He Looks Mighty Pretty When He Gets Mad: Relationships of Face versus Body in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Roach proposes an inventive reconsideration of the film’s two stars, John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart that is premised fervently on post-structural deconstructions of masculinity and the politics of the body. Through gestural analyses and close attention to the ways in which both men occupy the filmic space, the article establishes a rigorous interpretation of Richard Dyer’s theories of stardom that is premised upon relational aesthetics: of not only its leads’ interactions with each other, but also an ethic of genre-based intertextuality