Back in the summer of 1951, Jackson, Wyoming was a sleepy town nestled amidst a vast untamed wilderness, and George Stevens was there in the valley shooting a film called Shane. To maintain as much creative control as possible, he acted as both Producer and Director.
“I personally like to see films that are the work of as singular a consciousness as possible,” Stevens explained about his decision to do two exhausting and difficult jobs at once. But as with everything, there was a price to be paid. “It’s like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time. You need an executive head to handle all the vast paraphernalia of moviemaking. You need another, more sensitive head to get the delicate human emotional values you are trying to put on film.”
The making of Shane, then — indeed, the making of most great films — is largely a tale of an artist using all of his powers and guile and energy to bend the technology and the paraphernalia to the arduous task of making those delicate emotional values come to life on an empty screen.
*****
The opening of Shane. A little boy, played by young Brandon De Wilde, stalks a large-horned buck with an unloaded rifle. The buck is startled by something in the distance, looks up — and there, poised right between its antlers, is a distant horseman lazily riding toward us.
You are George Stevens, there on the ground in Jackson Hole one morning, with dozens of cast and crew waiting around for you to decide how to capture such an image. What do you do?
“I sent out and got a little elk and a couple of bucks with big spreads,” says Stevens.
We lined it up and then worked with this buck to have him in the foreground; we had some dry stuff or weed up there that he went after a few times. We rehearsed with Alan Ladd and got Ladd back — he’s going to move along at a signal — then we moved the camera over to where the buck was grazing. There’s a fella out there, hidden back in Ladd’s direction just out of frame, with a bucket and some rocks in it. During the take the fella shook the rocks; it sounded a little bit like rain. Once we did it and the buck looked toward the rocks. We took it again, the buck stayed right there with his good downtown hay (it’s unusual for him), and on cue, a silent cue, we watched this rider come along.
And it was a coincidence, the horn was right in the middle — it was awful good. So I decided to shoot the works, since I was going to get lucky. I kept it quiet, let the animal graze, got Alan all the way back there, silent signal for him to start on, silent signal for the camera, he’s coming on and pretty soon we call up the cue for the buck. Not quite. A little more cue. He looks up, and Alan is right between the antlers.
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And that, more often than not, is how movie magic happens. “Three takes,” says Stevens. “You’re either going to get it or you’re not going to get it. There’s no use persisting; it just had to work that way.”
*****
Fifty-five minutes into Shane. A boy, learning how to shoot a weapon for the first time, asks the man he idolizes to show him how it’s done. “What do you want me to shoot at?” asks the man. The boy glances around. “The little white rock over there, see?”
You’re George Stevens, thinking about World War II as you make this Western. Above all, you’re keen to convey to a somewhat innocent audience the notion that “A gunshot. . . is a holocaust. It’s not a gesture of bravado, it’s death.” What do you do?
“The effect on the audience was much greater than normal,” says Stevens, justifiably proud of his solution. To start, he increased the power of this scene by deliberately muting the power of all the scenes previous. “I very carefully kept gunshots out of it up until that point,” he says of the film’s opening hour, “to make the first one more emphatic.”
Then he leveraged the full power of editing, taking what had been a fairly leisurely paced movie and suddenly assaulting the audience with a half-dozen shots in rapid, machine-gun succession:
Shane draws!
The boy grimaces as the blast rocks his ears!
The boy’s mother, watching from the fence, gasps in horror!
The rock bounces toward us low on the ground, with Shane standing tall in the background, shrouded by gunsmoke!
The boy gapes, eyes wide!
And as the smoke clears, and the gunshot echo fades away among the mountains of the Teton Range, and the farm’s chickens clatter in fear, Shane’s strangely meditative face comes into view, in deep contemplation of and respect for the power of his weapon.
Six shots in as many seconds, a pace that leaves the audience as breathless and impressed as the boy.
But even that wasn’t enough. “In most Westerns,” Stevens complained, “you know, people are shooting off guns all the time, until you don’t even notice it anymore. I wanted people to be really jolted out of their seats the first time Shane uses his gun.” And so decades before surround sound became the norm, Stevens decided to do what he could to bring off the same type of sonic grandeur using comparatively primitive 1950s monaural speakers. “We took the pistol sound out,” he says, “and put in the sound of an eight-inch howitzer canon, alongside a rifle shot. So it had the highs of the rifle shot and the expanding boom of the howitzer.”
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If you talk to old-timers who saw Shane in the theater in 1953, you’ll often hear them remembering the sheer power and impressiveness of those gunshots. The effect was wonderful. As Big Hollywood commenter “blueunicorn6” said a few weeks back, “The gunshots really rock you. I think Stevens wanted those shots to be loud.”
Yep.
*****
“If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil,” says filmmaker Woody Allen, “it is Jack Palance.” It’s not too much to say that his portrayal of Jack Wilson in Shane ranks right up alongside such quietly venomous portrayals as Bela Lugosi in Dracula (1931), Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter (1955), Henry Fonda in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and Ralph Fiennes in Schindler’s List (1993). That he manages to make such an unforgettable mark in a relative handful of scenes makes his achievement all the more impressive (perhaps only Neville Brand in the 1950 noir classic D.O.A. has managed to create a similar gleeful maleficence using even less screen time).
