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I recorded Shane off TCM and watched it for about the tenth time last night. The film was directed by George Stevens with a script by A.B. Guthrie, Jr. Alan Ladd plays Shane, the gunfighter with a mysterious past who is looking for a new life in Wyoming circa 1889.

A variety of currents and undercurrents run through the film. Some of them conflict. Indians have been cleared from the land and made it suitable for settlement. However, the law remains at some distance, a distance measured in days.

As it turns out, Shane can’t put down the gun. He comes to the defense of the homesteading farmers who are being run off their land by cattle baron Rufe Ryker and his hired gun (played by a menacing Jack Palance in a black hat). Ryker’s cattle need an open range that cannot subsist with the homesteaded farms. The conflict builds toward an intense climax.

It’s a classic oater, as Variety would put it, and a great film. It draws on all the resources of the medium. The direction, the acting, the cinematography, the score, the screenplay all contribute to its powerful effects. The gun is treated with ambivalence. Shane is both a heroic and tragic figure. He saves the lives — the way of life — of the family he is serving and wants to stay with, but at the end has to move on. Shane says it has branded him.

Watching the film last night, I found the film saturated in the ethos of World War II. At the 1953 Academy Awards, Shane was overshadowed by From Here To Eternity, but I think that the former reflects the experience of the war even more than the latter.

Stevens is one of the five Hollywood directors profiled by Mark Harris in Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (2014). Each of the five — John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens, William Wyler, and Frank Capra — enlisted to bring his talents to bear on the war effort. Harris recalls that Stevens directed two of the documentaries introduced into evidence at the Nuremberg trial — Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps and The Nazi Plan.

Turning back to Five Came Back this morning, I was reminded that Harris winds up his epilogue with notes on the post-war career of Stevens:

In 1948, George Stevens finally returned to directing with the gentle and well-received comedy I Remember Mama. Two years later he won the first of two Academy Awards for his direction of A Place in the Sun, his long-planned adaptation of An American Tragedy. “As time went on,” he said, “I kept feeling I should do a picture about the war. All the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their experiences — Ford, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the experience.”

Harris places Shane in this context:

As the years passed, Stevens became troubled by the growing popularity of violent Westerns among children, something he first noticed in Germany immediately after the war, when he watched little boys in cowboy hats play with cap pistols.

Harris then quotes from a 1953 interview of Stevens making the point I saw in the film this time around:

In 1953, as a response, he made Shane, the somber drama about the effect of a roving gunslinger on the lives of a frontier family. He called the movie “a Western, but really my war picture…”

Stevens’s explication of the film (quoted by Harris from the same interview) seems to me off base or vastly oversimplified: “In Shane, a gun shot, for our purposes, is a holocaust. And when a living being is shot, a life is over.” As always with great art, trust the tale, not the teller.