[Wilson is
trying to goad Torrey into drawing on him]
Jack
Wilson (played by Jack
Palance, pictured): “I guess they named a lot of that Southern trash
after old Stonewall.”
Frank
'Stonewall' Torrey (played
by Elisha Cook Jr.): “Who'd they name you after? Or do you
know?”
Wilson
(pulling on black
gloves to match his black hat and vest): “I'm saying that
Stonewall Jackson was trash himself. Him and Lee and all the rest of them Rebs.
You, too.”
Torrey:
“You're a low-down lyin' Yankee!”
Wilson:
“Prove it.”
[Torrey draws,
but Wilson is faster. Torrey stops, and for a split second it is quiet. Then
the explosion from Wilson’s gun resounds in the air, and Torrey is propelled
back into the mud, dead.]—Shane (1953), screenplay by A.B.
Guthrie with additional dialogue by Jack Sher, based on the novel by Jack
Schaefer, directed by George Stevens
I’ve wanted to write about Shane, among the most satisfying of westerns, for awhile now, but
the 60th anniversary of its premiere passed without my noticing it.
One would think that today, the centennial of the birth of star Alan Ladd,
would provide reason enough for a post. But I’ve never been that enamored of
the onetime Paramount idol.
The release of the movie on Blu-Ray, however, allows for a broader consideration of its virtues, particularly the importance of this pivotal shattering scene.
Critics came up with the umbrella term “American
Trilogy” to group together three films made by director George Stevens in the first half of the Fifties: A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane
(1953), and Giant (1956). That would not be a particularly helpful
label if it were merely meant to distinguish these somber postwar dramas (all
made after he was part of the U.S. Army Signal Corps unit that photographed the liberated Dachau concentration camp) from his
frothier pre-war fare of musicals and rom-coms. But the term does recognize that each of the three films examines a major
defect in American culture.
In the case of Shane,
that defect was violence and its cost to both the individual and the larger
community. That trait has long been associated by European intellectuals with
both American civilization as a whole and our first indigenous artform, the
western. D.H. Lawrence gave a highly problematic interpretation of the wider
implications of this in his essay “Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Novels,” in the British novelist’s Studies in Classic American Literature
(1923):
“Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty
in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy
was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln,
had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American
Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.”
The epitome of this in the Western (or, at least,
the early, literary version of it) was Cooper’s Deerslayer, a.k.a. Natty
Bumppo, whom Lawrence described as “A man who turns his back on white society.
A man who keeps his moral integrity hard and intact. An isolate, almost
selfless, stoic, enduring man, who lives by death, by killing, but who is pure
white.”
The shorthand that Lawrence used for Natty—“a saint
with a gun”—applies perhaps even more so to Shane. He is the mysterious
stranger come down from the mountains, eager to help the Starrett family but
not to talk about his past.
More than perhaps any other Ladd role, this one
might have been tailor-made for him. Audiences carried expectations, from his
film noir work of the prior decade (This
Gun for Hire, The Glass Key and The Blue Dahlia), of a man handy with a
gun—which, it turns out, exactly describes Shane. Moreover, Ladd's minimalist acting could
be interpreted as stoicism—the exact opposite of the central figure in the
sequence above, Wilson.
Woody Allen summed up the nature of the achievement
of then-unheralded actor in this role: “If any actor has ever created a
character who is the personification of evil, it is Jack Palance.” For a
medieval literature class, a college professor of mine, wanting to convey the
terror spread by Grendel, likened the Beowulf
monster to Wilson.
The Fifties may have been the apotheosis of the
Western on film because it was the heyday of the psychological western, a subgenre that emphasizes heightened
states of greed, jealousy, rage, and above all, fear. Shane does not have to
take a back seat even to other exceptional examples of this kind such as The Gunfighter, High Noon, The Man From
Laramie, and The Searchers, and
the treatment of Wilson demonstrates why.
This bit of dialogue I've quoted above is only part of a tense
four-minute confrontation between the villain and the hapless Torrey. (If you can put aside the annoying subtitles in this YouTube excerpt, you'll have a pretty good idea of what follows here.) It has
been more than adequately prepared for, with the homesteader, stoked on whiskey-fueled
courage, vowing to the rancher Stryker that he wouldn’t be driven away—and, in
the same saloon, with a dog moving stealthily out of the camera frame to get
out of the way of sinister Wilson, a malign presence from another realm.
Would that Torrey had shown more sense. Despite
Shane’s warning to be careful of Wilson, the proud ex-Confederate gets drawn
into a confrontation with him. We never get a close-up of Torrey, but Stevens
allows us to infer his mounting fear through the scene’s composition, with the
blustering little man caught between the taunting, black-hat-wearing stranger
and his own, sensible Swedish friend, whose call—“Torrey…Torrey…Torrey!”—has to be ignored lest he seem a coward.
And now, perhaps the most expertly choreographed,
symbolic cold-blooded killing in all of cinema follows, with Torrey gingerly stepping across and
slipping in the treacherous mud, surely aware that he is now, literally, in too
deep, as the far taller Wilson, with the sleek grace of a panther, follows him
on the dry plankboard above, closing off his path, stalking his prey. Wilson is
far physically superior to Torrey, even without a gun. The fact that Wilson has
observed the central legal nicety—letting Torrey draw first so Wilson and
Stryker can claim self-defense to the sheriff—doesn’t change the fact that we
are not watching a shootout but an execution.
The tension building for the entire scene, starting
with the ominous thunder and darkening sky, now ends with a sickening sound and
sight—the loud report of Wilson’s gun, followed by Torrey’s sudden jerk
backward (accomplished by a harness-and-pulley underneath actor Elisha Cook Jr.’s
outfit that yanked him six feet back). “You know, the one thing I wanted to do
with Shane,” the director recalled some years
later, “was to show if you point a .45 at a man and pull the trigger, you
destroy an upright figure.” It’s
impossible to imagine anyone watching this scene without being jolted, with
their perspective on every subsequent action in the film from here on
drastically changed—including Warren Beatty, who, more than a decade later,
consulted with the veteran director to see how he could pull off something
similar with Bonnie and Clyde.
Stevens had balanced this technical gizmo with some
human sleight-of-hand. Just before the scene was shot, he took Cook aside and
hissed, “You know, I've got you eight weeks on the picture, and I'm stuck with
you. You're the worst actor I ever saw in my life bar none.” This piece of
manipulation, along with the mud Stevens made the actor walk through, got the
director what he wanted: fear and fierce anger, the
combination that gets Torrey killed.
A monster like Wilson of nearly mythic proportions
requires a hero of similar epic qualities. But gunfighting takes something out
of a man—if not his life, then his soul. There is some debate whether, in the
film’s great ending, Shane is riding off away from the Starrett house and into
the mountains to die from his wound in the gunfight with Wilson and his
confederates. In one sense, it doesn’t matter—if he doesn’t die here, he’ll die
someplace else, profoundly alone and removed from the community he’s permitted
to live through his own self-sacrifice.
There’s nothing in the slightest romantic about
Torrey’s miserable murder in the mud, anymore than there is in Shane’s last
explanation for his nomadic career and sudden departure to the little boy who’s
grown to worship him:
“Joey, there's no living with... with a killing.
There's no going back from one. Right or wrong, it's a brand. A brand sticks.
There's no going back.”
A brand…a mark of Cain, making its wearer an outcast
in the community he wishes he could join. In George Stevens’ frontier America,
the “winner” of a gunfight gains nothing but isolation—and, perhaps, the satisfaction
that he has rid the world of a menace to all order and goodness.
