Today’s movie: Shane

In this 1953 Academcy Award nominated film, Alan Ladd plays the loner who walks in and saves the day. George Steven’s Shane is considered one of the quintessential movie westerns pitting ranchers against homesteaders in 1880s Wyoming. This could be simplistic but reaches deep to make the bad guy understandable–although the rancher is shown ordering murders he also gets an excellent speech explaining how he came to his position–and brilliantly uses a young boy to focus us tightly on Ladd’s stoic hero. Hollywood gets its material from elsewhere and in the case of most westerns, that source was Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian who argued that the continuously receeding western frontier was the central story of America in the 19th century.