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Shane – Reviewed by Doug Boilesen

OK, so this movie ends with the often satirized "Shaaaaane..., come baaaaaack..." And it doesn't have any phonographs (wrong time period). Nonetheless, this movie is in my top ten because Shane is a great western film. Perhaps I'm also trying to justify how many times I've watched it by building it up. Actually, it's more than that because this movie is THE archetypal western set in the magnificent Grand Tetons. It's good guy vs. bad guy, white hat vs. black hat, with Jack Palance perfect as the malevolent gunfighter Wilson ("yeah, that was Wilson all right. He was fast, real fast..."). And Alan Ladd is the one and only Shane. With his supporting cast, Ladd set the tone and message for a time and place that can't be duplicated.

I first saw this movie at the Starview Drive-in theatre in Lincoln, Nebraska and when you talk about the big screen, the outdoor theatre was king in the 1950's. The open country and scenery of Wyoming is breathtaking and it seemed in scale at the outdoor theatre. Watching the movie, one feels the remoteness of the time and place, separate from law and order and distant from big-city life. Store-bought clothes and soda pop are small clues in Grafton's General Store that there was civilization beyond the muddy streets where Palance would gun-down Elisha Cook, Jr. The movie painted a seemingly realistic view of the battle between fence-building homesteaders and the open-range cattlemen of the 1870's. This was the West and Shane was the last gun in the valley, destined to set the world in order by removing those that had outlived their time.

In later years I frequently enjoyed this movie at the home of my friends Dave and Kathy Aiken who owned an RCA Videodisk player and had this as one of their discs. This last of the great pre-Laservision, pre-DVD "phonograph" technologies actually used a record player needle to display images and sound. RCA is said to have lost $1Billion trying, and failing, to promote the Videodisk.

So this movie has some historical associations for me and probably gets extra points for those memories. But this is a special movie that I continue to watch. So as a great representative of its genre and for its personal nostalgic associations and for its great panoramic scenes and its simple values that are as clear as the open Wyoming sky in 1870, this movie is in my top ten. If you want to see a classic western, this is my favorite.

Shane Copywrite (C) 1953 Paramount Picture