‘Shane’ celebrates 70th anniversary with Academy Museum screening and Christopher Nolan conversation
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There are many films that have quotable last lines such as “After all, tomorrow is another day” from “Gone with the Wind.” And who can forget Humphrey Bogart telling Claude Rains: “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” But the beloved 1953 George Stevens’ Western “Shane” perhaps has one of the most endearing and emotional final lines. Young Joey (Brandon De Wilde) wants his idol, the former gunslinger Shane (Alan Ladd), to stay with his family. But the wounded hero continues to ride off.
“Shane………come back,” Joey cries out.
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Be prepared to bring you handkerchiefs to the Academy Museum’s 70th anniversary screening Dec 10 at the David Geffen Theatre. Ladd, in his strongest performance, plays a world-weary gunslinger who wants to hang up his six-shooter. He ends up working for an honest, struggling rancher Joe, (Van Heflin), his wife Marian (Jean Arthur) and young son Joey (De Wilde) who are having problems from a vicious cattle baron and his heartless posse. Shane refuses to use his gun until the baron brings in a hired gunfighter (Jack Palance) who is the personification of evil. Critically acclaimed and a hit with audiences, “Shane” contended at the Oscars for picture, director, screenplay and supporting actor for both De Wilde and Palance. “Shane” won for Loyal Griggs’ breathtaking Technicolor cinematography that captures both the beauty and isolation of the Grand Tetons and Jackson Hole areas of Wyoming.
The screening is the latest installment in the George Stevens Lecture on Directing. It began in 1982 “after I gave my father’s papers to the Academy, his films and my film,” revealed George Stevens Jr., the honorary Oscar-winning writer/filmmaker/producer/playwright in a recent Zoom conversation. “I think Robert Benton gave the first Stevens’ Lecture.”
This year, it’s “Oppenheimer” director Christopher Nolan who will discuss the Western. “I think I read a 20111 article somebody sent me where he’s talking about the making of ‘The Dark Knight,”’ said Stevens Jr, who was also a founding member of the AFI, creator of the AFI Life Achievement Award and creator of the Kennedy Center Honors. “He’d kind of studied the depiction of evil in ‘Shane,’ presumably referring to Jack Palance. So, I wrote to him. I think he’s the perfect person.”
If it hadn’t been for Stevens Jr. 91, his father may have not made “Shane.” He told me in a 2000 LA Times interview that he had fallen in love with Jack Schaefer’s western novel “Shane” and wanted to share his enthusiasm with his Oscar-winning dad (“A {lace in the Sun,” “Giant.”) “He was sitting in his bed at the house — I remember it so clearly — and he said, ‘tell me the story. I remember walking around his bed trying to tell him the story of ‘Shane.’ I saw it as a good yarn.” So did his father, but he also saw it as something more. “He as a filmmaker invested it with his own feelings and ideas.”
De Wilde, who was nine when the film was shot, had appeared on Broadway in “The Member of the Wedding,” when he was hired for “Shane.” “Brandon, who was a New York kid, came out there and put on those Western clothes. He was just the most natural boy running around looking at the horses and the camera. He was just so real and genuine.”
Palance, who is billed as Walter Jack Palance, didn’t know much about horses — ironically, he won his best supporting actor Oscar as a cowboy in 1991’s “City Slickers” — when he arrived on set. “Dad brought him out [to Wyoming] about two weeks before he started shooting. You’d see him every day just ride on the horse and off the horse. You know how he’d mount the horse and in one case, dad reversed the film. When he was getting on the horse, it was the reversed film of him getting off. It made it just such a cat-like grace when he got on that horse.”
It’s hard to believe that Ladd, Heflin and Arthur, who hadn’t made a film in five years (“Shane” ended up being her final feature), weren’t the first choices. In fact, Stevens envisioned Montgomery Clift, whom he had just worked with the filmmaker in 1951’s “A Place in the Sun,” and William Holden as Shane and Joe respectfully. When they left for other projects, Stevens went to the Paramount studio head to see who was available and in just three minutes he chose Ladd, Heflin and Arthur.
Prior to World War II, Stevens was known for comedies such as 1943’s “The More the Merrier” with Arthur and action adventures like 1939’s “Gunga Din.” But during World War II, he was a leader of a battalion of camera crews; he recorded the Allied invasion on D-day and saw the Nazi atrocities when he was the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp. “After three years at war, he comes back and goes to a John Wayne Western, and he sees people shooting one another, falling over forward, then getting up and shooting some more because they are using six-guns like guitars,” noted Stevens Jr.
So, in the movie when Palance shoots the feisty homesteader played by Elisha Cook Jr., Stevens told his son “’For us, a gunshot is a Holocaust.’ He wanted, as he put it, to show what a single shell from a .45 can do to the human form. At that time, that was kind of unique. Westerns were just full of gunfire. Here was one where guns were fired on just three occasions.”
Stevens didn’t do much rehearsing with his cast before the cameras rolled. “Dad was just awfully good with actors. So many actors, their best roles were in his pictures. You know, Rock Hudson [in ‘Giant’]. He just knew how to take time with them. And, in the editing. He was very good at protecting actors to find their best moments and be careful not to let any of their moments where they were less genuine sneak into the picture.
Info: George Stevens Lecture on Directing: Shane” 70th anniversary screening Dec. 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the David Geffen Theatre, at the Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd., Los Angeles. For more information visit the museum’s website.
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