|
John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, scripted by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck, from a 1953 short story by Dorothy M. Johnson, premieres in Los Angeles. Set in the late 1870s, James Stewart stars as an idealistic young Eastern attorney who relocates with his lawbooks to a small frontier town where he quickly runs afoul of the titular Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), a much-feared, sadistic outlaw given for dispensing his violent brand of justice at the point of a gun. A top-billed John Wayne plays a local rancher whose pivotal retributive act gives ambiguous substance to Ford’s elegiac demythologisation of a genre upon which both men left an indelible mark. Also starring Vera Miles, Edmond O'Brien and Woody Strode.
