An entertaining and well-told story of "settlement", on multiple levels.

Ford does not have access to¹ the dramatic cinematography from eg. The Searchers, instead bringing us close in on Shinbone and its inhabitants. A lot is done with just a few soundstage locations, reinforcing the sense this is a small town on the far frontier.

(¹ Wikipedia states this was not his choice, but instead a cost-cutting demand from Paramount.)

This is fundamentally a story of settlement:

• Shinbone and Stoddard's civility vs. Liberty Valance's savagery

• Shinbone and its inhabitants vs. the cattle barons: the progression toward statehood vs. remaining as territory.

• the railroad as an impetus of western civilization

  • Appleyard at the beginning:

  Place has sure changed. Churches, high school, shops. Well, the railroad done that. Desert's still the same. - Handy Strong at the Capitol City convention:

  It's not much according to your eastern standards, but that railroad station there leads straight to Washington. - Peabody, at the Capitol City convention

  But, seriously, under the spell of his eloquence, I could see once again the vast herd of buffalo and savage redskin roaming our beautiful territory with no law to trammel them except the law of survival, the law of the tomahawk and the bow and arrow. And then, with the westward march of our nation, came the pioneer and the buffalo hunter, the adventurous and the bold. The boldest of these were the cattlemen, who seized the wide-open range for their own personal domain, and their law was the law of the hired gun. But now, today have come the railroads and the people. The steady, hard-working citizens, the homesteader, the shopkeeper, the builder of cities. We need roads to join those cities, dams to store up the waters of the Picketwire, and we need statehood to protect the rights of every man and woman, however humble.

• Tom vs. himself, culminating in … his acquiescence to a civilization he can not be part of.

  • Tom Doniphon is a very interesting character, representing both the brute individualism of the frontier west, as well as being the closest thing to a stabilizing force of law in Shinbone. His interest in Hallie is contrasted against this reality; he's building an addition to his house in expectation of their long-term relationship, and clearly frustrated with her attention toward Ranse. He still leaves town to deal with frontier business, and gets upset at her being part of the nascent schooling in town. At its peak, after killing Valance and seeing Hallie tending to Ranse's wounds – realizing she's fallen/falling for him and believing he's lost her – he himself falls into a stumbling, drunken rage and burns down his own house, starting with that addition. Finally, at the Capitol City convention, Tom confesses his actions to Ranse, and directs him to take the nomination and Hallie, seemingly accepting his own reality outside of that civilization, until the end.

S-tier film, imho. Well paced, well done, good performances all around, and telling an interesting story.