Shane (1953)

George Stevens, Director

I’ve often said that the old Star Trek series was either Paradise Lost or Gunsmoke in outer space. I meant it as praise! We don’t know whether there will ever be such a thing as “warp drive,” to allow a ship to travel faster than the speed of light, so that you could actually go places in the galaxy and be back home for dinner. We don’t even know whether there are intelligent beings on other planets, and if there are, they surely will not accommodate explorers by speaking English. If French waiters in Paris won’t, I don’t see why I should expect the natives of Capella 4 to do so.

The show might have been dressed in science fiction, boldly splitting infinitives and going where no man has gone before, but the strange new worlds were excellent opportunities for exploring the strange old world, the world of man, his folly, his heroism, his passion, the gleam of his intellectual light, and the battle-line between good and evil, which as Solzehnitsyn says runs right through the middle of every human heart. It’s when you set man apart from the guard-rails of the familiar, of social convention, that he must show what he is made of. So outer space serves the same function as did the yet-to-be-civilized lands of the old west, in our western movies. The lands are on the edge, so to speak; think of them as existing uneasily between civilization, with its many tradeoffs, most of them beneficial to man, and savagery, with its “call of the wild,” threatening, dark, but powerfully appealing too.

And that brings us to our first western for the Film of the Week: George Stevens’ classic, Shane (1953), based on the novel of the same name by Jack Schaefer (1949). Schaefer’s sympathies lay with the dangerous and untamed west, but in his novel, and in the film, we feel that the homesteading farmers of Wyoming, the “sod-busters” as the old-time ranchers contemptuously call them, are certainly in the right. They are trying to build a real and fully human life for themselves, their families, and their posterity, and that can only happen if the soil is tilled and the tillers themselves set down roots. That is what the leader of the homesteaders, Joe Starrett (Van Heflin) says, but the main rancher, Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer; not at all the typical villain), resents their coming in and enclosing land, drawing from the streams that used to water his herds, and taking for granted the decades of conflict, often bloody, that he and his fellows endured against the Indians in carving out their ranches. The homesteaders are good people, and the ranchers, though raffish and bullying and willing to shed blood, are not simply evil.

Into this situation comes the good-looking, clear-eyed, laconic Alan Ladd, playing a mysterious man with a violent past, “dangerous but good,” who sides with the farmers. He is known simply as Shane. He is a gunslinger. But he takes work at Starrett’s farm, where he is quickly idolized by the boy Joey (Brandon de Wilde), who of course has no idea that Shane could replace his own father in his and his mother’s affections. Mrs. Starrett (Jean Arthur), not entirely happy to be out west, is in fact powerfully attracted to Shane, and the scene in which the two of them dance at the barn-festival shows the electricity between male and female, also dangerous but good. When Ryker tries to buy Shane off and he refuses, and when it becomes clear that Shane’s presence has put spine into the farmers, the rancher takes his fatal step into wickedness, hiring a gunman from outside the area (Jack Palance). And we are set up for a showdown, which will involve quite a few unexpected turns.

The film is about so many things that are archetypal for man — that we can hardly imagine man without, unless he is to become a pallid and diminished thing indeed. Schaefer said that the west in his novel was a boy’s dream of America as it ought to be, and the film shows it; the boy must learn what manhood means, and it isn’t always a gun or a fist. It is self-denial, even the ultimate self-sacrifice. The film shows a real friendship between man and man, friendship built upon shared labor and accomplishment, for when it comes to male camaraderie, sweat at work is the cement. And then, and most glorious of all, the hardest thing to talk about, but the most common thing in our lives, that love between the two human beings who are not alike, because they are not alike: man and woman.

George Stevens was one of the greatest of American directors, and we’ll be featuring his work again. But see Shane, and know what people with hearts and minds can do with human truths that do not change for railroads or spaceships or other toys lying in the yard.