerns.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3.5/5
There is a purity to the John Ford style. His composition is classical. He arranges his characters within the frame to reflect power dynamics -- or sometimes to suggest a balance is changing.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
John Ford and the writers have somewhat overplayed their hands. They have taken a disarmingly simple and affecting premise, developed it with craft and skill to a natural point of conclusion, and then have proceeded to run it into the ground.
7M Pictures
The movie does not offer a clean-cut look at morality and heroes, who emerge from a reluctant position, but it does draw a definitive line between good and evil.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Movie Metropolis
...an appropriate tribute to the passing of the Old West, and a fitting salute to the films of screen legend John Ford.
Full Review
| Original Score: 8/10
A great film, rich in thought and feeling, composed in rhythms that vary from the elegiac to the spontaneous.
Video-Reviewmaster.com
Superb John Ford--a western classic--with strong Wayne, Stewart, Marvin in tow.
| Original Score: 5/5
Decent Films Guide
A remarkably complex and nuanced take on the Western.
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
EmanuelLevy.Com
In one of his last (good) Westerns, John Ford draws even more explicitly the contrast between charismatic and legal authority, between the Wilderness of the West (John Wayne) and the values of the Civilization (Jimmy Stewart, from the East).
Full Review
| Original Score: A-
Arizona Daily Star
In their final Western together, Wayne and Ford gave the past a resounding send-off.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Ford's purest and most sustained expression of the familiar themes of the passing of the Old West, the conflict between the untamed wilderness and the cultivated garden, and the power of myth.
A basically honest, rugged and mature saga has been sapped of a great deal of effect by an obvious, overlong and garrulous anticlimax.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
New Times
When the movie becomes a legend, watch the legend.
| Original Score: 5/5
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
John Ford's most complete vision about the passing of the Old West.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
