“It’s a Wonderful Life” (1946) began as a short story called “The Greatest Gift.” Pennsylvania-born writer Philip Van Doren Stern, who said that the heartwarming tale had come to him in a dream, was unable to sell it to a publisher, so he sent the story out as a long Christmas card to friends. His agent subsequently sold the fable to RKO pictures, where it went through several transformations.

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In one version a losing political candidate contemplated suicide, only to have an angel convince him to stick around and do good works. Finally it fell into the hands of director Frank Capra, who said it was the story he had been looking for all his life. He purchased it to be the first project for his new venture, Liberty Films (started by Capra in 1945 along with Producer Samuel J. Briskin, and directors William Wyler and George Stevens). With movie attendance booming during the Second World War II, a new independent film company for big name directors seemed like a can’t-miss idea.

Capra had long been an admirer of Amadeo Pietro Giannini, the founder of the Bank of Italy in 1904, renamed the Bank of America in 1928. Giannini earned a reputation for lending money to people other financial institutions had considered bad risks, including immigrants whose property had been destroyed by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. A.P. only required a handshake and was proud to say later that he was always paid back. Giannini also believed strongly in the hopes and dreams of some of the street merchants who gravitated into the fledgling film industry, and put his bank’s money behind their ventures.

Based on Giannini, Capra’s 1932 drama, “American Madness,” told the story of a bank president (Walter Huston) who makes lending decisions based more on character than collateral, which causes his board of directors to try and ruin him. The money man is bailed by his less well-to-do friends,who personally benefited from his past generosity. A movie about a bank run had proved too topical to be a big hit in 1932; now, fourteen years later, “It’s a Wonderful Life” would allow Capra to once again tackle a similar theme.

To play the unassuming savings and loan clerk in “Wonderful Life,” Capra wanted Jimmy Stewart, who had previously worked with him in “You Can’t Take It With You” (1938) and “Mr. Smith Goes To Washington” (1939). Coming back from World War II, the 37-year-old Stewart was no longer the easy going man-about-town he had been in the thirties. The former Academy Award winner for “The Philadelphia Story” (1940) had led a thousand men on bombing missions in the European theater in hard-to-maneuver B-24s. The loud plane engines damaged Jim’s hearing; in later years when people would greet him in public he would sometimes fail to respond. Some would mistake his partial deafness for a cold personality.

Stewart had displayed a great sense of humor when he’d first been inducted into the army; his salary had dropped from the hefty $1,500 a week he was being paid by MGM Studios to twenty-one dollars a month, and he earned his keep as a Buck Private whose duties included peeling potatoes. Upon receiving his first payment Jim immediately sent a check for $2.10 to his agent.

The actor was uncertain after five years away from the screen whether he still wanted to be in the movies; his life in the military at times made him feel like his old profession was insignificant. In 1943, when Stewart had tried to stay in one the best hotels in Madrid, he was turned away because he was an actor. Jim returned back to the military base, changed into his Lieutenant Colonel’s uniform, returned to the resort and was allowed to stay.

“Frank called me one day and said, ‘I have an idea for a movie, why don’t you come over and I’ll tell you?’ So I went over and we sat down and he said, ‘This picture starts in heaven’. That shook me.” James Stewart

When he returned to Southern California in 1945, Stewart took things easily. He refused to re-sign with MGM, despite tearful requests to do so from Metro’s hammy head honcho Louis B. Mayer. Like many World War II veterans, Jim had trouble sleeping and would instinctively duck down whenever a plane would fly overhead. He was content to spend time flying kites, building model planes and going bobcat hunting with Henry Fonda. Fonda had also been up for the George Bailey role; the two war veterans remained lifelong friends despite political differences which had once caused a fistfight between them in 1947. The liberal Fonda and conservative Stewart had promised, and kept their word, never to discuss politics again.

When Frank Capra made his pitch Stewart looked bored, out of it, which caused the director to lose confidence. “Well Jim, it’s about a savings and loan clerk who wants to commit suicide. There’s an angel named Clarence who shows him what life would have been like without him… aw forget it, it’s a stupid idea.” Capra was turning to leave when Stewart put his hand on his shoulder. “Frank, if you want me, I’m your man.” At least that’s how the film’s publicists told it.

“I can remember when nobody believed an actor and didn’t care what he believed.” –Lionel Barrymore

In Part 2 (which publishes tomorrow), we learn why “It’s a Wonderful Life” star Jimmy Stewart fought a bad case of nerves while shooting the film and how director Frank Capra got along with his dictatorial studio boss.

Joan Fontaine, Rebecca, 1940.

In 1939, Joan Fontaine, twenty-one years old, was slowly making her way up the Hollywood ladder. MGM signed Fontaine to play a small part in the high profile production The Women, directed by George Cukor, starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, Rosalind Russell and Paulette Goddard. For the young actress it was a plum assignment.

At the same time, Fontaine was subject to numerous tests for the star-making role of the second Mrs. De Winter for David O. Selznick’s Rebecca, first under the direction of John Cromwell and then Alfred Hitchcock. Screen tests are grueling and the emotional toll is devastating. During this period of her life Fontaine’s nerves were seriously frayed.

Fontaine and her sister Olivia de Havilland lived in the same house in North Hollywood with their domineering mother Lilian, a failed actress. As always, Joan and Olivia were engaged in a low-intensity conflict, which continues tot his very day. And like so many Hollywood actresses, Fontaine’s father was long gone.

Fontaine freely admits that she had a thing for older men. Ambitious but deeply vulnerable the young woman was looking for security and a “protector.”

She already had a brief affair with her childhood idol, the handsome leading man Conrad Nagel. Her description of their first intimacy is less than passionate:

The whole experience had been no more than a quick surgical violation conducted with considerable modesty and no conversation. It reminded me of the time when I had to stand up in class as a child and be vaccinated. This just wasn’t as neat… and hurt more. Yet I was smugly pleased that I could now consider myself an adult.

Fontaine’s clinical detachment is best understood in context. She just wrapped production on Gunga Din. Her role was small, but her dewy innocence left an indelible impression on producers and directors. Fontaine confesses that during production she girlishly day-dreamed about her director, George Stevens, another older man.

Enter Brian Aherne, a respected British stage actor making a name for himself in Hollywood. He was charming, handsome and of course older.

