For Conservative Movie Lovers: Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and 'Shane' Part 3

One of George Stevens’ filmmaking maxims was: “The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.” Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in Shane, perhaps the most peculiarly cast A-grade Western in Hollywood history.

It all started with a memo from Paramount Studios, where the director was currently under contract: “Herewith story and treatment entitled Shane, which we would like you to consider for one of your two remaining pictures. . . This property is now being supervised by one of our studio producers, but no serious problem would be involved in re-assigning it to you, and we are prepared to do so if you like it. . .” Stevens did like it, and soon began reading both the novel and existing script, marking them up with marginal notes that contained the seeds of dialogue and shots that would go on to become immortal.

As packaged, the movie was set to star Alan Ladd, Paramount’s most popular star — only John Wayne eclipsed Ladd’s popularity in moviegoer polls during those heady years. But Stevens initially considered other options. Many of his jotted notes about the character of Shane referenced “Monty,” showing that Stevens was thinking of using Montgomery Clift, the young, tight-jawed brooder then appearing in the director’s tragic love story A Place in the Sun (1951). Gregory Peck was also in the running. Meanwhile, author Jack Schaefer wanted “a dark, deadly person” — someone more like tough-guy gangster actor George Raft — to portray his hero. For the part of Joe Starrett, the homesteader and father of the young boy, names like Broderick Crawford, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden were bandied about.

After a Clift/Holden combo fell through for budget and scheduling reasons, Stevens ended the debate by taking a look at Paramount’s listing of contract players. Within minutes, he chose Ladd for Shane, Oscar-winning character actor Van Heflin for Joe, and Jean Arthur for Marian, Joe’s wife. All three choices were risky for various reasons.

Alan Ladd was a box-office draw, yes, but as a pretty face rather than as a solid actor. Critics judged him as a lightweight, someone more famous for smiling on magazine covers than for sinking his teeth into the meat of a genuinely dramatic role. Known throughout Hollywood for his self-abasing nature, he was hardly the guy one would expect to rise to the occasion of becoming a gunslinging, two-fisted hero for the ages.

Yet Stevens, his ultimate artistic intentions fully in mind, believed Ladd could provide a shining light at the center of the storm. “You know, it’s against the formula,” he said about his choice, “but Ladd seemed to have a decency on the screen even in violent roles like this one. He always seemed to have a large measure of reserve and dignity.” It was that, and not the silky deadliness, that Stevens most wanted to carry over from Schaefer’s novel.

Unlike so many other directors, Stevens even saw Ladd’s diminutive 5’4″ stature as a cup half-full. “It was an interesting thing for the picture,” he said, “because he didn’t tower above the others — the mountains did. We kept him as high off the ground as possible so he wouldn’t be dwarfed by people.” With Ladd’s lithe, genial masculinity now defining the role, Stevens changed Shane’s black silk shirt and matching hat from the book into a buckskin outfit that toned down the character’s more sinister overtones.

Evan “Van” Heflin, like Ladd, was quiet and reserved in real life, a well-read Yale-educated man who shunned parties and kept a low profile away from the silver screen. He was, however, a more respected thespian than Ladd, having won a Best Supporting Actor academy award for 1942’s Johnny Eager. The two had much in common (both did some growing up in Oklahoma), and soon they became fast friends on the set of Shane. “Alan was a far better actor than he would ever believe himself to be,” Heflin said in an interview many years later. “As with most of us, he needed a director who could bring out the best in him. With George he had it. He was a very sensitive person and he had a terrific inferiority complex. . . Alan later said he thought Shane was a fluke. . . although actors usually go their separate ways after a movie is completed, Alan and I remained very close. God, how I loved that man!”

If hiring Alan Ladd and Van Heflin were gambles — no John Wayne drawls, no lazy cowboy strides, no history of anchoring Western movies — Stevens’ choice of Jean Arthur for the part of Joe Starrett’s pretty, careworn wife bordered on outrageous. She was an actress known primarily for urbane comedies and love stories directed by Frank Capra. Her shyness meant that even in the best of circumstances she could be difficult to work with. “You had to treat her like a child,” Stevens explained, remembering her insecurities. “She was terribly anxious about everything.”

Even more troubling was that her heyday was long behind her. By the time she was considered for Shane Arthur was over fifty years old, her hair completely gray, and she hadn’t acted in a film in years. Why hire someone like that to play a pretty wife and mother figure, when there were many younger actresses from which to choose?

