Format: DVD from personal collection on big ol’ television.
Think just for a moment about John Wayne. You can see him, right? You can hear him talking, right? I’d guess there’s a 50/50 chance that you’re imagining him calling somebody “Pilgrim.” If that’s the John Wayne mental stereotype you’ve pictured (it certainly is for me), you have The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to thank for that mental picture. He says that word probably more than any other in this film.
I’ve mentioned my relationship with Westerns in the past, but I’ll sum it up here for reference. Few genres of film are so likely to fall into cliché as the Western, which means that for a lot of them, if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen a ton. This also means that Westerns that manage to get away from cliché or do something more than show us six-guns and horses have the potential to be extremely interesting. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is such a film, because it plays with those Western conventions and gives us something different from good guy-bad guy to think about.