Quick as a jump-cut, Fontaine and Aherne were engaged. But the night before the wedding, Aherne’s friend, director Jean Negulesco, called Joan and told her that Brian had cold feet and wanted to call off the wedding. Unwilling to be publicly humiliated Fontaine told Negulesco that she would be at the church at the appointed time. Brian could take it from there. If he wanted to divorce her the next day, he could.

Joan Fontaine and Brian Aherne.

Aherene did show up and the unhappy couple pronounced their wedding vows.

In addition to the emotional dysfunction Fontaine recently had a wisdom tooth extracted. Her jaw was swollen and aching. Aherne’s sinuses were acting up.

Right after the wedding reception, the newlyweds drove in Aherne’s light blue Packard convertible to San Francisco’s swanky Fairmont Hotel, without ever discussing Negulesco’s midnight phone call.

In her fine memoir, No Bed of Roses, Fontaine describes the honeymoon:

After ordering champagne and dinner, we both changed our clothes, I into a white lace-trimmed negligee, Brian into a navy-blue-and-red patterned dressing gown. He hoped I’d excuse the worn elbows; he’d ordered a new robe from his tailor in London, but it  would take months to deliver. After a knock at the door, our dinner was served in our suite by a bevy of unctuous waiters. The door finally closed on the embarrassed newlyweds, the thirty-seven-year-old groom, the twenty-one-year-old bride.

During dinner, perhaps to conceal his apprehension, Brian recounted his previous romance with Marlene Dietrich, his affection for her daughter Maria. He got up from the table to illustrate ballet steps he taught the child, having learned then while going to the Italia Conti Drama School in London. He asked me if I would object if he took Maria out one night a week. Pulling myself together, I replied, “No, not if I can go out with Conrad Nagel on those nights.” He never mentioned it again, though Marlene called him several times during our marriage to ask his advice about her daughter.

With Brian pirouetting about the room, his dressing gown flapping, its tassels waving in the air, I grew increasingly numb. The foghorns in the bay hooted their melancholy warning, the plaintive sounds I remembered from my childhood.

Finally, closing the bedroom door behind us, Brian said he wished he’d remembered to pack a hot-water bottle for his sinuses. I could have used an ice bag on my aching cheek. The lights were turned out. Somewhere, from the cornice of the hotel room, I felt, Mother was watching.

During the night, I rose quietly, slipped on my negligee, and went into the adjoining room. I huddled on a marble window ledge and watched the fog whirl past our Nob Hill aerie. Brian found me asleep there in the early morning. Mrs. Aherne had a wedding night not to remember.

The honeymoon was definitely over.

Fontaine went on to win the first of her three Best Actress Academy Awards for Rebecca. Aherne’s career went cold as their marriage. They finally divorced in 1945.

Sisters Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland.

“As far as the favorites of my own films,” George Stevens said late in life, “I have a warm spot in my heart for Shane. It was enormously satisfactory to me from many standpoints. . . We were attempting something on more than one level, more than just the surface level. That’s where a film gets most interesting to me, with those aspects of it that are somewhat hidden, the secondary and third levels of interest.”

Shane is a myth, with all the grandeur and thematic sweep that the term demands. It revealed itself as such even at the beginning, back when it was just a pulp story written by a harried newspaperman who had never been out west. It became even more so when re-interpreted by a Hollywood director haunted by memories of the Holocaust, who was himself aided by a group of actors with a variety of talents and backgrounds, a cinematographer with thirty years in the Tinseltown trenches, and a musician taught in Europe by men who themselves had sat at the feet of Tchaikovsky. All of these people came together to craft a tale that digs deep into our collective psyches, stirring up ghosts from ancient layers of cultural sediment. This was clearly apparent to movie reviewers in 1953. “A homeless cowboy St. George slays the homesteaders’ evil dragon,” said Look magazine when Shane appeared, while Life titled its review “Galahad of the West.”

This patina Shane has acquired — the aura of True Art — tends to bother folks who feel superior to the simple (not easy, but simple) purity of its message and worldview. Pauline Kael found Shane’s mythmaking tiresome, calling the picture “overplanned and uninspired; the Western was better before it became so self-importantly self-conscious.” To answer those charges I turn to the great Swedish filmologist Harry Schein, who in his essay on Shane titled “The Olympian Cowboy” explained that, “Folklore demands a rigid form. If one is to feel the power of the gods, repetition is required. It is precisely the rigid form in the Western which gives the contents mythological weight and significance.” Anyone who has studied the “rigid form” of old myths and tall tales knows this to be abundantly true.

One of the reasons that even many old B-Westerns remain popular with audiences is that they adhere to these tenets and recapitulate that sense of early American morality. “The genre has produced several good and many bad films,” Schein admits, “but even the stuttering priest can speak about God.” We are a culture starved for both heroes and for priests willing to preach about them, and so many of us find ourselves renting old low-budget horse operas from Netflix in an almost pathetic attempt to fill that gaping hole in our souls.

For others, it’s not just the repetitive form of the Western that galls, it’s the message. In his Foreword to the critical edition of Shane, Marc Simmons tells how the picture was perceived by some college kids during the intellectual doldrums of the counterculture Seventies:

I recall attending a showing of Shane twenty-five years after its release, during a film classic series on a university campus. I was not surprised that it now appeared a bit dated and that some of its original luster had faded. But I was wholly unprepared for the reaction of the young audience. Throughout, they laughed at serious moments, jeered at Shane’s deference toward women, and hooted at Bob’s open admiration for his hero. Without making too much of that single incident, it seems to me at the very least that some of our youth have capitulated to the doctrine that the world is without serious purpose, chaos is our destiny, and serious thought is a pointless exercise in futility.

Sadly, it wasn’t just the youths — even Shane’s author, Jack Schaefer, succumbed to this disease in his dotage. Using books, speeches, interviews and essays, the old writer began publicly repudiating what he had come to see as the simplistic and misguided worldview espoused in his famous novel. Specifically condemning the righteous violence once depicted with pride, he went on to embrace a PETA-style morality based on the notion that humanity is a poison ruining planet Earth for all the little animals.

