The old man has acted for Michael Curtiz, Robert Wise, Richard Brooks, Robert Rossen, Sidney Lumet, Martin Scorsese. When it turns out that George has forgotten his pocket money at home, he refuses to accept the boy’s gold watch as collateral for the debt: “I’ll trust you ten years, George-not a day over.” You sense affection in the older man and, equally, respect in the younger the mutuality is warming. Morgan, who crafts the fountain treats for the youngsters. Later, when George escorts his sweetheart, Emily, to the drugstore for an ice cream soda, the Stage Manager takes on the persona of Mr. He’s handsome, and when caught up in the spell of love, he croons you wouldn’t tune a piano to it, but he’s sincere. His heart is in the right place, even if he must occasionally be reminded of just where that place is. George Gibbs, the youthful hero, is an all-American boy. Such is his air of decency and authority that you find yourself hoping he deems you worthy. He appears to have lived every vicissitude of life. With his spectacles perched on the tip of his nose and a vaguely distracted air, he stills looks imposing. The Stage Manager is knowing and vigilant. Cowboys could no longer sing once this song was sung.America's national epic is reflected poetically in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1938, and it was described by Edward Albee as "the greatest American play ever written." Our Town contains the snapshots of bygone days, cracker-barrel philosophies, homespun homilies, good-natured ironies, the hints of pain caused by epiphanies, and that climax which brings a welling to your eyes despite yourself. How real are these heroes in us and to us? Westerns changed forever after Shane. We call ourselves into question because of the habit. We have watched Westerns all our lives as DeWilde’s Joey watches Shane. When Shane takes down Jack Palance (in his first screen role), it is Brandon DeWilde as the boy spying agog who stands in for us as we have always been spying, adoring the Western hero in films, prizing the gun-skills, justifying the slaughter because of its elegance and daring and aim. He is a lesson to all actors of how modesty of technique can achieve the role of moral authority that a certain role requires. He is one of those actors, like Charles Coburn, who satisfies a part by never slacking and never overloading it. Van Heflin as her homesteader husband fills the role with full value. She is so naturally plaintive that you cannot but respect her decency in that and in her attraction to Shane himself. Jean Arthur brings to a close her great film career playing the pacifist wife laboring in dirty shirts to make a home for her husband and boy. Never in a film has spectacle and intimacy been so strikingly joined. Stevens sets it under the mountains of The Grand Tetons, which he films with a telephoto lens to bring them forward as cold, distant Gods sitting in their tremendous chairs watching the little doings down there in the vast valley, and he mats his adversarial faces as beautiful against a scripture of clouds scrawling across a huge blue sky. And by hooking Elijah Cook Junior up to a jerk line that knocks him backward off his feet violently when he is shot, shows that when a man is shot a life dies in a crude, sudden, ugly way. For him guns are the last resort, and Stevens, who had seen World War II and its guns and the criminality that war is, uses a cannon when guns go off to shock the audience into the knowledge that a gun is dreadful. As Alan Ladd plays it, he is nothing if not a gentleman. What’s important is that the boy is eight he is at that stage where his pheromones are open to drink in what he must become as a male, what is inherent in the gender, where the gentleness of a gentleman is housed and demonstrated. He sees the Western hero as we as all have seen him and desired him to be, gone to Westerns to contemplate, desire, and idolize him. It is told through the eyes of an eight year-old boy. For it is a movie about how we see Westerns. Sam Peckenpaugh said it is the greatest Western ever made, and it probably is, for this reason: Westerns both begin and end with it. A stranger pitches in to help some homesteaders in Montana and finds himself caught up in their struggle and destiny. Shane –– produced and directed by George Stevens.
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