# 3
SHANE (Paramount, 1953)
DIRECTOR: George Stevens; PRODUCER: George Stevens; ASSOCIATE PRODUCER:
Ivan Moffat; WRITERS: A.B. Guthrie, Jr.
(screenplay) and Jack Sher (additional dialogue) from a story by Jack Schaefer; CINEMATOGRAPHER: Loyal Griggs
CAST: Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon
De Wilde, Jack Palance, Ben Johnson, Edgar Buchanan, Emile Meyer, Elisha Cook,
Jr., Douglas Spencer, John Dierkes, Ellen Corby, Paul McVey, Nancy Kulp,
Leonard Strong, Ray Spiker
THE PLOT.
George Stevens took an uncomplicated, slow-moving
tale containing Western archetypes such as the gunfighter, the rancher, and the
farmer, mixed in a typical conflict between cattlemen and sodbusters, and
turned it all into a penetrating personal vision. It was a refreshing and classic return to the
themes of man vs. man and man vs. nature in the building of the West.
SHANE (Alan Ladd): “Do
you mind putting down that gun? Then
I’ll leave.”
JOE STARRETT (Van Heflin):
“What difference does it make? You’re leaving anyway.
SHANE: "I’d like it to be my idea."
A buckskinned horseman from nowhere, named Shane
(Ladd), with a mysterious and undoubtedly violent past, arrives in a Wyoming
valley in search of refuge – or a hiding place – or perhaps simply peace.
He hires on as a hand with a farm family
(Heflin, Arthur, De Wilde) that is being threatened by a powerful
anti-homesteader rancher (Meyer), his tough brother (Dierkes), their arrogant
cowhands (Johnson being the most prominent), and the hired gunslinger (Palance)
they’ve employed to drive the homesteaders off the land.
 |
| Gunfighter wearing fancy gun belt and riding fancy horse meets hard-working homesteader |
The movie and its plot are so well known that I
don’t think I am giving anything away when I say that in the end, after
exhausting every peaceable means, Shane finally confronts the powerful
land-grabbing villains, gives them and their hired hands their just desserts,
and rides away to disappear – wounded, possibly dying, but making the sacrifice
because his dignity requires it: riding off, in the tradition of cowboy heroes,
into the sunset, alone, with young Joey Starrett (De Wilde) calling after him,
“Shane…Shane …come back Shane!”
He didn’t come back. He couldn’t.
“There’s no living
with a killing. There’s no going back
from one. Right or wrong, it’s a brand…a
brand sticks. There’s no going back. Now you run home to your mother and tell
her…tell her everything’s all right. And
there aren’t any more guns in the valley.” -- SHANE
Yes, it is a plot that has been filmed many times,
before and after SHANE, but never as well. The story is much more subtle than
what a bare outline of its plot can portray.
True, we have the age-old struggle between good
and evil. Both Shane and Wilson
(Palance) are gunslingers, but there the similarity ends.
Shane has a conscience and is remorseful when
he is forced to use his gun. Not so,
Wilson. He enjoys what he does and
suffers no remorse or misgivings about his line of work.
Shane may not enjoy it, but he is a
killer. Can such a person be totally
virtuous? Wilson, on the other hand, is
evil incarnate. Ambiguity is not one of
the characteristics of his personality as it is with Shane.
It seems that Shane is searching for something –
perhaps for himself – and the result is an inner war that he is destined to
lose. In the end, he realizes he is
trapped, that it is impossible to break the mold.
There is also the struggle between the civilized
life, as represented by the homesteaders, and the primitive life, as
represented by the ranchers. However,
here the distinction is not as clear-cut as it often is in Western films.
The rancher Ryker (Meyer) is not entirely an
unreasonable man. He even says at one
point that he likes Joe Starrett (Heflin), the leader of the homesteaders. He even offers to hire Starrett and Shane.
He is also correct when he says that it was
he and his kind who defeated the Indians and tamed the land and now the farmers
were moving in and attempting to take over that land, a free range that was
suitable only for cattle ranching and not farming. History would prove him correct on that last
score.
So, why don’t we feel more sympathy for
Ryker? That’s an easy question to
answer. It’s because he hires the
coldblooded killer Jack Wilson to do his dirty work for him.
 |
| poor Elisha Cook never stood a chance |
RUFUS RYKER (Emile Meyer):
“I’ll kill him if I have to.”
JACK WILSON (Jack Palance):
“You mean I’ll kill him if you
have to.”
THE STARS.
Director George Stevens’ first choice for the lead
role was Montgomery Clift, whom he had directed in A PLACE IN THE SUN (Paramount, 1951). Depending on the source, Clift either turned
down the role or had a conflict. William
Holden was the director’s choice to play Joe Starrett. However, he wasn’t available either. The result was the casting of Alan Ladd and
Van Heflin.