Against all of this lukewarm nihilism stands Shane, a genie that Schaefer and the rest, despite their best efforts, could never force back into the bottle. A fictional hero rendered so real by George Stevens and Company that, to millions of Americans, he’s as inspirational as if he’d really lived. A mythic figure who teaches stark lessons about violence and right that many find uncomfortable. Woody Allen, of all people, once praised the film along just those lines:

Shane doesn’t want to get back into gunfighting. He’s been trying the whole movie to put it behind him. But he knows that the only way to put an end to the violence in the valley is for him to do it. That’s what makes the film great in my eyes. He knows. He’s got to go in there and kill them. And sometimes in life — it’s such an ugly truth — there is no other way out of a situation but you’ve got to go in there and kill them. Very few of us are brave enough or have the talent to do it. The world is full of evil, and rationalized evil and evil out of ignorance, and there are times when that evil reaches the level of pure evil, like Jack Palance, and there is no other solution but to go in there and kill them.

That is exactly the lesson George Stevens took away from his experiences at Dachau, and that countless generations have learned in places less cloistered than the typical American university. One of the most valuable aspects of great myths is the beauty and poetry they bring to the telling of these hard, necessary truths. Author and Japanese film historian Donald Ritchie put it best to my mind, when he wrote of Shane that “Stevens knows what it means for a romantic to lose his romanticism. In this and in other of his later films he chooses to show us the post-romantic individual through the eyes of characters themselves romantic, and then to record the painful awakening to the real world which is the lot of all of us, if we live long enough.”

Shane was George Stevens’ only Western. Only one was needed. Right there, in a single story, he managed to gather together all the elements of Western myth and build a gateway to truths largely lost on a generation of Americans. Campus radicals can jeer at the way Shane treats women, or the sincerity with which a little boy worships his violent hero. Pseudo-sophisticates can bemoan the everlasting formula in Westerns that sees the good guys win, the bad guys get what’s coming to them, and Gaia’s fragile ecosystem choked by tendrils of gunsmoke. But truth always wins out in the end. As book critic Orville Prescott wrote when reviewing one of Schaefer’s later novels, “There is no escaping the cowboy myth. . . As long as our country survives, the cowboy myth will survive too.”

This concludes our seven-part look at one of the greatest of America’s Western myths, Shane. Come back next Saturday for a look at an all-new film from an all-new year, only at Big Hollywood.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Shane is a movie that looks and sounds pretty good as-is, but is nevertheless begging for some sort of determined restoration with a host of extras. For instance, reading about the picture being screened in 1953 with “stereophonic sound” (a primitive attempt at achieving some spatiality and audio separation) makes me wonder if there are isolated audio tracks buried in the Paramount studio archive that might be made the basis for some sort of surround-sound conversion. Oh well, one can dream.

Until then, make sure you get the 2002 DVD release as opposed to the 2000 — the former has a commentary track featuring George Stevens Jr. and the late Ivan Moffat, producer of the film. Lots of great trivia is revealed, much of which I didn’t include in my essays, so it’s worth a listen. Amazon has the inferior 2000 released listed first when you do a search there, so be careful. Here’s the link to the correct one.

And of course, you can rent the film from Netflix — they offer the latest and greatest version as well.

That’s a beautiful melody titled “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” and it was written for the movie Shane by one of Hollywood’s premier musical talents, the composer Victor Young. He was, in the words of his colleague and best friend, the equally great composer Max Steiner (King Kong, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Searchers), “a very, very talented composer, excellent orchestrator, and wonderful violinist” whose seemingly endlessly inventive stream of lush melodies during a two-decade career as head of Paramount Pictures’ music department came to define Hollywood film scoring.

Born the poor son of a Chicago opera singer in 1900, a chance encounter with an old violin at the age of five (and his mother’s fateful decision to have the instrument re-stringed for him to play with) turned him into a child prodigy. When his mother died a few years later, both Victor and his sister were sent to live with their grandparents in Poland, where they attended the Imperial Conservatory in Warsaw. Both graduated with honors and played in orchestras all across Europe, but came back to America in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution and postwar economic strife in Eastern Europe (at one point a starving Victor, impounded in a German prison, played a three-hour concert for the guards on his violin in exchange for a simple bowl of soup).

Back in Chicago, highly skilled but poor, Young began playing in orchestras, then leading the orchestras of silent movie houses, then recording for radio and records. In the Thirties he migrated to Hollywood and started his own successful orchestra for a few years before giving it up in exchange for film scoring at Paramount Pictures, where for the rest of his life he would be the head of the music department. He also scored for lesser studios like Republic on the side, a workload that thankfully married Young’s skills to several of John Wayne’s best films (Sands of Iwo Jima, Rio Grande, and especially The Quiet Man among them).

At Paramount, Young became legendary for his unparalleled ability to invent memorable melodies with seeming ease. “The perfect score for a dramatic picture,” he would say, “is one which the fans do not think they’re hearing but they leave the theater whistling the theme.” For Shane, he eschewed the avant-garde styles growing popular during that era in favor of tried-and-true sentimentalism and classicism.

If you’ve got an ear for old folk tunes and ballads, you’ll hear many sprinkled between Young’s distinct themes for Shane, the Starrett family, the sodbusters, and the villains. Torrey, the doomed settler played by Elisha Cook Jr., gets “Dixie” as his theme (with the local harmonica player often teasing him with quick segues into “Marching Through Georgia” for laughs). “The Quilting Party” is sung by Marian in the beginning of the movie while she’s in the cabin as Shane approaches. Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” appears on a quiet harmonica when Marian and Joey watch Shane standing in the rain. “Good-bye Old Paint” fuels Shane and Marian’s square dancing.

All of these combine with Young’s original music — “The Call of the Faraway Hills,” Marian’s lovely submotif, the triumphant tree-stump conquering music (a style echoed again when Shane and Joe conquer the equally recalcitrant Ryker gang in Shane’s epic bar fight) — to produce one of the all-time great scores. It’s criminal that there is no complete recording available on CD.

Young and several other composers — Max Steiner, Dmitri Tiomkin — would regularly get together after work to unwind. “He loved to play cards,” Max Steiner later wrote in his (alas, still unpublished) autobiography. “and he never let his work interfere with this.” One night, soon after Steiner had proudly told his buddies about a great new theme he had just written for the picture Johnny Belinda, Young nonchalantly told his wife to turn on the radio. Steiner’s theme blared over the speaker, lavishly played by a full orchestra.

“I wrote that piece,” Young said when challenged. “Where do you come off to say that this is your tune?” Thinking he must have somehow unwittingly plagiarized one of Young’s own melodies, Steiner was horrified and thinking his entire score would have to be hastily rewritten until everyone burst out laughing and let him in on the joke: Young had heard Steiner playing it on a piano a few days earlier, surreptitiously copied it down, then made a grand recording of it. “It must have cost Victor $200 to $300,” Steiner recalled fondly, “but the gag was worth it to him. He thought the whole thing was hilarious.”

