Shane

Edward Countryman, Evonne Von Heussen-Countryman

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838718145
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This text looks at the film 'Shane' (1983) directed by George Stevens, then one of Hollywood's most successful film-makers. Alan Ladd plays the charismatic outsider who defends a community against a predatory gang and, in so doing, transforms the life of a family.

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THE PUREST WESTERN OF ALL

Four brass chords sound under the Paramount ‘Matterhorn’ logo. Dissolve to a mountainside, in blues and greens. Ahorseman in buckskins enters, riding downhill. Briefly, his pistol is in centre frame. Victor Young’s lilting theme music begins in strings and woodwinds and the rider stops to reconnoitre. Orange-yellow letters announce George Stevens’ production of Shane.

Dissolve to a long shot over the valley, as the horseman crosses. Dissolve again to the valley floor in slight high angle. Under the last credits a deer can be seen in middleground, with a farmstead behind and the Grand Tetons in the distance. Cut to a child stalking the animal, cocking his gun and aiming. Cut to ground level, with the deer turning its head so that its antlers frame the approaching rider (as a tiny car crosses in the far distance). Both boy and deer see the man and each bolts. The music segues to a song sung by a woman.

Western after Western has begun with somebody coming out of the wilderness, but none uses the image with greater purity than the opening sequence of Shane. This film can also claim purity within the genre. Paramount advertised it that way, building on Stevens’ multiple Academy Awards for previous films, on Shane’s Oscar nominations (including Best Director) and on the Oscar won by cinematographer Loyal Griggs. Trade and national media critics joined in celebrating Shane. Crowds turned out for it after its premiere on 24 April, 1953 at the Radio City Music Hall. Film-makers have been paying homage ever since. John Ford’s unhappy family in The Searchers (1956) extrapolates themes and images that Stevens broached in Shane to a disillusioned, irredeemable ending. Warren Beatty and Arthur Penn drew on Shane in Bonnie and Clyde (1967). Sam Peckinpah developed the balletic violence in The Wild Bunch (1969) from Shane’s two shootings and quoted Shane in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). Clint Eastwood remade Shane as Pale Rider (1985). Reaching beyond the Western genre, there are echoes of Shane in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter (1978). Mike Nichols shows Shane’s ending in Primary Colors (1998) to comment on late twentieth-century national politics (‘Come back, Shane and run for President’). In Down in the Delta (1998) first-time film-maker Maya Angelou reverses the shot of the child, his gun and a deer in order to make the same point about children and firearms that Stevens had intended. How shall we account for Shane’s power at the time of its release? How can we understand the debt to it that film-makers have felt?

George Stevens certainly knew his craft. He graduated from child actor to cameraman, shot film and wrote gags for Laurel and Hardy and directed ‘Our Gang’ shorts. After Alice Adams (1935) jumped him to first-rank features he made only twenty films, but until The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), whatever Stevens released drew acclaim and made money. Seven Stevens films won Academy Awards, including Best Director twice. Shane and two others earned Best Director nominations and he received the Irving Thalberg Award at the Oscar ceremony in 1953. His comedies with Katharine Hepburn (Alice Adams and Woman of the Year, 1942) brought out her witty best. Swing Time (1936) revealed new dimensions in the dance partnership of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers and in the musical genre. Gunga Din (1939) prefigures the Indiana Jones cycle and thus the work of Steven Spielberg. Jean Arthur is as manic in The More the Merrier (1943) as she would be sober in Shane, her last film. From Vivacious Lady (1938) onward, Stevens produced his films, except for Woman of the Year, I Remember Mama (1948) and The Only Game in Town (1970).

Stevens was a Westerner who loved the region, but unlike Ford, Peckinpah or Eastwood he did not ‘make Westerns’. Shane was his only one, unless we count Annie Oakley (1935) (which places its protagonist in Ohio with Buffalo Bill’s touring show), Gunga Din (whose Indians wear turbans) and Giant (1956) (which is about family, wealth and race in modern Texas). His vaudeville childhood meant social exclusion and being an outsider was an enduring theme throughout his films. His schooling was brief and his spelling was erratic, but he read widely. He respected film studies scholars, but he always appreciated that he had helped invent their subject.

