When The West Was Wild-Literally-With Alan Ladd’s Shane In Mind

When The West Was Wild-Literally-With Alan Ladd’s Shane In Mind

DVD Review

By Sam Lowell

Shane, starring Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, directed by George Stevens, 1953

Nobody, nobody at least for a long time in America, could go wrong in trying to depict what the old West, the Wild West of generations gone by, looked and felt like in song, storybook or on film. They, those who tried, usually did it in one-dimensional way, saw whatever romance could be squeezed out of their looks need not be leavened by the ugly undersides of what really happened going west to the ocean’s edge. George Stevens’ Shane fit rather nicely into that starry-eyed view of how the West was won. How certain types of men, and their “little women” brought the land under cultivation and a veneer of civilization before the deluge of modern industrial, and now post-industrial, society put its chain-link fence mark on the locale.

There are many stories about going west, and who went there but mostly those who went west were those who had run out of chances back East. Maybe the land ran out after too much indiscriminate cultivation, maybe the banks took over, maybe the song wanderlust and “streets” paved with gold proved irresistible, maybe a man or woman just got tired of being in the same place. What was known for sure though was that just like those who immigrated to the American shores from Europe those who headed west had exhausted their possibilities in the where they hailed from, felt they had to move on. Or were pushed. They could be solid citizens like hard-working homesteader Joe (played by Van Heflin), and his wife Marian or mad monk adventurers like, well, like Shane (played by Alan Ladd) but they had to have something eating them inside to wander into that deep unknown.     

Of course the lure of land, fertile, beautiful land, was great and Joe and a whole generation of Americans, those who had been around for generations or immigrants, went in search of the land being offered in the post- Civil War period. And that is where the tension comes in, one of the tensions of the westward expansion. The tension between big ranchers already there running huge herds to market for a meat-eating hungry world and homesteaders, what did they call them, yeah, pig farmers, homesteaders, “sod-busters” who were working a more subsistence type of using the land. No question the tensions were real and in the end hard to reconcile, reconcile short of a mini-civil war out on the range.    

Enter one ex-gun-fighter, or wannabe gun-fighter who was just drifting from pillar to post, just heading west and would probably wind up in Professor Turner’s land’s end, frontier’s end, California except he stopped by Joe’s place on the way west and wound up getting caught up in a small version of the range wars that plagued the West then. Of course a guy like Shane, torn between a weariness of gun-fighting which was his only stock-in-trade, and seeing the justice in the cause of those like Joe whom he came to know and respect had to choose a side, had to decide to put his money where his mouth was. In the end a stand-up guy like Shane really had no choice, no choice but to stick up for the little guys. But also no choose but to follow his trade, follow what made him Shane.     

When the historians write the history of the West there is plenty of ink spilled about guys like Joe the homesteader, hell, even Ryker the wild and wooly rancher but there also should be plenty of ink about guys like Shane who gave the place character and in a rough-hewn way did their part in civilizing those great lawless expanses before the hammer came down.