By all rights Victor Young should have spent several decades after Shane continuing to entertain audiences with his memorable scores, but it was not to be. Young was known as one of Hollywood’s most notorious workaholics. “He could record from nine in the morning until eight at night,” wrote Steiner, “have a bite to eat when he got home and then call the boys and ask them to come over and play cards. They would play until four in the morning, then get up at 7:30, go to the studio and start recording. This was Victor’s routine almost every day.” Not even his first heart attack slowed him down, and he kept up his blistering work pace until finally felled by a second heart attack at the age of fifty-six. An Oscar for the 1956 Best Picture winner Around the World in Eighty Days was awarded posthumously, his first win after twenty-two nominations.

“I gave up cards,” wrote Max Steiner later, “and have never touched them since. Victor passed on quite a few years ago, but without him, it just doesn’t seem right to play anymore. However, I have made my dear wife, my little mama, promise me that when they bury me in Old Forester Lawn, she would put a couple of packs of Pinochle cards, two Gin Rummy decks, two bottles of Bourbon and a box of cigars in my coffin in case I meet Victor where I’m going.”

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Ken Curtis sings “The Call of the Faraway Hills.” Curtis, longtime member of the John Ford Stock Company and the popular musical group The Sons of the Pioneers, sings the lyrics written to accompany the main theme for Shane.

Victor Young Collection at Brandeis University. Upon his death, Young’s wife donated his effects to Brandeis, located in Massachusetts. They have a huge collection of his records, many of them private recordings of his and others music, and it’s a shame that these haven’t been transcribed to digital media, re-mastered, and released.

Interview with Victor Young’s niece, Ms. Bobbie Fromberg. Young’s sole surviving relative tells a bit more about his personal life and legacy.

And do browse around YouTube and Amazon for Victor Young’s music, only a fraction of which is currently available.

I’ll end this week on a pair of obscure scholarly notes: The exact year of Young’s birth is open to conjecture. His entry at the IMDb says 1899. His grave states 1901. Wikipedia says 1899 in the opening paragraph of its entry on Young, then promptly contradicts itself by listing 1900 on the sidebar. My call of 1900 follows the lead of newspaper obits published at the time of his death, Paramount press releases, and this 1920 newspaper article, which describes the return of “Albert Young” from Europe (why the name change while overseas, I don’t know) and seems to insinuate he was nineteen years old as of February 18, 1920. In addition to being the most widely cited year, 1900 splits the difference between the other two possibilities, so that’s what I’m sticking with until a birth certificate appears to settle the matter once and for all.

Also, regarding Shane, there is one crucial cue in the film that wasn’t written by Young at all. Towards the end, when Shane is riding through the night into town to face Ryker and Wilson, the ominous music was taken from an old Franz Waxman score to another film. It’s effective, but if you listen carefully it’s not at all like the music heard throughout the rest of the movie, and none of the other Shane themes can be heard within it.

Well, let me fess up. I read the article recently, yes — but in a fifty-year-old copy of the Los Angeles Times. The paper was dated May 6, 1953, and the two-dimensional film being praised for bucking Hollywood’s push towards 3-D was Shane.

It was a time when TV was cutting deeply into movie profits, and studios were scrambling to win back the wandering eyeballs of America. Cinerama, an ambitious, three-projector widescreen extravaganza, debuted in New York in the fall of 1952, with its test film This Is Cinerama garnering front-page fanfare and great acclaim. Bosley Crowther, the Roger Ebert of his time, gasped that it gave the audience “the same sensations. . . felt on that night, years ago, when motion pictures were first publicly flashed on a large screen. . . People sat back in spellbound wonder. . . as though most of them were seeing motion pictures for the first time.” In a single evening, the development of all-new expansive formats had become a fait accompli, and studios immediately began looking for ways to capitalize on the buzz.

At the same time, 3-D movies were another innovation being used to lure your grandparents and parents away from their televisions. Nineteen Fifty-Two, the year before Shane, saw the first flurry of attempts to do for depth what This Is Cinerama did for height and width. By 1955, audiences had seen Vincent Price (eventually christened “The King of 3-D!”) appear in House of Wax and several other horror titles. John Wayne used 3-D for Hondo. The now-famous cult classic Creature from the Black Lagoon crawled off the screen and toward audiences who didn’t know whether to scream or laugh. The great Alfred Hitchcock even toyed with the third dimension in Dial M for Murder.

While the two potential TV killers, widescreen and 3-D, warred with each other for supremacy (one contemporary ad for Cinerama proclaimed “NO GLASSES NEEDED,” reminding audiences of the eye fatigue and uncomfortable headgear necessitated by its rival), these fads spurred frenzied discussions among filmmakers and studio heads. The 1952 movie Singin’ in the Rain was then in theaters, mocking the shortsightedness of many 1920s Hollywoodites caught in the bedlam of the transition from silents to sound. Everyone in modern Hollywood, therefore, was wary of catastrophically missing out on what, for all they knew, could snowball into the 1950s equivalent of that epochal transition.

That is, almost everyone. George Stevens, for his part, looked on these developments with wry amusement. His Shane was in the can, having been filmed a year earlier in the summer and fall of 1951. And he seemed perfectly comfortable knowing that his plain ol’ 2-D picture would be debuting in the midst of all this hoopla. “I’m interested in all the new ideas, such as 3-D and widescreen,” he told one reporter at the time, “but I don’t believe the technical method of presentation is the real important thing. Only the picture matters. It’s what goes on the screen that counts.”

Perhaps that is why, when Stevens was choosing a cinematographer to shoot Shane, he zeroed in on a man named Loyal Griggs. Griggs was a Paramount fixture. Born in 1906, raised in Los Angeles, and graduated from Los Angeles High in 1924, he immediately scored a grunt job at Paramount in their effects department. Beginning at a paltry $80 a month and often logging hundred-hour work weeks with no overtime pay, he persevered for nearly three decades, slaving his way up the Paramount food chain towards the coveted rank of Director of Photography. Finally, in 1950, he became head lensman on a trio of mediocre flicks (a gangster pic and two westerns) for producers Bill Pine and Bill Thomas.

At the comparatively late age of 44, he was at long last a full-fledged Hollywood cinematographer.

