150 Word Review: 'Shane' (1953)
About a boy
Shane is a perfect western featuring a hell-raising saloon fistfight and one of the most unfortunate performances by a young actor in Hollywood history. Director George Stevens’s Technicolor fable about a world-weary gunslinger who finds a home helping a poor farmer and his family terrorized by a local free-range rancher explores a core theme of westerns: who does the law bind?
Alan Ladd is Shane, a wholesome cowpoke with corn-colored hair, who is very good at perforating other men with hot lead. At first, Van Heflin’s grouchy settler and his frontier wife, played by Jean Arthur, don’t trust ol’ Shane, but he charms them, and their toe-head son, a precocious Brand deWilde, who is annoying, especially when he whines, “Sha-a-ane.” Shane also stars Jack Palance in a supporting role as a reptilian mercenary with murder on his mind. Palance’s sadistic smile and slow, measured whisper scare everyone, except for Shane.
One of my favorite movies of all time, and the book is decent, too.