Although John Ford made three more films after its release in 1962, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is generally thought of as his final masterpiece and one of the best-made Westerns of all time. Critics initially derided the film as unoriginal and a seeming rehash of themes Ford had dealt with more successfully in earlier oeuvres, but Liberty Valance has ultimately come to be recognized as Ford's most self-reflective work, a film in which he examined the loss of the frontier traits that forged America's early identity. In the decades after the release of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the film has gained a reputation as a seminal revisionist Western—ironically for the very reasons Liberty Valance was initially dismissed: its derivative nature and seeming reworking of Ford's earlier movies. In referring to his own past works...