Stevens had employed Griggs for some process photography on his last film, the popular and well-regarded A Place in the Sun (1951), and during pre-production on Shane it was becoming increasingly apparent that he needed a cameraman who not only could film pretty pictures, but who could use color, lenses, and composition to manipulate images for serious dramatic effect. The director, you see, had chosen Wyoming’s Teton Range over a slew of other locations (Utah, Idaho, Colorado) after sending a camera crew on an exhaustive 4,500-mile trek around the American West, filming test footage in glorious Technicolor (itself an expensive concession made by the studio only after pressure from Stevens).

But while the awe-inspiring, snow-capped peaks and grand desolation west of Jackson Hole looked perfect, there was also a problem — the scenery filmed too well. New York Times writer Jack Goodman, who visited the Wyoming location while Shane was being shot, laid out the essential challenge in a September 9, 1951 article for that newspaper: “The Teton Range west of the Hole has been widely photographed before this and has become associated with tourism and dude ranching through hundreds of travel-magazine articles. . . Further, as Stevens now explains it, Technicolor ‘tends to glamorize and romanticize,’ its basic weakness being ‘the rainbow quality’ it lends to scenic shots.”

So the question was how to get rid of what Stevens once derided in another interview as the, “Oh, what a beautiful morning!’ Technicolor musical look.” How could one make rich, saturated Technicolor images bend to the will of a director who foresaw his story’s need not only for beauty and majesty, but doom and gloom?

Enter Loyal Griggs. He had worked in the various process, front-projection, and special effects departments of Paramount for three decades. There wasn’t a trick in the book he hadn’t seen. And he brought his full array of talents to bear on making Shane one of the most variegated Technicolor films in Hollywood history.

The goal was to achieve the filmic version of what in art circles is called “Rembrandt Lighting,” a classic, shadowy style filled with dramatic possibilities. To that end, Stevens and Griggs studied the famous photographs and drawings of the Teton Range made by William Henry Jackson, as well as the paintings of famed western artist Charles Marion Russell. Most Technicolor cinematographers were afraid to lose exposure and saturation, but Griggs ruthlessly degraded both when necessary. Early each morning weather stations were consulted, and if rain or clouds were on the way the filmmakers would rush out to take advantage. Many times the sun appearing through the gray expanse would ruin the effect, and so Griggs had such shots backprinted (made artificially darker) in the lab to preserve the shadow-laden, brooding atmosphere.

Back in the Fifties, film stocks weren’t “fast” enough (i.e. sensitive enough to light) to pick up anything during a nighttime shoot. So Griggs used a trick called “day-for-night” — first filming in bright sunlight, then adjusting the exposure in the lab to make it look as if it had been filmed in the evening — to capture some of the most important scenes in the movie, complete with visible mountains and vast plains in the distance.

This particular technique was itself common enough, but Griggs took it to the next level, using optical printing to single out characters in the frame and boost their exposure while leaving the rest of the image alone, giving the actors an eldritch, almost supernatural glow of the kind moonlight makes on Halloween. For the very last shots of the picture, he filmed a graveyard bathed in a severe darkness, then used optical printing to insert Alan Ladd’s character as a ghostly silhouette.

Jack Goodman, viewing the rushes while visiting for his New York Times article, came away most impressed: “[By] not hesitating to shoot portions of Shane on days when clouds race across nearby lakes, Stevens has managed to make this most beautiful of western vistas positively forbidding.”

Careful use of lenses also played a role. Stevens and Griggs show here some of the earliest examples of filming vast outdoor spaces with telephoto lenses normally used for facial closeups. The result was a flattening of the depth in an image, which made the distant mountains in the background seem far closer and more imposing. This is nowhere more effective than in the justifiably famous funeral scene of Shane. “There was the funeral on the hilltop,” Stevens explained, describing the master shot for this key sequence, “and there was the dis­tance where cattle grazed, and then there was the town at the crossing, a western town like western towns were. There were the great moun­tains that rose behind it. This was all arranged in one camera view, one camera view that had to do with a man being put away in his grave with the synthesis of the whole story wrapped around it.”

Stevens wanted to connect 1950s families with a time when “death was a very large part of living.” His inspiration for the scene came while visiting a tiny pioneer hamlet in California:

Bridgeport, on the way to the Sierra Nevadas, is. . . a poor little town. . . About three miles away, in the foothills, there is a graveyard. . . A man comes in his front door from a funeral and perhaps goes out the back door to bring in the pail of milk before he goes to bed that night. If he has just buried his mother, he can look up to where she is on that hillside. While he was at the cemetery, he could look back to those beautiful mountains. This is what the pioneers came for, this vast country, and a little cemetery with a fence around it. It’s there waiting. Mother, all those who have gone before, are there. It will be throughout his time, and the man can look down to the town and see the house where mother came as a bride, and where he was born and where he was raised. There is a convenience in being able to visually associate all of these essential aspects of life in a frontier world; some of it isn’t around the corner or on the other side of town, it’s all right there and it’s all true. I see that, I know what it means.

As Shane was nearing its release, Paramount ran a test of the film on one of the big new screens being developed, to see how it would look blown up to that size. To make the square-ish image fit onto a rectangular screen, they unceremoniously chopped off a portion of the top and bottom of Griggs’ lovingly composed compositions. Some critics noticed this right off and grumbled. (Lord knows what expletives emerged from Griggs’ own mouth!) But most thought it was a decent enough compromise for the treat of getting magnified, IMAX-like versions of Shane’s Wyoming vistas.

On April 15, 1953, the industry trade paper Variety ran an article stating that

Shane was previewed in a process stage on Paramount’s experimental widescreen, to an audience perched on makeshift seating. Despite these abnormal viewing conditions, the picture’s worth was not lessened, and the widescreen projection did contribute, in some measure, to a sense of bigness, although, again for the record, Shane would be a big picture on any size screen. Theaters equipped for widescreen showings should find the extra ballyhoo angle of this gimmick adding to the dollars taken at the box office.

The efforts of the cinematographer were especially singled out for distinction: “Pictorially, the picture has been beautifully photographed in color by Loyal Griggs. Wyoming’s scenic splendors against which the story is filmed are breathtaking. Sunlight, the shadow of rainstorms and the eerie lights of night, play a realistic part in making the film a visual treat.” The Hollywood Reporter chimed in as well, praising the use of “long shots and lovely Technicolor hues to establish mood, some of the scenes emerging like exquisite paintings.”

