The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Short description
Senator Ransom Stoddard arrives in the small Western town of Shinbone for the funeral of Tom Doniphon, a man the local residents have never heard of. Pressed by a journalist to explain why a sitting senator would travel so far for such an obscure burial, Stoddard recounts the events that began his career. Years earlier he had come west as an idealistic young lawyer, only to be robbed and beaten on the road by the outlaw Liberty Valance. Tom Doniphon, a rancher who is the one man Valance leaves alone, takes him in, and Stoddard recovers while working at the Ericson restaurant, where he meets Hallie, the woman both men come to love. Stoddard tries to bring law and order to the territory through the courts and education rather than the gun, but Valance refuses to yield, and a confrontation becomes unavoidable.
John Ford directed, working from a screenplay by Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah, and produced the film with Goldbeck for Paramount and John Ford Productions. It was the twenty-sixth of the thirty-one features Ford directed, following Two Rode Together and preceding How the West Was Won. John Wayne plays Doniphon opposite James Stewart as Stoddard, with Vera Miles as Hallie, Lee Marvin as Valance, Edmond O'Brien as the newspaperman Dutton Peabody and Andy Devine as the marshal Link Appleyard; ninety performers are credited in all.
Made for about three million dollars, the film took roughly eight million worldwide. On IMDb it holds 8.1 from over eighty thousand votes, and on TMDB 7.8 from more than a thousand, while a critics' rating of 8.7 from fifty-five reviews places it above both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- Woody Strode (1914-1994) often performed stunts himself – both because he was in excellent shape (before entering the film industry, he was a decathlete and football player), and because it was impossible at the time to find a Black stunt double for him. (A similar situation arose during filming of Stanley Kubrick's "Spartacus" in 1960.)
- Sergio Leone (1929-1989) called this film his favorite John Ford film and the only one in which "... Ford demonstrates a certain pessimism."
- In 2007, the U.S. National Film Preservation Council added this film to the National Film Registry for preservation in the Library of Congress.
- The actor who played the teenager, O.Z. Whitehead (1911-1998), was 50 years old.
- John Ford preferred to film as few takes as possible, believing that after the first few takes, actors grew tired, which inevitably affected their performance, stripping it of its spontaneity. This is why he tried to cast the same actors in his films—they already knew exactly what was required of them in terms of on-camera acting.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
