Film · 1962 · Films · 1960s
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
Scored from 273 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1960s (1,929 peers).
Summary
United States Senator Ransom Stoddard returns to the frontier town of Shinbone for a rancher's funeral, and tells the local newspapermen who ask why the story of his arrival decades earlier. As a young lawyer carrying law books instead of a gun, he was robbed and beaten on the road by the outlaw Liberty Valance, then nursed back to health in a town the cattle interests rule through Valance's violence. Stoddard answers with courts, literacy classes and a push for statehood; Tom Doniphon, the rancher who saved him, insists only a gun settles anything, and both men want the same woman, Hallie. John Ford's black-and-white Western, starring James Stewart, John Wayne and Lee Marvin.
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is a 1962 drama and western film. It is rated Approved. The runtime is 123 minutes. It was made in the United States.
273 IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, and those are the ones the calibrated score reads; a separate, broader pool of 286 reviewers with at least two reviews each feeds the raw-average track. The cohort it is ranked inside is 1960s films — 1,929 of them.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1960s (1,929 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 273.
Cohort: Films · 1960s
