Trivia for
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) More at IMDbPro »

• Director Trademark: [John Ford] [cards] Liberty Valance plays the Dead Man's Hand (Aces and Eights) before going out to duel Ransom Stoddard.
  
  
• Several reasons have been put forward for the film being in black and white. John Ford once claimed it added to the tension, however others involved with production said Paramount was cutting costs and so they had to make the movie on sound stages at the studio. Without the budget restraints, Ford would have been in Monument Valley using Technicolor stock. It has also been suggested that since both John Wayne and James Stewart were playing characters thirty years younger than they actually were (Wayne was 54 when the movie was filmed in the autumn of 1961 and Stewart was 53), the movie needed to be in black and white because they would never have got away with it in color. The age difference was particularly noticeable in Stewart's case, since he was playing a young lawyer who had only just graduated from law school and had moved West without even practicing law back East.
  
  
• At the beginning of the movie, in the scene in which Vera Miles comes near John Wayne's burned house, the music from John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) is played.
  
  
• Some of the earlier scenes in the movie, particularly in the restaurant, were apparently styled by John Ford as a mocking tribute to the films of his friend and fellow director, Howard Hawks.
  
  
• Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) refers to Valance as "... the toughest man south of the Picketwire," then adds, "next to me!" The Picketwire is not a wire fence dividing line; it was slang for the Purgatoire River, which flows into the Arkansas.
  
  
• First occasion of John Wayne calling someone "Pilgrim".
  
  
• John Ford had considered casting a young actor as Stoddard, but feared that would highlight the fact that John Wayne was too old to play Doniphon.
  
  
• In the scene where Stoddard is carried into the "Peter's Place" kitchen wounded, Nora (Jeanette Nolan) gives him a cup of coffee laced with what she describes as "Akvavit, Swedish brandy" - the bottle is, in fact, a quite recognizable Akvavit bottle. The drink is found in all of Scandinavia but is largely considered to stem from Denmark.
  
  
• In promotional posters for the film, James Stewart appears to be billed first; however, in the film itself, John Wayne's screen card appears first, followed by Stewart's.
  
  
• The last time John Qualen plays a Scandinavian character alongside a John Wayne lead.
  
  
• This was John Ford's last film in black and white.
  
  
• Final film of Stuart Holmes.
  
  
• At the time of release, this was dismissed as a lesser work from a once-great director and was stuck on the bottom half of double-bills.
  
  
• During the territorial convention, three of the actors (John Wayne, Andy Devine and John Carradine) had performed together previously in Stagecoach (1939) under the helm of the same director John Ford.
  
  
• John Ford deliberately shot this film on soundstages in an effort to distance it from his Monument Valley epics.
  
  

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