Film Forum

U.S., 1962
Directed by John Ford
Starring John Wayne, James Stewart, Lee Marvin, Vera Miles, Woody Strode
Screenplay by James Warner Bellah and Willis Goldbeck
Based on the story by Dorothy M. Johnson
DCP. Approx. 123 min.

Senator James Stewart returns to the Western town where, as a rookie Lawyer, he argued Law versus rancher John Wayne’s more personalized justice, finding books no deterrent to nutjob Lee Marvin, the eponymous Liberty. Perhaps Ford’s darkest, most melancholy Western.

Reviews

“The most romantic of Westerns and the greatest American political movie.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker  

“Ford's purest and most sustained expression of the familiar themes of the passing of the Old West, the conflict between the untamed wilderness and the cultivated garden, and the power of myth.”
– Nigel Floyd, Time Out