Soon after that test, Paramount debuted the film in New York at Radio City Music Hall, which had just installed one of the first widescreens in the country. On April 24, 1953, The Hollywood Reporter gushed to an industry town holding its collective breath: “New York Critics Enthusiastic About Shane, Wide Screen.” Frank Quinn of The New York Daily Mirror conveyed the almost futuristic, game-changing aspect of the event: “A thrilling new visual concept of motion pictures unfolds with the debut of Shane on the panoramic screen. The screen is wide, more oblong like a picture postcard.”

In Los Angeles, the movie’s star-studded premiere was equally rapturous. Celebrities like Cary Grant, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, Irene Dunne, Charles Coburn, Mitzi Gaynor, Rory Calhoun, Anita Ekberg, Shelly Winters, and Claire Trevor poured into Grauman’s Chinese Theater as hundreds of fans cheered. “Shane Premiere Gala Fete: Hollywood Turns Out in Panoramic Pandemonium,” was the headline in the Los Angeles Evening Herald Express.

Philip K. Scheuer, longtime film critic for the Los Angeles Times (who had begun his career covering the silents), penned in his own newspaper a thoughtful review of both film and presentation:

When, in the good old days, we called a picture an epic we must have had some reason for it. Later, through misuse and repetition, the word fell into disrepute and we put quotation marks around it to indicate we didn’t really believe an “epic” was an epic any more. With Shane one is tempted to leave the quote marks off. . . .

At the Chinese, where it premiered last night, it is being projected onto what is, by a slight margin, the largest screen in town (about 50 x 25 feet). Shane was not made for magnification, but its detail “blows up” very well in Technicolor, with not too much of the picture cut off at top and bottom. Directional sound, from three speakers, is used sparingly but effectively. . . However, I am quite sure Shane would hold you even on a 17-inch screen.

It wasn’t long before the trades were reporting that — much like today’s twenty-first-century theaters rushing to install 3-D capability — dozens of 1953 theaters were hurriedly converting to widescreen in a frenzied attempt to take advantage of Shane’s theatrical run. Reviewers and audiences alike were almost unanimously hailing it as an instant classic. The Saturday Review honed in on exactly the things that we’ve been discussing here, noting “Loyal Griggs’ handsome Technicolor photography. . . his cameras point insistently to the physical beauties of the place — the play of light on the distant mountains, the golden skies after a shower, the vast expanse of green and coppery fields. But none of this is merely travelogue prettiness. Nature enters dynamically into the development of the story, its moods matching and underlining the dramatic action.”

Conservative Henry Luce’s Time magazine made the distinction between gimmickry and artistry: “Without recourse to tricky 3-D photography and Polaroid glasses, Stevens, with ordinary Technicolor camera and sound track, has given his flat old story a real third dimension of believability.” A grandstanding Democratic politician from Wyoming, Lester C. Hunt, even went so far as to stand on the floor of the Senate and laud the picture’s stunning portrayal of the beauties of his home state.

So although Shane wasn’t a real widescreen Hollywood movie (the first real one was The Robe, a Christian tale shot in Twentieth-Century Fox’s Cinemascope format, which hit theaters later that fall and quickly became one of the all-time box-office champions), it was the first to be presented with much fanfare on a widescreen, and its marvelous cinematography did much to warm audiences to the new format. Meanwhile 3-D, hampered by a variety of technical limitations, would die out by the end of the decade, experiencing only intermittent spurts of life thereafter (time will tell how this latest 2010 revival pans out.)

Loyal Griggs won his first and only Oscar for Shane (the only Shane nominee to take home a gold statue that night), and went on to a distinguished career as a Director of Photography. A few years later, when Cecil B. DeMille was looking for a combined Technicolor/special effects/VistaVision expert, he turned to Griggs, and the result was another classic of gargantuan proportions, The Ten Commandments. That film netted Griggs another Oscar nomination, and in 1975 he received a special U.S. Bicentennial award for his photography on the picture. He died in 1978 at the age of 71, with two great Technicolor spectaculars forever linked to his name.

If I had to turn to one person to sum up the impact of Shane’s visuals, I’d pick the words of Hollywood writer/critic Ruth Waterbury, who’s own review appeared on Friday, June 5, 1953 in the pages of The Los Angeles Examiner. “The glory that God gave to the American West has been captured by it,” she said of the photography. “The strength, the fidelity, the weakness, the insecurity, that God gave man is reflected in it. . . Shane is on wide screen with stereophonic sound, all very fine. But it would still be magnificent if it were the size of a postage stamp. You’ll remember it long, long after you see it. In fact, I think I will personally remember it always.”

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The development of VistaVision: Here’s an informative overview of Paramount Pictures’ own 1950s widescreen format, which debuted a bit too late to be used in Shane. In my humble opinion, it was perhaps the most impressive of all the various permutations of widescreen created during that era. Loyal Griggs used VistaVision for Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments (1956), John Ford used it for The Searchers, and Alfred Hitchcock for To Catch a Thief among others.

And check out the rest of The American Widescreen Museum website for even more history on widescreen photography in general.

Order a nifty CD-ROM book on The Making of Shane. Wish I had known about this before starting in on these articles. Compiled by Walt Farmer, it reportedly has a full tour of all of the film’s Wyoming locations, including detailed directions and GPS coordinates in case you want to hunt them down yourself (I love reading about — or performing myself — that kind of historical detective work). He reveals that the only structure still standing from the movie is Ernie Wright’s homestead (the sodbuster played by Edgar Buchanan, whom the Ryker Gang intimidates by running their cattle through his farm and crops). Apparently, the Cemetery Hill still sports a faint depression where Torrey’s grave was dug. Alas, save for a few fence posts and ruins, everything else is gone.

The cost is $20 plus $5 S&H, but if you are a hardcore Shane fan, or simply someone who’d like to poke around the film’s locations the next time you are out Wyoming way, it sounds like an invaluable purchase.

“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.

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.”

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.”

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!”

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 ac­tor 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 diminu­tive 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”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

It all started with a memo from Paramount Studios, where the director was currently under contract: “Herewith story and treatment entitled Shane, which we would like you to consider for one of your two remaining pictures. . . This property is now being supervised by one of our studio producers, but no serious problem would be involved in re-assigning it to you, and we are prepared to do so if you like it. . .” Stevens did like it, and soon began reading both the novel and existing script, marking them up with marginal notes that contained the seeds of dialogue and shots that would go on to become immortal.

