Ransom Stoddard, a young lawyer who comes to the town of Shinbone, is credited with killing the outlaw Liberty Valance — but the truth about that night is more complicated.
In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), directed by John Ford, James Stewart plays Ransom Stoddard, a lawyer who arrives in Shinbone and is beaten by the outlaw Liberty Valance, played by Lee Marvin. Stoddard is befriended by Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne, a rancher who knows how to use a gun. When Stoddard finally faces Valance, he is said to have shot him, and that reputation carries him into politics — but the film, told in flashback, reveals a different story.
Stewart plays Stoddard as a man of principle in a town that is changing from frontier violence to law. His idealism is both his strength and his burden, and his scenes with Wayne, as two very different kinds of hero, are at the heart of the film.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a meditation on legend and truth in the West, and Stewart’s Stoddard is its conscience: a man who builds a career on a story he did not quite earn, and who must live with what that cost.