Old and no nonsense - what refreshing change.
The tale has been told in so many ways, but it seems this movie was the first.
I'd strangle the kid myself, but the relationship between the star and each of the family members suggests so much without needing to be obvious.
Ideas about violence, intimidation, resistance.. all for the seeing.
Crowd-pleasing, very sentimental western which draws on the range wars between settlers and cowboys in 1890s Wyoming. This one takes the side of the farmers who are stampeded and burned out of their homes by the cattle barons whose demand that the plains remain open are backed up by intimidation, guns and a lot of muscle.
Van Heflin plays the most resolute of the farmers, a quiet, determined family man who can't operate a firearm but won't back down. He is joined by Alan Ladd as Shane, a mysterious, impassive drifter who just might be a gunman seeking to bury his bloody past. So when the cattle boss drafts in a cruel, cold eyed gunfighter, played by Jack Palance as a kind of proto-Terminator, maybe Shane will strap on his pistols one last time...
There is one big problem with Shane and that's the astonishingly irritating performance by Brandon De Wilde as Heflin's impressionable 12 year old who hero-worships Shane. But, without him, Shane would be just another range war western. It's the way Shane ingratiates his way into the the family, including the wife (a rather elderly Jean Arthur) that makes the film so memorable.
Maybe Alan Ladd lacks the stature for the hero, but his persona remains one of the most potent in cinema. It's Heflin who physically dominates the screen and his character is no less courageous. Shane is the quintessence of the western's most enduring archetype; the wandering gunfighter who can never escape his past, so must go on searching the valleys of the old west for an elusive peace.