#30 — Shane (George Stevens, 1953)
No other film genre inspire hyperbolic statements about deconstructionist subversion like the western. That’s in part because the hefty log pile of westerns from the earliest decades of Hollywood are largely so staid and by the numbers. The whole black hat vs. white hat paradigm is overstated, but it wasn’t conjured up out of nothing. There was cause to see the western as the stiffest of genres, lacking the sweaty intensity of film noir, the existential bleakness of melodrama, and the intriguingly tangled gender politics of screwball comedy. Pinpointing the different films that ushered westerns from one plateau of deconstruction to another is a dandy cineaste parlor game. It’s similarly entertaining to examine those films that clung to bygone standards while the frontier town set flats collapsed to the ground around them. For me, the most interest thing about Shane, is the way it dutifully, warmly cleaves to established patterns while also commenting on the fiction in a manner so subtle that it almost seems inadvertent.

Based on a 1949 novel of the same name, Shane brings a gunslinger (Alan Ladd) to a barely settled terrain of Wyoming, presumably sometime in the eighteen-sixties. He quickly falls in with a family that is struggling to hold onto their land in the face of machinations by a powerful local cattle baron (Emile Meyer). The visiting stranger, the Shane of the title, had obvious skills that he keeps under wraps, even as different nefarious cads in the nearby town taunt him. If the staging of the film relies on a certain amount of delayed gratification, the narrative is built upon the dueling notions of how prevalent violence should be in settling disputes. Shane is good with a gun, but understands it as a tool not a magic wand, something he tries to instill upon the family’s young boy (Brandon deWilde), who is fascinated by this handsome, weathered newcomer. Shane clearly has a dark history, but it doesn’t haunt him. He carries it with him, and it naturally informs everything he does, everything he is.

The same haze of past hung around director George Stevens. Into his third decade as a professional filmmakers, Stevens was two years past his Oscar-winning effort A Duel in the Sun, another twisty take on western traditions. He had a strong eye for the wide open vistas and visual sprawl that was one of the key selling points on the western. More importantly, he knew how to frame the people within those images, in ways that emphasized both the smallness of individuals and their imposing primacy of humanity in a land they were taming, sometimes callously so. It’s a central part of the film’s thematic thesis that Shane and the homesteading family’s father (Van Heflin) bond over the exhausting removal of a stubborn tree stump. Nature is being tore up by its gnarled roots, and so is the past. Shane argues for the value of moving forward, even as it artfully embraces every available archetype.