Retrospective Film Review

Shane (1953) • 70 Years Later

A weary gunfighter in 1880s Wyoming hopes for a quieter life in a new community, until local conflicts force him to act.

The 1950s were a pivotal decade for the western, and George Stevens’s Shane has become one of its most celebrated examples — bracketed by two others in the form of High Noon (1952) and The Searchers (1956). Bosley Crowther wrote in The New York Times at the time of Shane’s release: “With High Noon so lately among us, it scarcely seems possible that the screen should so soon again come up with another great Western film.”

It has significant elements in common with those movies, not least the important parts played by boys (though not as important in either of the others as in Shane). All three films, too, mark the way that the makers of westerns, responding in part to competition from TV, were trying to move beyond mere genre and invest their films with greater breadth or profundity of meaning. Often at this point, the new dimension was a kind of mythic heroism rather than the deliberate undermining of the heroic image found in the…