Shane

Actor, producer and director Warren Beatty has told a story about a London screening of his landmark film Bonnie and Clyde (1967). As a producer on that film he had worked closely with director Arthur Penn, straight through to editing the final cut. Beatty made sure that the gunfire in Bonnie and Clyde would be extremely loud, startling, unforgettable. He told colleagues he wanted the gunshots to be "like Shane (1953)". At this London screening Beatty, in the audience, noticed that the gunshots were not loud enough, so he rushed to the projection booth. He asked the projectionist what was wrong and the projectionist said he had in fact adjusted, and softened, the gunshots. He told Beatty he couldn't remember a movie since Shane with the sound so badly mixed.

Beatty's story illustrates a central but often forgotten truth about Shane. Today it may look like an ordinary, formula Western. It might seem predictable, conventional, and even routine. What is forgotten is that in 1953, Shane was shocking. It was distinct, extreme, almost scary, like no other Western before it. These qualities emerge not so much from the story as from the filmmaking. They are moments in which emotions are laid bare, in thunderous, irrevocable events, arising from the stark, unforgiving reality of the American West. Shane is filled with these carefully crafted incidents, which create memories and give the viewer the sense of being there. They're the kind of movie moments that experts like to call pure cinema.

The director George Stevens got those gunshot sounds by recording a cannon fired into a barrel. All of that was done in what nowadays is called post-production, after the movie was shot, during the editing process. Shane was the one true, full-scale Western feature George Stevens directed in his spectacular career. He spent much of his time for 15 months finishing the editing of Shane before it was released in April of 1953. This made his studio bosses at Paramount Pictures furious. A post-production schedule of that length is common today, but it was unusual at the time, and unheard of in the earlier days of the Hollywood studio/factory system. But that system had begun to change, and Stevens himself had changed even more.

He was born in 1904 into a theatrical family. His actor parents had their own theater company in Oakland, California before moving south in 1922 to find work in the movie industry. Stevens himself was working by the time he was 17, as an assistant cameraman on silent comedies and low-budget Westerns, at the hyper-efficient Hal Roach company. In those early days, before actors could talk, Stevens, operating the camera himself, learned about how things happen on movie screens. He spoke in later years of coming to understand how viewers could recognize reactions: how one actor, on camera, had to react to what another actor had just done. Whether in a single shot or in a separate "reaction" shot, Stevens discovered that these reactions, with one person responding to another in real time, were a key part of what makes movies seem real. The best place to see how Stevens began to put these ideas into practice is in the work of the comedy team (Stan) Laurel And (Oliver) Hardy. The two comics together became an institution, and Stevens was a key part of their team. As a director of photography, and what was then known as a gag-writer, Stevens knew that as great as the slapstick gags might be, they were only one part of the formula. Any Laurel and Hardy fan knows that the best laughs often come from the shots in which Stan reacts to Ollie, from a puddle of mud, or Ollie to Stan, sprawled on a sidewalk. George Stevens, in his nearly five decades making movies, took this fundamental technique to something approaching the level of high art.

The great difference, of course, between Laurel and Hardy and Shane is the tone, and the gravity of what is taking place. Shane is a tale of life and death, and of the great currents of American history, and by the 1950s, George Stevens had begun to think seriously about how movies could address those themes. Stevens had become a highly respected director over the course of the 1930s. He had a great success directing Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935.) His use of the camera and lighting were credited with bringing the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musicals to a new level of quality with Swing Time (1936.) He made the great action film Gunga Din (1939) and sparkling, sophisticated comedies like The Talk Of The Town (1942) and The More The Merrier (1943), eventually becoming his own producer, all the while gaining greater control over his films.

World War Two was the event that reshaped George Stevens' career. In 1944 he joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps. As the head of a combat motion picture unit, Stevens covered the D-Day landing at Normandy, and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. He produced and directed some of the most memorable and widely seen government-funded documentaries about the war and its aftermath, and that experience changed Stevens' approach as an artist. He became less interested in comedy, and more interested in films that addressed the human condition. His first post-War film was the family drama I Remember Mama, in 1948. Then came A Place In The Sun (1951), based on Theodore Dreiser's masterpiece "An American Tragedy," and that picture earned Stevens his first Academy Award for direction.

In his later years, Stevens observed that if there was ever any undertaking for which he was well qualified, it would have something to do with Westerns. He was quite direct in explaining that he saw Shane as his personal movie about World War Two. He explained that he saw Alan Ladd, the title character, as an American figure who preferred peace, but when provoked would feel he was best qualified to take violent action to protect his community. Stevens saw this as the basic model for America's involvement in the war. He was determined that Shane would capture both that motivation and the lasting emotional impact of the use of deadly force.

Loyal Griggs, Stevens' director of photography, used wide telephoto lenses for his exterior scenes, which had the effect of bringing the dramatic landscape -- especially the famous Grand Teton mountains of Wyoming -- closer to the action in the foreground, intensifying every frame. With all the tension that Stevens creates as a director, it's surprising that the shots that Shane (Alan Ladd) fires when teaching Joey (Brandon DeWilde) how to shoot come almost an hour into the movie. But they are loud, stunning, framed with close-ups and shocked reactions. Later, when a character is shot by the gunfighter Wilson (Jack Palance), Stevens resorted to an old Laurel and Hardy trick to make sure the scene had the effect he wanted. Instead of letting the character fall forward, Stevens had a rope tied around the actor's waist, so that he could be pulled back when shot. He looks to be literally blown back, as much as six feet by the single shot, which was Stevens' way of emphasizing the physical result of the decision to use violence. When you know what to look for, on repeated viewing, Shane becomes a fascinating insight into Stevens' technique as a director, and into what he was trying to accomplish with every scene.

Shane went on to become a major hit, the third highest box office film of 1953. It remains the film for which Alan Ladd is best remembered. Brandon DeWilde's closing line ("Shane, come back!") has become an American cultural touchstone. For George Stevens, Shane was the Western he always wanted to make, and proof of his belief that movies could, and should, address the biggest and most challenging problems faced by any society.