You’re George Stevens, looking over at Jack Palance, who is over in the corner practicing his quick draw technique and quietly hissing his lines to himself, getting into his character Method-style. You know that this largely unknown actor somehow has to measure up to Alan Ladd, one of the world’s most popular movie personalities. With much less screen time in which to operate, Palance has to be as much a villain as Shane is a hero, absolutely terrifying in his deadly skills and sinister potentialities. The crew is getting impatient as the sun rises, waiting for you to tell them how to setup the day’s first shot.
What do you do?
Stevens, as it happened, decided to break all the rules. Most movies show a major villain cantering into town on a towering black charger, with quivering mothers shuttering windows as the little ones hide in their petticoats and their men look down at their shoes in shame. In contrast, the director of Shane makes his town look deserted as Palance rides down a muddy street on a horse specially picked to be too small for the actor. The animal almost creeps as it walks, as if it is trying to be quiet with each step, and the effect is subtly grotesque, a kind of dark mirror image of when Shane majestically came down from the mountains in the beginning of the film. “He’s just bad news,” says Woody Allen about that shot. “Serpentine.”
Then Stevens has Palance enter the local tavern, and in the middle of his walking toward the camera, for no apparent reason, he does an odd dissolve, showing Palance fade away from the background and reappear in the foreground.
“It’s one of the most puzzling dissolves I’ve ever seen,” Allen admits. “I can’t imagine what it was for. It must have been to cover up a mistake. I can’t think of any other reason for it.”
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I can — the effect turns Palance into more than a mere man. He becomes a baleful specter possessing the power to almost disappear and reappear at will.
Stevens takes this idea further in a later scene when Shane and his nemesis are sizing each other up while the other protagonists argue a few feet away. One of our FCML commenters, “nolotrippen,” pointed this out after our first installment of this series, when he marveled at how “Shane (Alan Ladd) just watching the evil Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) getting on his horse in the background while the main conversation between other characters goes on is one of the most masterful scenes ever. Very little happens, yet it shows volumes about the hero and the villain.” Another regular in our comments section, “LBOscarMayer,” added, “That hesitation thing that Jack Palance does — where he stops for a moment in mid air — while getting on his horse is mesmerizing! Whoever came up with that — genius!”
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As it turns out, the man who came up with how to get Palance to mount his horse like a creepy ballerina was George Stevens. Remember, Stevens spent years filming slapstick comedies with geniuses like Laurel and Hardy, and many of the old tricks they used decades earlier were still in his mental toolbox. Specifically, he remembered how they were able to achieve all sorts of interesting physical effects in the old days by first performing certain actions in reverse order and then playing the film backwards through the projector.
So for this scene in Shane, he asked Palance to first get off his horse, swinging his leg out wide and taking his sweet time lowering himself down, using the vastly improved control gravity gives you when you lower yourself down instead of push yourself up. Then he had the film printed backwards in post-production. The result in the final film is Palance seeming to get on his horse in an eerie, almost impossibly muscular fashion, pushing his body up with his leg without a hint of the quivering or weakness that would usually accompany such a feat. As our commenter said, it’s “mesmerizing,” and becomes yet another sign of the villain’s preternatural powers of malevolence.
*****
But above all, audiences remember Palance in the famous scene with actor Elisha Cook Jr., taunting and bullying him from the plank walkway, his every movement sleek and graceful as a shark drifting in for the kill, while Cook’s character slides and stumbles in the mud, hopelessly outmatched. Grim peals of thunder echo across the plain as the sun glows wanly through grey clouds, as if nature itself knows that death is in the air.
All of those details weren’t in the book, nor were they serendipitous uses of things Mother Nature gave him to work with. Every bit was dreamed up by Stevens.
If you’re the director, how do you pull it all off?
Cook remembers Stevens stalking around the town set on the night before the scene was to be shot, thinking through the logistics. In the morning, he ordered the entire street sprayed down with water until the dirt became a sea of treacherous mud. The dreary atmosphere was made by having the lab print the film a bit dark, and the thunder was added in post-production by the sound editors.
Stevens also worked over Cook himself to get him in the proper mindset. “He called me aside,” the actor remembered. “He said, ‘You know, I’ve got you eight weeks on the picture, and I’m stuck with you. You’re the worst ac tor I ever saw in my life bar none’.” One can imagine the feelings of fear and anger that coursed through Cook’s mind upon getting this awful news. “What are you gonna say?” Cook said, thinking back on how he was snookered. “You don’t say anything. What are you gonna do?” Only after everything was shot did Cook learn the truth: “He wanted me terrified and not terrified.”