Full documentation on Shane survives at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and in such places as the Oral History of American Performing Arts Collection at Southern Methodist University and the personal records of George Stevens Jr. Using that wealth of material we can watch Shane develop from Jack Schaefer’s novel to the final print. We can see how the film’s ‘intense simplicity’ allows Stevens to deal with very complex themes. Finally, we can appreciate the film’s influence on the Western genre. Shane challenges not only the historian of cultural artifacts but also the historian of cultural production.

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JACK SCHAEFER, GEORGE STEVENS AND ‘SHANE’

When Jack Schaefer wrote Shane he ‘had never been west of Toledo, Ohio’. He had tried doctoral study in American literature at Columbia University and then drifted into journalism, read American history and experimented with fiction writing. Shane was his first result. Published in Argosy as a sequence of stories, it appeared as a novel in 1949. Although at first it sold poorly, its publication spurred Schaefer on to quit journalism. He kept writing about the West without seeing it. In his words, ‘I had written four books about the West and still I had not been out there.’ Once he and his spouse saw what he had been writing about, they moved immediately, settling in Santa Fe and remaining there until his death in 1991.

Although Shane deals with Anglo-whites, Schaefer explored Indian and Hispanic experience in The Canyon (1953) and Old Ramon (1956). The Silver Whip ( Schaefer’s title was First Blood) (1953), Tribute to a Bad Man (1955), Trooper Hook (1957) and Advance to the Rear (originally Company of Cowards) (1965) were all made into films. Schaefer’s most ambitious work, Monte Walsh (1963), is a long cowboy elegy that became an end-of-the-West feature (William Fraker, 1970). Lee Marvin took the title role of a gentle, aging cowboy who might have been an elderly Shane. Jack Palance appeared as a figure who is even more gentle, reversing the actor’s viscious persona in the Stevens film. But despite unusual subtlety, the film failed at the box office. Shane remains Schaefer’s most famous work.

The film version is often joined with the Stevens productions A Place in the Sun (1951) and Giant in a supposed ‘American trilogy’. Stevens denied any such intent, but he made the films in near sequence and each emerged from a literary attempt to make sense of America. A Place in the Sun is derived from Theodore Dreiser’s novel An American Tragedy. It considers the recurrent Stevens themes of justice, ambition and success in a class-riven society and adds the issue of the state’s legal violence against errant citizens. Shane considers violence where there is no law, both in terms of what a shooting does and as a historical problem in America’s development. Giant adds that most intractably American question, race, which Stevens had first touched on in Alice Adams, through Hattie McDaniels’ hired maid disrupting a middle-class dinner party. In The Diary of Anne Frank (1959) Stevens brought together innocence, youth, sex, racism, armed violence and the power of a malign state. Whether or not he intended an American trilogy (let alone a coherent oeuvre), Shane marks a significant point in his artistic and personal growth. Stevens’ career took him from studio employment and entertainment to autonomy and arduous themes. But scholarly attention to his films consists of little more than a doctoral thesis, some short studies and a few academic articles. The only biographies are the television films made by his son George Stevens Jr, George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (1988) and D-Day to Berlin (1995), which assembles the home-movie colour footage that Stevens shot for his own pleasure while he was supervising the official filming of the Allied drive across France, Belgium and Germany. This study is also short, dealing with just one film. It goes without saying that George Stevens deserves more.

