FILM SUMMARY

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance opens in 1910 with the return of Senator Ransom “Ranse” Stoddard (James Stewart) and his wife Hallie (Vera Miles) to the small western town of Shinbone, where they immediately arouse the interest of the local press. They are met by the aged ex-marshal Link Appleyard (Andy Devine), who soon escorts them to the undertaker's office, wherein lies a plain pine coffin containing the body of Tom Doniphon. The newspaper editor Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), who has followed them, has never heard of Doniphon and demands to know more about the man whose death has brought the Senator all the way from Washington. Ranse agrees to tell his story at last, initiating the long flashback that constitutes the bulk of the film.

Many years before, Ranse was a green Easterner headed to Shinbone where he intended to practice law, but on the outskirts of town his stagecoach was robbed and he himself whipped by the brutal outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin). He is later found by Tom Doniphon (John Wayne), a local rancher, who takes him to the town café where he is nursed back to health by the pretty young Hallie, whom Doniphon plans to marry. Once he has recovered, Ranse helps out at the café to pay his room and board, but hangs his shingle in front of the newspaper office operated by Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), ignoring warnings that it will provoke Valance. He also opens a one-room schoolhouse to educate the illiterate of Shinbone – Hallie included – and becomes an advocate for law, order, and statehood.

At a town meeting called to elect delegates to the Territorial Convention, Doniphon declines a nomination, after which Ranse and Peabody are elected over Liberty Valance, who is employed as a hired gun by the cattlemen who want to preserve the open range, and are thus against statehood. Valance retaliates by wrecking the newspaper office and beating Peabody near to death, after which Ranse resolves to confront Valance despite his moral objection to violence and his inexperience with guns.