As packaged, the movie was set to star Alan Ladd, Paramount’s most popular star — only John Wayne eclipsed Ladd’s popularity in moviegoer polls during those heady years. But Stevens initially considered other options. Many of his jotted notes about the character of Shane referenced “Monty,” showing that Stevens was thinking of using Montgomery Clift, the young, tight-jawed brooder then appearing in the director’s tragic love story A Place in the Sun (1951). Gregory Peck was also in the running. Meanwhile, author Jack Schaefer wanted “a dark, deadly person” — someone more like tough-guy gangster actor George Raft — to portray his hero. For the part of Joe Starrett, the homesteader and father of the young boy, names like Broderick Crawford, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden were bandied about.

After a Clift/Holden combo fell through for budget and scheduling reasons, Stevens ended the debate by taking a look at Paramount’s listing of contract players. Within minutes, he chose Ladd for Shane, Oscar-winning character actor Van Heflin for Joe, and Jean Arthur for Marian, Joe’s wife. All three choices were risky for various reasons.

Alan Ladd was a box-office draw, yes, but as a pretty face rather than as a solid actor. Critics judged him as a lightweight, someone more famous for smiling on magazine covers than for sinking his teeth into the meat of a genuinely dramatic role. Known throughout Hollywood for his self-abasing nature, he was hardly the guy one would expect to rise to the occasion of becoming a gunslinging, two-fisted hero for the ages.

Yet Stevens, his ultimate artistic intentions fully in mind, believed Ladd could provide a shining light at the center of the storm. “You know, it’s against the formula,” he said about his choice, “but Ladd seemed to have a decency on the screen even in violent roles like this one. He always seemed to have a large measure of reserve and dignity.” It was that, and not the silky deadliness, that Stevens most wanted to carry over from Schaefer’s novel.

Unlike so many other directors, Stevens even saw Ladd’s diminutive 5’4” stature as a cup half-full. “It was an interesting thing for the picture,” he said, “because he didn’t tower above the others — the mountains did. We kept him as high off the ground as possible so he wouldn’t be dwarfed by people.” With Ladd’s lithe, genial masculinity now defining the role, Stevens changed Shane’s black silk shirt and matching hat from the book into a buckskin outfit that toned down the character’s more sinister overtones.

Evan “Van” Heflin, like Ladd, was quiet and reserved in real life, a well-read Yale-educated man who shunned parties and kept a low profile away from the silver screen. He was, however, a more respected thespian than Ladd, having won a Best Supporting  Actor academy award for 1942’s Johnny Eager. The two had much in common (both did some growing up in Oklahoma), and soon they became fast friends on the set of Shane. “Alan was a far better actor than he would ever believe himself to be,” Heflin said in an interview many years later. “As with most of us, he needed a director who could bring out the best in him. With George he had it. He was a very sensitive person and he had a terrific inferiority complex. . . Alan later said he thought Shane was a fluke. . . although actors usually go their separate ways after a movie is completed, Alan and I remained very close. God, how I loved that man!”

If hiring Alan Ladd and Van Heflin were gambles — no John Wayne drawls, no lazy cowboy strides, no history of anchoring Western movies — Stevens’ choice of Jean Arthur for the part of Joe Starrett’s pretty, careworn wife bordered on outrageous. She was an actress known primarily for urbane comedies and love stories directed by Frank Capra. Her shyness meant that even in the best of circumstances she could be difficult to work with. “You had to treat her like a child,” Stevens explained, remembering her insecurities. “She was terribly anxious about everything.”

Even more troubling was that her heyday was long behind her. By the time she was considered for Shane Arthur was over fifty years old, her hair completely gray, and she hadn’t acted in a film in years. Why hire someone like that to play a pretty wife and mother figure, when there were many younger actresses from which to choose?

Because “people are always the instrument,” as Stevens was wont to say. “She was interesting,” he believed, “because she seemed to be rising above her personality. Anytime she has a charge to make against someone or a defense of something, it always seemed that she felt herself dangerously exposed, kind of heroic in the most ordinary circumstances — even if she had to put her left hand out in traffic in order to turn.”

It was that delicate brand of heroism that he wanted the character of Marion Starrett to epitomize. With a blond wig and makeup, Stevens believed that Arthur could still pass as an attractive woman in her thirties — after all, as recently as 1950 she had managed to play Peter Pan on Broadway to great acclaim. Thus he lured Arthur out of her self-imposed Hollywood retirement for what would be her last movie (and her only one in color).

Arthur, being the only one of the main actors who had worked with Stevens before, quickly noticed the deep change in the director’s post-war personality. “He was very serious,” she recounted sadly, “No jokes. It was like I never knew him before. He wanted me to look tired and worn. . . I felt kind of sorry for him.”

The last two actors to headline the film were more conventional selections, but no less effective.

Young Brandon de Wilde (pronounced duh-WILL-duh) was the only choice for Joey. He had made his name a year earlier by stealing scenes and charming audiences in a Broadway production of Carson McCullers’ The Member of the Wedding. Hailed as a child prodigy, he soon became the best-regarded boy actor of the period. Alan Ladd’s step-daughter Carol Lee recalls the “infinite patience” Stevens displayed while directing De Wilde, saying that the kid “drove all the actors a little crazy because his idea of fun was jumping up and down in the mud — splashing mud all over everyone. But George Stevens knew how to work with him.”

When famed director (and, to his credit, reformed communist) Elia Kazan directed A Streetcar Named Desire for the stage, he had Marlon Brando playing the part of Stanley Kowalski on Broadway and Anthony Quinn performing the same role in Chicago. The understudy he hired to act as their backup in case of illness was, in Kazan’s opinion, “the most menacing, the most sinister, and the most frightening Stanley Kowalski ever to appear on the stage.”

The man was an ex-coal miner and ex-boxer, tough as nails, muscular and mean-looking. His face was bony and gaunt, marred both by numerous beatings endured in the ring, as well as by reconstructive surgery due to burns received while bailing out of an Air Force training flight during World War II. His name was Jack Palance, and in hindsight, the character of Jack Wilson in Shane was the role he was born to play.

When Stevens hired him, Palance was still largely unknown — Shane was lensed between June and October of 1951, and Palance’s first Oscar nomination for his memorably ominous role in the Joan Crawford noir vehicle Sudden Fear (1952) was still a year away. But such was Palance’s presence that Stevens didn’t need to be told that he was up to the job.

