Shane Review

Stevens shot this in the Grand Tetons with the camera low and the mountains always present, and Loyal Griggs won an Academy Award for photography that treats the valley as a promise the settlers cannot quite hold. The film is deliberately mythic. Alan Ladd is short and slight and Stevens uses that, dressing him in pale buckskin against Palance in black so the two men read as symbols before they read as people.

The famous saloon killing of Elisha Cook Jr is still shocking because Stevens rigged wires to yank the body backwards, making a pistol shot feel like an act of physics. Jean Arthur, in her last film, plays the wife's divided feeling with more restraint than the script asks for. The problem is Joey. Brandon deWilde is asked to carry the audience viewpoint and the writing gives him nothing but wide eyed adoration, so a film about moral cost keeps stopping to be admired by a child. The final call across the rocks is iconic anyway.