Shane - 1953

Shane, Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, 1953 Giclee Print
12 in. x 9 in.
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Shane (1953) is a timeless, classic western tale - a very familiar and highly regarded seminal western and the most successful Western of the 1950s. The film's rich color cinematography captures the beautiful environment of the legendary frontier (filmed on location in Jackson Hole, Wyoming) with its gray-blue Grand Tetons as a backdrop.

The screenplay was based on Jack Schaefer's successful 1949 book of the same name. The film received six Academy Awards nominations: Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Brandon de Wilde), Best Supporting Actor (Jack Palance), Best Director, Best Screenplay (by A. B. Guthrie, Jr.), and Best Color Cinematography, and won its sole Oscar award for photographer Loyal Griggs. Unbelievably, star Alan Ladd in probably his best known and realized performance, was un-nominated. Director/actor Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider (1985) paid homage to Stevens' film with a similar storyline.

Veteran director/producer George Stevens' film is often considered the second film of his "American trilogy," positioned between A Place in the Sun (1951) and Giant (1956). Stevens self-consciously fashioned this simple western into a wide-screen, Technicolored panoramic masterpiece to create a symbolic myth: the age-old story of the duel between good and evil, the advent of civilization (with families, law and order, and homesteaders) and progress into the wilderness (a world of roaming cattlemen, lawless gunslingers, and loners on horseback), a land-dispute conflict between a homesteader and cattle baron, and the coming of age of a young boy. The film is dotted with classic sequences - the uprooting of the stubborn stump in the yard, Torrey's murder in the muddy street and his hilltop funeral, and the climactic finale.