With just a few days to go before the Oscar awards ceremony, classical movies are up on display and in today’s schedule one of them is ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’. The movies are part of Turner Classic Movies campaign leading upto the Oscars.

‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ was directed by John Ford and released by Paramount Pictures in 1962. The specialty of the movie was that it featured the great actors James Stewart and John Wayne together for the first time in cinema history. It also starred Vera Miles alongside Lee Marvin as Liberty Valance.

The classic movie is an adaption of Dorothy M. Johnson’s fictional story titled ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance’ written in 1949. In 2007, the film was also chosen by the Library of Congress for a place in the U.S National Film Registry due to its cultural worth.

The movie is set in the early 19th century and is told in flashback by a U.S senator who is attending a funeral of his friend. The plot of the movie revolves mainly around Ransom Stoddard, played by James Stewart, Tom Doniphon, played by John Wayne and Liberty Valence played by Lee Marvin. Stoddard is a law graduate who refuses to accept that carrying a gun is a necessity for one’s own safety. When he’s badly beaten by a group of thugs on a journey to Shinbone, he is helped and sheltered by a rancher known as Tom Doniphon. Stoddard and Doniphon have contradictory way of thinking about life and future but during the movie they find a common ground as both they earn the enmity of chief of the outlaws, Liberty Valence.

The senator in the end turns out to be Stoddard who had come to attend Doniphon’s funeral.