The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Complete Monster: Liberty Valance is a particularly nasty piece of work, one of the few comforts the audience has when this sadistic psychopath is on screen is that we know he's going to get shot at some point during the movie.
  • Family-Unfriendly Aesop: Our need for heroes seem to outweigh our need for the truth.
    • And while Ransom achieved great things for his adopted state - getting statehood, representing in Congress, working as Governor, bringing the roads, schools and gardens to the desert as Peabody envisioned - it still all happened based on a lie.
  • Ho Yay: Valance's sidekick Floyd seems to toady up to Liberty a little too much...
  • Moral Event Horizon: Liberty Valance enters the film with a nasty reputation and violent history, and gets worse as the movie progresses. It's his beating of Peabody to within an inch of the editor's life that riles up Ransom enough to get him to call the gunman out for a duel.
  • Smug Snake: Liberty Valance knows enough of the law to figure out how to get away with murder, even though everyone in Shinbone knows he and his pack are involved.
  • Tear Jerker: Poor Tom.
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