Because “people are always the instrument,” as Stevens was wont to say. “She was interesting,” he believed, “because she seemed to be rising above her personality. Anytime she has a charge to make against someone or a defense of something, it always seemed that she felt herself dangerously exposed, kind of heroic in the most ordinary circumstances — even if she had to put her left hand out in traffic in order to turn.”

It was that delicate brand of heroism that he wanted the character of Marion Starrett to epitomize. With a blond wig and makeup, Stevens believed that Arthur could still pass as an attractive woman in her thirties — after all, as recently as 1950 she had managed to play Peter Pan on Broadway to great acclaim. Thus he lured Arthur out of her self-imposed Hollywood retirement for what would be her last movie (and her only one in color).

Arthur, being the only one of the main actors who had worked with Stevens before, quickly noticed the deep change in the director’s post-war personality. “He was very serious,” she recounted sadly, “No jokes. It was like I never knew him before. He wanted me to look tired and worn. . . I felt kind of sorry for him.”

The last two actors to headline the film were more conventional selections, but no less effective.

Young Brandon de Wilde (pronounced duh-WILL-duh) was the only choice for Joey. He had made his name a year earlier by stealing scenes and charming audiences in a Broadway production of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. Hailed as a child prodigy, he soon became the best-regarded boy actor of the period. Alan Ladd’s step-daughter Carol Lee recalls the “infinite patience” Stevens displayed while directing De Wilde, saying that the kid “drove all the actors a little crazy because his idea of fun was jumping up and down in the mud — splashing mud all over everyone. But George Stevens knew how to work with him.”

When famed director (and, to his credit, reformed communist) Elia Kazan directed A Streetcar Named Desire for the stage, he had Marlon Brando playing the part of Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and Anthony Quinn performing the same role in Chicago. The understudy he hired to act as their backup in case of illness was, in Kazan’s opinion, “the most menacing, the most sinister, and the most frightening Stanley Kowalski ever to appear on the stage.”

The man was an ex-coal miner and ex-boxer, tough as nails, muscular and mean-looking. His face was bony and gaunt, marred both by numerous beatings endured in the ring, as well as by reconstructive surgery due to burns received while bailing out of an Air Force training flight during World War II. His name was Jack Palance, and in hindsight, the character of Jack Wilson in Shane was the role he was born to play.

When Stevens hired him, Palance was still largely unknown — Shane was lensed between June and October of 1951, and Palance’s first Oscar nomination for his memorably ominous role in the Joan Crawford noir vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) was still a year away. But such was Palance’s presence that Stevens didn’t need to be told that he was up to the job.

Unlike some of the other actors, Palance came from the then-new and novel Method school of acting. Before each take, he would make the cast and crew wait while he went off into a corner by himself and worked his emotions up to the proper temperature, burrowing deep into the role until the character of a bloodthirsty assassin infused his very being.

Woody Allen, of all people, is a big fan of Shane, and in a New York Times piece a few years back he aptly described Palance’s priceless contribution to the picture: “If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil, it is Jack Palance. . . he’s so poetically evil. He looks like he’d gladly kill the guys who hired him if they looked at him wrong. He’s just bad news. Serpentine. In our minds, he’s set off against Shane, one particularly good, almost too good to be true, and the other is totally evil.” Allen’s right — it’s hard to imagine any other pair of actors pulling off this basic good/evil struggle in such mythic terms.

Of his director on Shane, Alan Ladd said that “I learned more about acting from that man in a few months than I had in my entire life up until then. Stevens is the best in the business. He knows exactly how to handle actors, how to relax them and win their confidence.”

That might sound like typical Hollywood butt-kissing, but go ahead: sit there at your computer and try to say some of Ladd’s now-famous lines with his combination of iron-clad conviction and mannerly grace. Try to mimic Palance’s equally famous lines with his deadly, gleeful hiss of ice-cold menace. Do that, and you’ll begin to understand what amazing acting truly is. The fact is that after Shane, neither Alan Ladd or Jack Palance would ever achieve a more perfectly tuned and modulated performance. Under the patient, guiding hand of George Stevens, the movie represents a high-water mark for the depictions of both implacable good and unfettered evil.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane“

Part 1 | Part 2

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