SHANE

One of the great westerns but, like "High Noon", it is a film that drifts in and out of favour. It's very classicism now can almost seem old-hat; the virtues of a well-made movie, a tale well-told, dismissed for lack of innovation and yet it seemed innovative at the time, a 'psychological' western rather than 'an oater' with as much emphasis on the characters and their relationships with each other as on the action.

And it is a film in which the characters and the action stay in the memory: Shane, the gunslinger who wants to settle down and put his guns to rest, a White Knight out of Camelot come to help the Starrets in their time of need; the Starrets, Joe, the decent homesteader forging out a new life in a new land for his wife and son; Marian, his wife, strong yet vulnerable, the lynch-pin of the family but stirred perhaps romantically by Shane's presence and Joey, the ten year old son who finds in Shane a father and a brother and an idolized hero out of the mythical tales of his own imagination. (The film deals explicitly with childhood loss; as Shane rides off into the sunset who can ever forget Joey's resonant pleading of 'Come back, Shane'?).

Nor does it short-change us on the action sequences either: the bar-room brawl, the killing of Elisha Cook Jr's Torrey, (by Jack Palance, one of the westerns most iconic villains), and the final gunfight, as inevitable and as classic as any in the movies. It didn't make a star out of Alan Ladd; he was that already, but it gave him his definitive role, the one that fitted him like a glove. And as the Starrets, Van Heflin, Jean Arthur, (in her final film) and the young Brandon DeWilde, (his best performance), were the perfect embodiment of the frontier family.

As a director George Stevens, too, has fallen out of favour. There is no denying "A Place in the Sun", "Giant", "The Diary of Anne Frank" and most especially "The Greatest Story Ever Told" suffer, for the most part, from an enforced solemnity and a measured pacing in style that borders on the funereal, but it was a style that not only suited "Shane", giving depth to Jack Schaefer's novel and transforming it into something classic and truly enduring.