- My favorite part of Shane was when I realized that I recognized the mountains in the film's background. Sure enough, I checked with my summer vacation photos, and they are indeed part of the Teton range near the entrance to Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming. Even the clouds in the film hover around the mountaintops in much the same way they did when I was there. Of all the different genres of film, I think it's pretty obvious that Westerns benefit the most from such authentic and majestic backdrops. As long as whatever is happening in front of these landscapes is tolerable, you'll generally end up with a halfway decent Western.
- And that's precisely what happened with Shane. Without a doubt, this film is not nearly as compelling as any John Ford or Clint Eastwood Western I've seen. It's ploddingly slow and predictable, and most of the characters aren't even that interesting. Shane himself, played by Alan Ladd, tries to be as reluctant and mysterious as Ladd's hitman in This Gun For Hire, but unfortunately the people around him aren't nearly as fascinating as Veronica Lake. In fact, the family Shane takes up with, consisting of a hardworking farmer named Starrett (Van Heflin), his wife Marian (Jean Arthur), and their son Joey (Brandon De Wilde), are completely unexceptional in every respect but two. One is that Joey is considerably whinier than the average kid. The other is that Marian is in love with Shane, and Starrett knows it.
- But before that last bit comes out, however, the film takes about an hour-and-a-half to illustrate that a rancher named Ryker (Emile Meyer) is a low-down enough dude to have his rugged cowpokes (Ben Johnson) bully a bunch of honest farmers (Edgar Buchanan, Elisha Cook Jr., and Douglas Spencer) off their land. When that doesn't work, he calls in the enjoyably villainous gunman Wilson (Jack Palance) whose skeletal grin is probably the last thing a lot of people ever live to see. Now obviously Shane is eventually going to have to stand up to Wilson and Ryker, but the film approaches this final conflict at a truly moseying pace. At least there are some pretty mountains and convincing homesteads to look at in the meantime. When Joey famously calls out for Shane to return at the film's end, though, I was just glad the hero kept going.