When it was time for Cook to bite the dust, Stevens’ technical adviser told him that men who are killed with a single shot fall forward. But just like with Shane’s first use of a gun, Stevens wanted Palance’s first draw to be just as memorable. So once again, he relied on an old Laurel and Hardy gag. “Let’s put him on a wire!” Cook remembers Stevens exclaiming. “So, under that curious outfit I had on, they had me wired [with a harness], and when [Wilson’s] gun went off it pulled me six feet through the air and into the mud.”
After the scene was shot, the ornery director who had treated Cook so badly let down his mask, and Cook realized that it had all been to make the scene work. “You dumb son of a bitch!” Stevens said to him with a broad smile. “That’s what happens to you when you stand up for a principle!”
*****
“Pa’s got things for you to do! And mother wants you! I know she does! Shane! Shaaaaane! Come baaaack!”
The most famous scene in the film, and one of the most memorable endings in film history. No one who sees it ever forgets it.
How does one craft such a wonderful conclusion? It’s not taken verbatim from the book, and Stevens pointedly leaves much of its subtext to the viewer’s imagination. The strange expressions of the little boy as he watches his hero ride away are left unexplained. We aren’t sure if the last shot of Shane, his left arm sort of dangling at his side as his horse canters through the graveyard and into the mountains, means that he is dying, or is just overcome with a weariness of the soul.
There comes a point in talking about this stuff when the usual anecdotes and stories are wholly inadequate to the task of answering such a question. The creative choices become so numerous, instinctive, and intertwined with the threads of the rest of the film — the poetic brushstrokes so fine and variegated — that all you can do is sit back in awe and shake your head in appreciation.
In her critical biography Giant: George Stevens, A Life on Film, Marilyn Ann Moss tells how, late in life, Stevens sat in on a screening of Shane with some students at a university, and gave a sort of running commentary to what was up on the screen. The transcript of his remarks is a rambling stream of consciousness that comes as close as anything to understanding how much focused, brilliant creativity goes into making an ending like that. I quote at length:
I notice in taking it apart [that] there’s very little unity to the film as shot; because there are so many different pieces. They’re inside the saloon with a variety of shots around the room, and the reverse angle shot, and the boy’s face coming under the door — all shot in the studio; then, outside there is the shot where Shane is sitting on a horse and the boy is talking to him — shot on location, so he can leave the front of the saloon. There, again, is the camera around from Shane’s point of view into the boy’s face, taken in the studio at another time — sometime after the work that was done in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Then there’s the shot, shooting up at Shane on the horse, seated in the saddle in front of the saloon. And then a strange “Ring-around-the-rosy” business in which Shane leaves the front of the saloon and heads toward the back of the saloon from another angle, then back to the front of the saloon when the boy comes around the end of the saloon, heading toward the Teton Peaks, the Grand Teton in the background there, at the right time, when the cloud happened to be with us, with a long focal-length lens to give the mountains some structure and some height — because it’s a grand thing, with the horse moving into the distance.
Then the boy coming around the building — a wide angle shot; then a reverse angle with the boy in the foreground and the horse in the middle distance going away toward the Tetons; and then around for what became the major aspect of the scene — the boy’s face. . . as he sees he’s not convincing Shane. Further shots with the camera now moved away from the saloon, following the horse and rider — it’s the horse and rider and the mountain. The same shot on the boy, back into his face, and, eventually Joey weakens — having the first experience in his life when something really doesn’t work his way — when he realizes Shane is not coming back. And his spirit dims a little bit and he grows up a lot. . . and then in the far distance, Shane going away. . . then back into Joey’s life with him looking rather bewildered and somewhat wiser. And then we’re way up in the mountain looking back as Shane comes toward us, going into his never-never-world, whatever that might be. And there’s a distant landscape below, where the farmers were, where we spent the hours of our adventure with them, and so to fadeout.
As we can see, it breaks up into quite a bit of work as far as shooting is concerned. It has to do with a variety of the aspects of the view that [gives it] an immediacy and a kind of continuity. And also, hopefully, in editing, a graceful relationship of scenes, so that the relationship of one shot isn’t repetitious with the following shot, but a great difference of relationship of size of figure. The size of the figure in one shot being small and diminu tive with the horse going away, then the face of the boy being immediate and close, which gives a kind of charge to the editing of the film.
All of that highly thoughtful creativity, made up of equal amounts of technique, craft, and artistry, and combining Stevens’ varied decisions about focal lengths, music, pacing, composition, light, shot selection — the works. And all for what?
For what was expressed recently by Big Hollywood commenter “IMCONSERVATIVE,” who says “I saw it for the first time over 40 years ago on TV and cried at the end. Now, 40+ years later, and having seen it several times over the years, I still cry at the end.”
Stevens would have loved to hear that, even as he sighed in exhaustion. “You have a Grand Central Station atmosphere around you,” he said wearily of being a director, “and in all that wilderness of people and machinery perhaps the only thing you are trying to record is a small boy, crying goodbye. With all that organization you feel you ought to be filming a battlefield. You have to squeeze so much grapefruit — to get so little juice.”
Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane“
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