Shane – Review

As one of the most name-checked Westerns, you’d expect 1953’s Shane would feel more relevant to us in 2015. Sadly, there’s little of the formal progressiveness of Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West, or the existential overtones of Ford’s The Searchers – Westerns that really made their mark as classics of the genre and helped move it forward in groundbreaking new ways – but while it may may outwardly lack such aspects, Shane boasts plenty of tension-heavy set pieces and an immovable sense of justice that always helped make a good name for the Western.

A mysterious cowboy, going by the name of Shane, finds his way onto the Starrett homestead. Within a few minutes, the Starrett family’s opinion on him evolves from mysterious, dangerous stranger to mysterious, dangerous hero – a player who could help them keep their farm from the clutches of a group of cattlemen. Shane realises that he’s stumbled headfirst into a war between The Rykers and the settlers, and as a result, a dark cloud has long settled over the town. Whether he likes it or not, he’s become a beacon of light for the settlers; with a gunslinger as sharp as him on their side, perhaps balance can be restored to the valley – a valley which is filled with an array of memorable characters, least of them Shane himself, played with sternness and tenderness by Alan Ladd, and bolstered by a fine performance from Van Heflin as Joe, patriarch of the Starrett family, bright-eyed and bearing a clear spirit. But Ladd is a casting choice that’s at the heart of why this particular Western has endured; his appearance in many movies as the stone-cold but warm-hearted saviour is an endlessly fascinating one, as his physicality lends him more to the romantic lead than the harder-than-thou anti-heroes he’s played, most famous of them all in this movie. Elsewhere, however, Brandon De Wilde as Joey – the Starrett’s blonde-haired, blue-eyed kid – makes for a hugely annoying addition, whose screeching, infuriating delivery of lines sidelines most of the great action it appears alongside. Why did child performances always have to be so awful in the ‘50s?

But on the note of action, Shane really soars: director George Stevens’ deftness in knowing precisely the right place to point a camera and shoot – a basic talent many filmmakers seem to have trouble with – means that saloon set pieces and shoot-outs sizzle with nervous tension, before exploding in hugely satisfying rounds of good-hearted, old-fashioned violence. It’s here that Shane gives back to the genre all the things it had so far leased – stereotypical and badly-fitting cowboy outfits, plus oft-used storylines – and more, and even does so with infrequent but delicious dashes of black humour. There’s nothing outstanding about Shane – but the fact that it stands as the bar for the genre, and doesn’t attempt to raise it, is no bad thing either.

Shane is out now on DVD and Blu-ray from Eureka as part of their Masters of Cinema series.