175: Shane (with Chris Cassingham)

Junk Filter

The Milwaukee-based film critic and programmer Chris Cassingham joins the show this week to discuss the great director George Stevens and his 1953 masterpiece Shane, starring Alan Ladd and Jack Palance, about a mysterious gunfighter who finds work with a homestead family in the open range of lawless Wyoming and is drawn into the community’s conflict against a gang of violent cattleranchers who are trying to take over the territory.

George Stevens’ life was transformed by his service in World War II as part of the military’s Special Motion Picture Coverage Unit, bearing witness to D-Day and the liberation of the Nazi death camps, and he returned to Hollywood to become one of the great American dramatic filmmakers with his unofficial fifties trilogy of A Place in the Sun, Giant, and this immortal western that serves both as a classic example of the genre and as a revisionist “psychological western” that questioned heroism, masculinity, the family unit and most importantly, the horror and the toll of gun violence on American life, a work that pushed cinema in the fifties forward towards the modern age, and is cited by some of today’s great directors as a key influence.

Plus: on the eve of the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, a discussion of what was once billed as Hugh Jackman’s final performance as the character in 2017’s Logan, a film that pays explicit (and in our opinion unearned) tribute to Shane.

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Follow Chris Cassingham on Twitter and catch up to Chris' film writing here.

Re-release trailer for Shane (George Stevens, 1953)