Holden would have been a great choice to play
Starrett, but it is hard to comprehend how he would have been better in the
role than Heflin. With Holden in the
role it would have been more difficult to accept the premise that Starrett’s
wife Marian (Arthur) was attracted to Shane.
With Heflin, a great actor, but no lady’s man, in the role, the
attraction becomes more logical.
Montgomery Clift was a tremendous actor and one of
my favorites. He gave some riveting
performances in some of the best movies ever filmed. But (you knew that there was going to be a
but, didn’t you?) – But I don’t think he would have been convincing as
Shane. It is probably sacrilegious to
say this, but I didn’t find him convincing in his only Western role, that being
RED RIVER (UA, 1948), a movie that is almost universally considered a
classic.
So, what about Ladd? There was a time when I went along with the
conventional wisdom that although SHANE provides Ladd with his greatest movie
and best performance, that he nevertheless did not possess the personality and
talent needed for the role of the lone gunfighter. However, over the course of watching this
film many times, I’ve changed my views.
Ladd is excellent in his scenes with young Brandon
De Wilde. I’m not sure anybody could
have been more believable. The same is
true regarding his scenes with Jean Arthur.
He was always good in his films when it came to dealing with personal
relationships.
It is true that Ladd was a man of small stature
(his boyhood name was ‘Tiny’) and many critics have pointed out that there is
no way that he could have bested Chris Calloway (Johnson) or Joe Starrett in a
brawl. That is a little hard to accept,
but what did those same critics say about the fight between slightly built Matt
Garth (Montgomery Clift) and burly Tom Dunson (John Wayne) in RED RIVER? I wonder.
Of course, a six-gun is an equalizer. Therefore, a gunfighter doesn’t have to have
great physical strength to be expert at that trade. It is also true that real-life heroes do sometimes
come in small packages. Does the name
Audie Murphy ring a bell?
Ladd’s presence didn’t hamper the film at the box
office. After all, he was at the peak of
his popularity and was one of the most popular stars in Hollywood at the time
that the film was released.
Although Ladd was not Stevens’ first choice, he
did say that he thought the actor was perfect in the role. That might be going too far. There’s no doubt that a Gary Cooper or a
Gregory Peck, for example, would have been better suited to the role, but I
believe that Ladd was very good and a much better choice than Montgomery Clift.
At the time that SHANE was filmed, Jean Arthur had
been off the screen for three years (five years by the time the film was
released) and had appeared in only one film during the previous seven years. Marian Starrett represented her last feature
film role though she would later star in a brief TV series.
Despite being in her early fifties when the
picture was filmed (Heflin was in his early forties and Ladd in his late
thirties), she was very good as the homesteader’s faithful wife who is
nevertheless attracted to the mysterious gunfighter. The age difference between her and her two
co-stars is not readily detectable and is of no consequence.
 |
| (L-R) Brandon De Wilde, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Alan Ladd |
THE
SUPPORTING CAST.
Brandon De
Wilde, just nine-years-old at the time the movie was filmed, was considered to
be a child prodigy – and deservedly so.
He debuted on Broadway at age
seven and completed almost 500 appearances in The Member of the Wedding.
SHANE
was his first film. However, because it
took George Stevens a year to edit the film, the movie version of THE MEMBER OF
THE WEDDING (Kramer/Columbia, 1952) was his first film to be released.
In 1953-54, he even starred in Jaime (ABC), a weekly TV
sitcom. That would appear to be a
daunting task for a youngster, but it was even more so since it was a live
production. If that wasn’t enough, he
appeared on the cover of Life magazine in 1952.
Other than SHANE,
De Wilde’s best-known (and best-regarded) film is HUD (Paramount,1963). By that time he was twenty-years-old and had
been acting for fourteen of them.
Tragically, De Wilde died in an automobile
accident. He was only thirty-years-old. (Two of De Wilde’s co-stars also died
young. Ladd was only fifty at the time
of his death, while Heflin died at age sixty.)
For his performance in SHANE, De
Wilde was nominated for an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor. Jack Palance, with only about a dozen lines
of dialogue, was nominated for the same award in what was his fourth film. It was his second nomination, the first coming
the previous year for his role in only his third film, SUDDEN FEAR (RKO, 1952). Almost forty years after SHANE, Palance
received a third nomination for the award, and this time he won. The film was CITY SLICKERS (Columbia, 1991).
Ben Johnson, looking larger and more mature than
he did just a short time earlier when he was making his mark in a trio of John
Ford Westerns, turns in one of the best performances in the film. As one of Ryker’s ranch hands, Johnson
appears at first to be the most arrogant of an arrogant crew. He is the first to goad Shane into a fight
with the result being a knockdown-drag out brawl. However, in the end, Johnson’s Chris Calloway
is a decent sort and when the chips are down that decency rises to the surface.
 |
| Shane being challenged by Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson) |
The rest of the cast is superb. And why not?
