This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop until I finish.
(G) ★★★★
Director: George Stevens.
Cast: Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, Brandon deWilde, Jack Palance, Ben Johnson, Edgar Buchanan, Emile Meyer, Elisha Cook Jr., Douglas Spencer, John Dierkes.
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| "We've gotta be on the lookout for cowboys. They sneak up out of nowhere." |
How many times do they say "Shane" in Shane?
It's a shitload. So many times it's distracting, to the detriment of the film. See that star I knocked off? That's partly due to the number of times they say "Shane". According to an estimate from this compilation it's about 90 times.
That's about once every 90 seconds. It's ridiculous. The fact that someone made a supercut of every time someone says "Shane" in Shane is a pretty good sign this is a highly noticeable thing.
It's also bad writing because it's unnecessary. In a film that barely wastes a word otherwise, having someone say "Shane" every minute and a half is mindboggling. It seem like overkill to mark a film down for such a thing, but I'm sorry, it had to be done.
About 50 per cent of those "Shane"'s come from the kid, who annoys me. I watched The Sound Of Music recently and those kids didn't irk me. But little Brandon deWilde's Joey quickly became like nails down a chalkboard. I feel bad saying that because deWilde died at a young age, and was nominated for Best Supporting Actor Oscar for this role. But sorry, kid, but you just didn't do it for me.
But then neither does Alan Ladd, which is somewhat sacrilegious to say. His presence doesn't ruin the film, and his performance is actually quite great - it's more that he doesn't look the part. Riding in out of the hills with his coiffured hair and virginal pale brown buckskin, he is far too manicured to be a gunslinging killer with a dark past. And at 5'6" he's certainly not an imposing figure, unlike Palance's grinning assassin.
These are my only quibbles with Shane. The film is rightly regarded as a classic, benchmark-setting western. The threatened farmers, the lawless cattle baron, his black-hatted henchmen, the mysterious stranger who comes to the rescue, the beautiful scenery, the shoot-outs, the saloon brawl - it's all here in this quintessential example of the genre.
Murray Pomerance, writing for 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, called it "the most iconic (western), the western that burns itself into our memory, the western no one who sees it will ever forget". Indeed, Pomerance is at pains to point what it isn't, it's not "the most glorious" western, nor is it the most masculine, most authentic, strangest or most dramatic. Similarly, in his 1973 book The Great Movies, William Bayer also points out Shane is not the a "rough-and-ready" western, nor is it "a meditation on history and character".
"It is the most self-conscious attempt ever made to use the western form to create a myth," Bayer writes, noting it is "the aestheticising, the contrived beauty, the calculated precision, the perfection which... is the picture's major strength".
Indeed, all of my quibbles - the performance of the kid, the look of Ladd, the overuse of "Shane" - add up to an inauthenticity that is otherwise tolerable. Shane is indeed a thing of beauty. When it's studio-bound it feels aged, but when it's out in the wide blue yonder among the mud and dust of America's past, it looks magnificent. From the opening shot of a deer drinking from a lake near a farmhouse to Shane riding off into a sunset that beats all other rides into the sunset, director Stevens captures something that feels, as Mayer put it, "mythic".
The images are indelible. The frightening assassin Wilson (a menacing Palance) gunning down a hapless homesteader and leaving him in the mud, the subsequent funeral on a dull hilltop, two men working together to pull out a massive tree stump against an azure sky, the tension of the final shootout, and Shane's farewell all become etched in viewers' memories. The characters are equally memorable - they are far from the caricatures that these types of characters would become. Shane and the Starrett family all have a depth to them that elevates the film and their plight.
Ladd, despite not looking the part, is wonderfully stoic in the lead, and his relationships with the Starrett family are central to the film, as well as its mythic quality. Shane is a cowboy idol - worshipped by both Joey and his father (Heflin), and secretly loved by mother Marian (Arthur) in a beautifully subtle subplot. The titular gunslinger represents a lost part of America, and the Starretts are America, bathing in his mythos. They're in awe of him, though they know nothing of his truth. The kid want Shane to stay and be his dad, the men want to be him, and the women want to bed him. This is some A-level myth-building.
Which is why it feels so petty to mark the film down a whole star because they say "Shane" incessantly, because the kid is annoying, and because Ladd doesn't look right for the role. But everything else about the film feels real, even when it's quite obviously trying to recreate some false but beautiful version of the cowboy legend. This is not a film trying to show us what the Wild West was really like, but to be a perfect example of what America wanted it to be like.
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