The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the first on-screen pairing of John Wayne and James Stewart, is now streaming free on Tubi, prompting renewed appreciation for John Ford's 1962 black-and-white Western. The film is notable both as a landmark collaboration between two of Hollywood's biggest stars and as a reflective work that seemed to anticipate the genre's coming decline, arriving just before Spaghetti Westerns and revisionist "New Hollywood" films reshaped the genre in the 1960s.

Set in the frontier town of Shinbone, the story follows Ransom "Ranse" Stoddard (Stewart), a progressive newcomer menaced by outlaw Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), and Tom Doniphon (Wayne), a rougher frontier figure who intervenes on his behalf, with Vera Miles's Hallie caught between them. Critics highlight Ford's exploration of myth-making in the Old West, encapsulated in the film's famous line "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," alongside his deliberate use of black-and-white cinematography, a departure from the colour used in his earlier film The Searchers. The film is widely regarded as marking the close of the Western's "Golden Age."