Almost from the moment Joey sees Shane the Starrett farm, whatever injustices or sins Shane has committed disappears within the wonder in Joey’s eyes. Shane (Alan Ladd) is that aforementioned desperado and finds himself settling down with homesteader Joe Starrett (Van Heflin), his wife Marian (Jean Arthur in her final film appearance), and their young son Joey (Brandon deWilde). Go deeper: the mysterious, lonely six shooter-carrying wanderer and a wife of one of the villagers are noticeably attracted to one another and that that wanderer is becoming a role model to her son for all the wrong reasons. Of course, he is ultimately unable to escape that past.įrom a more superficial analysis, Shane is a straight male savior black-and-white Western that should be discarded with the lot of them. The plot is cliched nowadays and perhaps back in 1953: a free spirit with a questionable past comes to a quiet pocket of the frontier (in this case, filmed near what is now Jackson Hole, Wyoming near Grand Teton National Park) to escape from that past. Where a lesser production would have wallowed and basked in the glory of its myth, Shane refuses to act upon its mythology and director George Stevens allows his film to speak (or not speak) for itself. It has been sixty years since Paramount released Shane to theaters - introducing audiences to one of the most self-consciously mythic Westerns of all time. Spoilers follow because the ending is relatively well-known. NOTE: Shane was the 1,000th feature-length or short-length film I rated on imdb as part of the whole, “My Movie Odyssey" tag.
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