Shane (1953)

Written by A. B. Guthrie, Jr. & Jack Sher

Directed by George Stevens

1998 List Ranking: 69

2007 List Ranking: 45

Y’all, I can’t: Westerns are awful. Across these lists I’ve seen just a couple that are moderately okay, but the rest are painful, and Shane is no exception. It boggles my mind that this film is so loved by critics, because I found this film to be extremely tedious and annoying.

The Starrett family (Joey, Marian, and Joe) and Shane

Shane is a lone gunslinger who decides to help protect a ranch (and the family who lives on it) from the aggressive settlers who are trying to drive the homesteaders off the land. Along the way, the family grows close to Shane, who fights the settlers and the aggressive gunslinger that they hire to help terrorize the various homesteaders. For a film who’s primary protagonist and antagonist are both gunslingers, there’s actually very little gunfighting (until the end), with most of the violence coming from hand-to-hand fights.

Alan Ladd as Shane

Shane is played by Alan Ladd, and he is, I suppose, the best part of the movie (which, again, isn’t saying much). He has a great aura and presence, and his mysterious past is intriguing. The problem is that that past is never explained, so we never see Shane be anything other than, essentially, a goody two-shoes. He doesn’t make any mistakes, all the good guys love him (and, like instantaneously), and the bad guys hate him without knowing a thing about him. As such, while he’s pretty watchable for a bit, he just becomes too perfect to be interesting, despite everyone falling over themselves to be the next ones to complement him.

Maybe it’s hero worship. MAYBE IT’S OBSESSION.

Seriously, everyone in this film almost seems to exist solely to state how great Shane is. The biggest, and absolutely most annoying, example of this is little Joey, played by Brandon deWilde. This kid, maybe ten years old, is legitimately OBSESSED with Shane. Once Shane shows up on the property, Joey does absolutely nothing EXCEPT talk to or about Shane. If you think I’m exaggerating, I’m 100% not. LITERALLY every word out of this kid’s mouth is about Shane. I get the idea of hero worship, but SOMEONE needs to tell this kid to turn it down a couple notches.

This problem is only made worse by the film’s unclear passage of time. Taken at face value, the film takes place over a few days (making Joey’s statement “I just LOVE Shane” after the second day even weirder); if the film takes place over a longer stretch, there is no indication. However, the action seems rather rushed if it DOES take only a few days to unfold. Having said that, I wouldn’t put it past this film to be making the argument that the holier-than-thou Shane magically makes everything better in just a few days.

Jean Arthur

The other somewhat notable performance is Jean Arthur, who we last saw in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Here, she plays Joey’s mother Marian (and wife to Joe, who is just…unmemorable). I wasn’t a huge fan of hers in Smith, and I feel the same way here. I only bring her up because there is big ol’ dollop of sexual tension between her and Shane and IT’S NEVER RESOLVED. Even when, about halfway through the film, they find themselves alone again, JOEY HAS TO INTERRUPT, AND ONLY TO TALK TO HIS MOTHER MORE ABOUT SHANE. I’m trying to not ALL CAPS RAGE TYPE too much, but it’s so ridiculous! I guess I understand why the film is called Shane, because no one ever SHUTS UP ABOUT HIM.

Except…that by the time the film enters its third act, Shane has been relegated to the background. There have been a few different plot threads that he’s become enmeshed in (the tension between him and Marian being one of them), but by this point of the film, every single one of them has been dropped. The film has overworked itself trying to show how important Shane is to literally everything and then…he’s just in the background, chilling, as the various homesteaders rally THEMSELVES to fight the settlers (SPOILER ALERT: GUESS WHO ACTUALLY DOES). It’s such a whiplash from the preceding two-thirds of the film that I was left wondering if this section was a reshoot that got shoehorned in.

Clearly, I didn’t like this film. It’s just so awful. I suppose it has a redeeming value of being the first widescreen film (at least, from what my research tells me), but nothing will soon allow me to forget the incessant whining of “SHAAAAAAAAAAANE” that occurs every 0.784 seconds in this unenjoyable film.

FINAL GRADE: D+