For Conservative Movie Lovers: Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and 'Shane' Part 7

When Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane first appeared in France, the translator did a curious thing: he snuck Brandon De Wilde’s famous movie line “Shane! Come back!” into the text. That bit, of course, never appeared in the novel. But the fact that the unethical (aw heck, let’s be generous and downgrade the charge to “impish”) translator felt obliged to include it, either by himself or on orders from his editors, speaks volumes about the power of George Stevens’ cinematic version of the tale.

shane_wilson_face_off

“As far as the favorites of my own films,” George Stevens said late in life, “I have a warm spot in my heart for Shane. It was enormously satisfactory to me from many standpoints. . . We were attempting something on more than one level, more than just the surface level. That’s where a film gets most interesting to me, with those aspects of it that are somewhat hidden, the secondary and third levels of interest.”

Shane is a myth, with all the grandeur and thematic sweep that the term demands. It revealed itself as such even at the beginning, back when it was just a pulp story written by a harried newspaperman who had never been out west. It became even more so when re-interpreted by a Hollywood director haunted by memories of the Holocaust, who was himself aided by a group of actors with a variety of talents and backgrounds, a cinematographer with thirty years in the Tinseltown trenches, and a musician taught in Europe by men who themselves had sat at the feet of Tchaikovsky. All of these people came together to craft a tale that digs deep into our collective psyches, stirring up ghosts from ancient layers of cultural sediment. This was clearly apparent to movie reviewers in 1953. “A homeless cowboy St. George slays the homesteaders’ evil dragon,” said Look magazine when Shane appeared, while Life titled its review “Galahad of the West.”

This patina Shane has acquired — the aura of True Art — tends to bother folks who feel superior to the simple (not easy, but simple) purity of its message and worldview. Pauline Kael found Shane‘s mythmaking tiresome, calling the picture “overplanned and uninspired; the Western was better before it became so self-importantly self-conscious.” To answer those charges I turn to the great Swedish filmologist Harry Schein, who in his essay on Shane titled “The Olympian Cowboy” explained that, “Folklore demands a rigid form. If one is to feel the power of the gods, repetition is required. It is precisely the rigid form in the Western which gives the contents mythological weight and significance.” Anyone who has studied the “rigid form” of old myths and tall tales knows this to be abundantly true.

One of the reasons that even many old B-Westerns remain popular with audiences is that they adhere to these tenets and recapitulate that sense of early American morality. “The genre has produced several good and many bad films,” Schein admits, “but even the stuttering priest can speak about God.” We are a culture starved for both heroes and for priests willing to preach about them, and so many of us find ourselves renting old low-budget horse operas from Netflix in an almost pathetic attempt to fill that gaping hole in our souls.

shane_boy

For others, it’s not just the repetitive form of the Western that galls, it’s the message. In his Foreword to the critical edition of Shane, Marc Simmons tells how the picture was perceived by some college kids during the intellectual doldrums of the counterculture Seventies:

I recall attending a showing of Shane twenty-five years after its release, during a film classic series on a university campus. I was not surprised that it now appeared a bit dated and that some of its original luster had faded. But I was wholly unprepared for the reaction of the young audience. Throughout, they laughed at serious moments, jeered at Shane’s deference toward women, and hooted at Bob’s open admiration for his hero. Without making too much of that single incident, it seems to me at the very least that some of our youth have capitulated to the doctrine that the world is without serious purpose, chaos is our destiny, and serious thought is a pointless exercise in futility.

Sadly, it wasn’t just the youths — even Shane‘s author, Jack Schaefer, succumbed to this disease in his dotage. Using books, speeches, interviews and essays, the old writer began publicly repudiating what he had come to see as the simplistic and misguided worldview espoused in his famous novel. Specifically condemning the righteous violence once depicted with pride, he went on to embrace a PETA-style morality based on the notion that humanity is a poison ruining planet Earth for all the little animals.

shane_latent_violence

Against all of this lukewarm nihilism stands Shane, a genie that Schaefer and the rest, despite their best efforts, could never force back into the bottle. A fictional hero rendered so real by George Stevens and Company that, to millions of Americans, he’s as inspirational as if he’d really lived. A mythic figure who teaches stark lessons about violence and right that many find uncomfortable. Woody Allen, of all people, once praised the film along just those lines:

Shane doesn’t want to get back into gunfighting. He’s been trying the whole movie to put it behind him. But he knows that the only way to put an end to the violence in the valley is for him to do it. That’s what makes the film great in my eyes. He knows. He’s got to go in there and kill them. And sometimes in life — it’s such an ugly truth — there is no other way out of a situation but you’ve got to go in there and kill them. Very few of us are brave enough or have the talent to do it. The world is full of evil, and rationalized evil and evil out of ignorance, and there are times when that evil reaches the level of pure evil, like Jack Palance, and there is no other solution but to go in there and kill them.

That is exactly the lesson George Stevens took away from his experiences at Dachau, and that countless generations have learned in places less cloistered than the typical American university. One of the most valuable aspects of great myths is the beauty and poetry they bring to the telling of these hard, necessary truths. Author and Japanese film historian Donald Ritchie put it best to my mind, when he wrote of Shane that “Stevens knows what it means for a romantic to lose his romanticism. In this and in other of his later films he chooses to show us the post-romantic individual through the eyes of characters themselves romantic, and then to record the painful awakening to the real world which is the lot of all of us, if we live long enough.”

shane_riding_mountains

Shane was George Stevens’ only Western. Only one was needed. Right there, in a single story, he managed to gather together all the elements of Western myth and build a gateway to truths largely lost on a generation of Americans. Campus radicals can jeer at the way Shane treats women, or the sincerity with which a little boy worships his violent hero. Pseudo-sophisticates can bemoan the everlasting formula in Westerns that sees the good guys win, the bad guys get what’s coming to them, and Gaia’s fragile ecosystem choked by tendrils of gunsmoke. But truth always wins out in the end. As book critic Orville Prescott wrote when reviewing one of Schaefer’s later novels, “There is no escaping the cowboy myth. . . As long as our country survives, the cowboy myth will survive too.”

This concludes our seven-part look at one of the greatest of America’s Western myths, Shane. Come back next Saturday for a look at an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

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

For Conservative Movie Lovers: Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and 'Shane' Part 7

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

COMMENTS