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INTENSE SIMPLICITY: THE STEVENS TECHNIQUE

Though his style moved from the loose fluidity of his pre-war comedies to formal composition, heroic close-ups, lingering vistas and slow dissolves, Stevens sought to bring viewers into his characters’ world. In his words, ‘to get some reality is the most difficult thing . . . about film doing. For people to create a moment of actuality.’ He wanted viewers to consider a film, not receive it. ‘Get 5,000 minds,’ he told Robert Hughes in 1967, ‘and seat them in . . . the Music Hall and . . . calculate the energy of these minds surpassing themselves. . . . I often watch the audience at work and I’m profoundly impressed by their intelligence.’ In Shane Stevens’ artifice generates an intense simplicity that hides complex meaning. The best Westerns have that quality, but most often by turning a bare bones narrative into a complex spectacle. In The Wild Bunch some bad men shoot up one town, wander for a time, shoot up another and die. Yet Peckinpah turned that four-statement story into one of the most intricately crafted films ever made. Shane presented a different problem. Stevens’ Shane is true to Schaefer’s purposes and the novel’s possibilities, but it is not simply a ‘film of the book’.

George Stevens directing on location

Consider the first five minutes which set in motion every issue that the film will consider: violence, American identity, social transition, family, young masculinity, being an outsider, women’s place in a world that men control and choosing between incompatible desires. The voice that sings ‘The Quilting Party’ as the little boy races to announce that ‘Somebody’s coming, Pa’ is slightly off-key and we see her through the open window of a cabin. She is in women’s territory, though pioneer crudity surrounds her. Her husband, outside chopping a tree stump, is roughly dressed and needs a shave. Even before we learn that they are Joe Starrett (Van Heflin), Marion Starrett (Jean Arthur) and Joey Starrett (Brandon de Wilde) they carry an overtone of the Christian Holy Family.

The approaching stranger (Alan Ladd, in the title role) crosses the boundary stream without muddying its clean flow (while a few chords of his own theme replace the woman’s song, in a Wagnerian leitmotif style). He avoids the garden, asks permission to cut through ‘your place’, and dismounts to accept some water. A close-up of the boy and a mid-shot of the woman establish the interest of each and the stranger compliments the boy’s observing his approach. The child will ‘make his mark’. The boy provides our point of view virtually throughout the film, but the rider’s ability to watch ‘things goin’ on around’ will drive the narrative.

When the stranger turns to take the water he reveals his holstered gun. The boy cocks his rifle, provoking a gunfighter’s fast-draw. The clang of the dipper that the stranger drops breaks the idyllic quality of the soundtrack. The farmer’s response is a muted challenge: ‘A little touchy, aren’t you?’ The woman reproves the child for pointing his gun (which he has not actually done). Joey’s fascination with weapons, Joe’s guarded acceptance that a man will carry a gun and Marion’s disapproval have all been established in the same moment. The child specifies his interest: ‘I bet you can shoot.’ The stranger’s ‘a little bit’ leads to three brass chords and cowboy-style hooting, with a cut to other approaching riders. Taking Joey’s rifle, the father orders the stranger to leave, which he does after requesting that the rifle be lowered. The new riders, who go through the garden, are the ‘Ryker boys’, named after the rancher Rufe Ryker (Emile Meyer) who employs them. Except for Rufe, his brother and foreman Morgan (John Dierkes) and cowboy Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson), ‘Rykers’ is all the identity they have.

Meyer gives Rufe Ryker the air of a pagan god. (Later he will use ‘By Jupiter!’ as an expletive.) Except in the long shot that introduces him, he doesn’t wear a hat over his thick silver hair and he has a fiercely jutting beard. His accent hints of New York. He and his cowboys also carry overtones of the anti-slavery warrior John Brown, who raided against southern settlers in Kansas in 1856. He may be a rancher, but he seems somehow alien to the West. Ryker and Starrett renew an ongoing quarrel about using the land (‘I’ve got that government beef contract and I’m gonna need all my range’) and possessing it (‘Now that you’ve told me that, will you kindly get off my place?’). They spar about descriptive nouns (Ryker: ‘you and the other squatters’; Starrett: ‘homesteaders, you mean’) and turn to the subjects of violence (‘I could blast you out of here right now’), progress (‘The time for gun-blastin’ a man off his own place is past’) and the law (‘They’re building a penitentiary right now’). The Rykers mock Starrett for holding a gun. The woman comes out of the house wearing trousers. As she joins her husband and son a short right pan reveals the stranger, his pistol on prominent display. He is ‘a friend of Starrett’s’ and his presence is enough to make the vis...