It had to be since it included such stalwarts as Edgar Buchanan, Elisha
Cook, Jr., and John Dierkes.
THE
DIRECTOR.
SHANE was George Stevens only Western, unless one
counts ANNIE OAKLEY (RKO, 1935), and I don’t.
A meticulous craftsman, it took him over a year to prepare the film for
release, and the wait was well-worth it.
For his efforts, Stevens was
nominated for an Oscar as Best Director and the film received a Best Picture
nomination.
I have only one quibble with his work on the
film. I didn’t like the fancy gun belt
and holster worn by Ladd or his horse’s ostentatious bridle and saddle. Both man and beast looked as though they
belonged in one of Republic’s B-Westerns.
It is hard to understand how this happened, since Stevens took such
great pains to ensure that the costumes worn by the other actors were
authentic. He even went so far as to
build a historically accurate town from scratch out in the middle of Jackson
Hole, Wyoming, so one would think that
he would see that how Ladd and his horse appeared in the opening and closing
scenes was a touch anachronistic.
 |
| George Stevens, Director |
Okay, so I don’t think the movie is perfect. I do think it is nevertheless a timeless
classic Western. After all, I have rated
it as my third most favorite Western.
CINEMATOGRAPHY,
LOCATIONS, AND WRITERS.
SHANE was
nominated for six Academy Awards, but won only one. The winning Oscar went to Loyal Griggs for
his breathtakingly gorgeous photography.
Of course, he had a lot to work with, too. Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with its Snake River
Valley and majestic Grand Tetons as a backdrop, is one of the most stunningly beautiful
places to be found anywhere in the world. Griggs specialized in Western
productions during his career, filming a total of eleven.
Two of the
writers involved in the production of the film rank among the greatest of all
Western novelists. Jack Schafer’s novel,
published in 1949, is considered one of the best Western novels ever
written. Although he later moved to
Santa Fe, at the time that he wrote Shane
he had never been anywhere near the region he wrote about. Nevertheless, he got it right. One of his later novels, Monte Walsh, was filmed twice – once as a feature film and once
as a TV movie. Both are very good.
A.B. Guthrie, Jr. is best known for three
critically acclaimed novels: The Big Sky,
The Way West (winner of Pulitzer Prize in 1950), and These Thousand Hills. All three were filmed, but with mixed
results. None of the three films came
close to the high standards set by the novels and in all three cases Guthrie
was unhappy with the results. There
might have been happier outcomes had Guthrie written the screenplays, but he
did not.
In fact, SHANE was his first screenplay, and
though he was nominated for an Oscar for his work, he wrote only one other,
preferring to concentrate his time on his novels.
******
REVIEWS:
“SHANE may
well be the ultimate expression of the Western legend, but the film does have
flaws….[It] strives too hard for its effects…and Alan Ladd wasn’t right for the
part really….[but] despite its pretentiousness SHANE codified the essence of
the Western, and it remains one of the few altogether towering movies of the
genre….in the end it is a monumentally rewarding film on nearly any level: moving,
entertaining, beautiful, even, perhaps, profound.” -- Brian Garfield in Western Films: A Complete Guide
“Truly epic
Western, among the best ever made….filmed with amazing skill by George Stevens,
with some of the finest scenic values ever put on film. There’s action, drama, fine
performances. A winner.” –- Steven
H. Scheuer
“Shane wears
a white hat and Palance [Jack Wilson] wears a black hat, but the buried
psychology of this movie is a mottled, uneasy, fascinating gray.” -- Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times
“…it is Master
De Wilde with his bright face, his clear voice, and his resolute boyish ways,
who steals the affections of the audience and clinches SHANE as a most unusual
film.” –- Bosley Crowther in the New York Times
“Palance is
unforgettable in role of creepy hired gunslinger. Classic Western is splendid in every
way. Breathtaking cinematography by
Loyal Griggs….” -- Leonard Maltin
And now for a couple of opposing viewpoints:
“While
clearly it is a milestone film, if not a permanent classic, it is a film of
diminishing returns and each viewing tends to leave one liking it a little
less. While the film rescued Alan Ladd
from decline and made him a star again, his performance is still the weakest in
the film when it should be the strongest….SHANE’s
best performance comes from Ford’s protégé and player Ben Johnson.” –- William K. Everson in A Pictorial History of the Western Film
“Once
celebrated for its realism, in retrospect, SHANE,
with its snow-capped vistas, De Wilde’s arch innocence, Ladd’s archetypal
white-fringed, buckskin-suited hero and Palance’s demoniac villain, is clearly
a Western that yearns for the innocent verities of Hopalong Cassidy, Roy
Rogers, et al….In short the film is less an exploration of such Western clichés
as ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do,’ than a mature version of ‘Heigh Ho
Silver.’ -- Phil Hardy in The
Western
“Shane…Shane…come
back Shane! Bye Shane!" – Joey Starrett
