The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Reviews
Top CriticJohn 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.
Ozus' World Movie Reviews
John Ford's most complete vision about the passing of the Old West.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
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
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
Along with The Searchers, it represents John Ford at his most accomplished. And it is one of the best Westerns Hollywood has ever produced.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Arizona Daily Star
In their final Western together, Wayne and Ford gave the past a resounding send-off.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Flipside Movie Emporium
John Ford deftly deconstructs the very Western icons he helped create.
| Original Score: 5/5
There's much to say about it; the simplest is that it's both the most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.
Combustible Celluloid
[Ford's] greatest film.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/4
Contactmusic.com
The Citizen Kane of westerns.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
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.
Journal and Courier (Lafayette, IN)
John Ford at his dark and brooding best. Lee Marvin is great. Stewart is too old to play the young lawyer. Wayne is solid. A Valentine to the West that was found only in legend
| Original Score: 5/5
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
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
