Shane (Paramount) is as high-styled a Technicolored horse opera as moviegoers are likely to see this year. It tells the familiar old western yarn about the good guy v. the badmen. The mysterious stranger named Shane (Alan Ladd) befriends a couple of turn-of-the-century Wyoming homesteaders (Van Heflin and Jean Arthur) and their nine-year-old son (Brandon de Wilde). Having helped the "sodbusters" fight off a group of villainous cattlemen who are trying to grab their land, Shane just as mysteriously rides off into the blue distance.
This conventional screenplay has been filmed in entirely unconventional style by Producer-Director George (A Place in the Sun) Stevens. One of Hollywood's most painstaking craftsmen, Stevens for the first time has turned his individualistic director's talents to a western—and with striking results. From the opening shot in which buckskin-clad Shane, a sort of blond Apollo of the plains, rides into view on a roan horse, the film is marked by the kind of distinctive, richly detailed picture-making that is scarcely ever lavished on the most high-toned movie drama, let alone a western.
Filmed largely around Jackson Hole, Wyo., Shane bulges with authentic sights & sounds. As the yarn plunges forward scene after scene hints at the pleasures and hardships of frontier life: homesteaders dancing and setting off homemade explosives at a July 4 party; bloody fistfighting in a saloon; little girls solemnly watching a sow with her sucklings; the ring of hand axes against a stump; tumbleweed brushing the legs of jittery horses; a harmonica solo of taps as a pine coffin is lowered into a hilltop grave Without recourse to tricky 3-D photography and Polaroid glasses, Stevens, with ordinary Technicolor camera and sound track has given his flat old story a real third dimension of believability.
Van Heflin as the hard-working homesteader, Jean Arthur as his wife and Brandon de Wilde as their young son who idolizes Shane, make the most of their roles. As hard-riding, straight-shooting Shane, Alan Ladd is the personification of 11 strong silent western heroes. He is larger than life, more heroic than legend, the kind of man who is feared by men and loved by women, children and dogs. But he is not the sort to take advantage of the affections of a faithful wife and a small boy. As Brandon de Wilde gazes adoringly after him, he mounts his horse and is on his way. Beyond the jagged mountains, there are other wrongs to be righted
The way Director Stevens has put it together, Shane adds up to something more than the sum of its individual parts, it almost rises above its stock material to become a sort of celluloid symphony of six-shooters and the wide open spaces.
Producer-Director George Cooper Stevens, 48, is a perfectionist who came up an odd way: at 19, he was the youngest cameraman in Hollywood, and his specialty was comedy (including 60 or more Laurel & Hardy and Harry Langdon shorts). Hal Roach made him a director (of shorts) in 1929, and Stevens moved on into feature-length pictures merely by stretching out his two-reelers. His first big hit was Alice Adams (1935)., followed by such topnotchers as Gunga Din, Woman of the Year, The Talk of the Town, A Place in the Sun, Something to Live For.