The film is told in a flashback: A US senator named Ransom Stoddard (Stewart) returns to the town of Shinbone to attend a funeral of an old friend, Tom Doniphon (Wayne). The local newspaper reporter and his editor insist that the senator explain why this funeral is so important to him.
He does so frankly, which goes so much against the prevailing cultural narrative that the journalists refuse to report Stoddard's version, giving rise to the famous quote from the film: "This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
This is a rich film, an old fashioned western, a love story and a story of a lost love, a favorite Ford theme. But it is also a story of politics and how sometimes goodness finds its ambiguous way into the future, there to find creative ways to address the truth.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance demands that viewers remember it as a work of political art.
It remains for me the best film ever made about the realities this democracy has to confront, especially in a culture locked in conflicting realities.
The Shinbone editor was wrong in Ford's 1964 film, and he would be wrong today when he asserts, "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend."
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