Unlike some of the other actors, Palance came from the then-new and novel Method school of acting. Before each take, he would make the cast and crew wait while he went off into a corner by himself and worked his emotions up to the proper temperature, burrowing deep into the role until the character of a bloodthirsty assassin infused his very being.

Woody Allen, of all people, is a big fan of Shane, and in a New York Times piece a few years back he aptly described Palance’s priceless contribution to the picture: “If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil, it is Jack Palance. . . he’s so poetically evil. He looks like he’d gladly kill the guys who hired him if they looked at him wrong. He’s just bad news. Serpentine. In our minds, he’s set off against Shane, one particularly good, almost too good to be true, and the other is totally evil.” Allen’s right — it’s hard to imagine any other pair of actors pulling off this basic good/evil struggle in such mythic terms.

Of his director on Shane, Alan Ladd said that “I learned more about acting from that man in a few months than I had in my entire life up until then. Stevens is the best in the business. He knows exactly how to handle actors, how to relax them and win their confidence.”

That might sound like typical Hollywood butt-kissing, but go ahead: sit there at your computer and try to say some of Ladd’s now-famous lines with his combination of iron-clad conviction and mannerly grace. Try to mimic Palance’s equally famous lines with his deadly, gleeful hiss of ice-cold menace. Do that, and you’ll begin to understand what amazing acting truly is. The fact is that after Shane, neither Alan Ladd or Jack Palance would ever achieve a more perfectly tuned and modulated performance. Under the patient, guiding hand of George Stevens, the movie represents a high-water mark for the depictions of both implacable good and unfettered evil.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1 | Part 2

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Woody Allen talks about Shane. The New York Times invited Allen to screen one of his favorite movies with them, and give a running commentary about why he considered it so great. Allen chose Shane, and gave some interesting reasons as to why he skipped all of his favorite foreign films to do so. Well worth a read.

A Short Biography of Van Heflin. A nice rundown of his life and career, showing what made him tick. Hard-working, unpretentious, and good natured, Van Heflin was one of Hollywood’s good guys.  

The “Low-down Yankee Liar” bronze. If you have some serious dough burning a hole in your pocket, you might blow it on this cool bronze statue depicting Jack Palance’s character of Jack Wilson from Shane. Wicked cool.

And while we’re talking Palance, here’s some fun YouTube items related to him.

David Carradine as Shane on TV. I’m not old enough to remember this, but if you were around in the 1960s perhaps you recall this ill-advised attempt to turn the character of Shane into a folk-rock hero. Did they substitute Peter, Paul and Mary for Victor Young on the soundtrack? Needless to say, it didn’t take off.

Born in 1904, he was the product of a family of actors, and grew up in San Francisco helping his parents learn lines, doing backstage work, and even acting when the occasion demanded. “I was fascinated by all of it,” Stevens said. “The sounds of the theater and the audience, their rapture when a play took over and moved them and held them quietly. . . When the audience was truly moved, it was absolutely quiet. They were in a communion because they were learning the truth about themselves.”

In 1921 his parents moved the family to Los Angeles to find work in the silent movie industry, and for Stevens it was a wonderful change. He leveraged a job his cousin had at Hal Roach studios to begin visiting the lot.

“I was really a kid at the time,” Stevens said, “and I had been interested in photography as a kid, as a hobby. . . I was on a picture for four or five days, had an opportunity to be on a set, and the assistant cameraman kept showing me things. One day I climbed the fence, knowing they needed an assistant cameraman. A couple of days later I was one. The first day or two it was pretty disastrous, but I knew something about photography, and I caught on quick.”

Soon Stevens quit high school — at sixteen, he was a full-time Hollywood cameraman.

Most of the early films he shot were westerns, and he quickly developed an affinity for the genre and the cowboys who brought it to life on screen. “The old western boys were pretty fine fellows,” he said. “It wasn’t that they didn’t kiss the girl and only kissed their horse and didn’t smoke: they were good men and the tradition was such that they wanted to be rugged, responsible. They had an integrity.”

He dreamed of soon directing a western of his own, putting all of these feelings onto the screen, but it was not to be:

Nothing is more pleasant for me than to be on location in the country that I love, in any of our western land­scapes, being out there with a camp outfit and a film company. I had done some work when I was starting in with photography on westerns, and photographing them was the greatest pleasure I had. If I was ever qualified for anything, it would have had to do with making westerns. But as I started working on pictures with people like Katharine Hepburn, I got further away from the thing I really liked to do.

As he developed his skills and through the 1920s and ’30s, slowly graduating from assistant cameraman to cameraman proper and then to director, he found that the western work of his apprenticeship gave way to another genre immensely popular and ubiquitous at the time: comedies. He worked on Laurel and Hardy pictures, and eventually an assortment of (for the most part) rather lighthearted dramas starring the likes of Fred Astaire, James Stewart, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers.

It was a successful career in terms of fame and box office, but it came at a hidden artistic cost that he would only fathom decades later. “I remember a whole period in my life where everything was a gag,” is how he summed up the essential dilemma later in life. “We found ourselves always wanting to play out everything as a joke — a very dangerous thing to do, because we looked at everything frivolously.” What, he wondered, had happened to that sense of communion he had felt when watching audiences under the spell of the plays put on by his parents?

When America finally found itself dragged into the maelstrom of World War II, Stevens’ long, idyllic Hollywood party was over. “I quit the film business to go into the army,” he explained. “I wanted to be in the war — I really didn’t want to make films at that time. . . My agent Charles Feldman told me, ‘You go in this war, it’ll last seven years, and you’re finished as far as films are concerned, if nothing worse happens to you.’ Well, I went in the latter part of 1942. . . ”

The war would become the defining event of his life, utterly changing the way he looked at his art. He commanded a troupe of cameramen who filmed in color throughout Africa and Europe, culminating in the nightmare world they found upon reaching Dachau at the close of the war.

“Beyond descrip­tion,” he said with a shiver later. “Like wandering around in one of Dante’s infernal visions. . . everybody’s pleading for water and laying there, three guys in a bunk, dying. . . we went to the woodpile outside the crematorium, and the woodpile was people.” The George Stevens who once filmed clever comedies in between behind-the-scenes flings with the likes of Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers was no more. “It causes a most profound adjustment in your thinking,” he said. “I don’t suppose I was ever too hilarious again.”

Back in America, the desire to direct again came slowly, and the films became more serious, the work of a auteur surrounded by the ghosts of his past. “I kept feeling I should do a picture about the war — all the other guys had done or were doing pictures about their war experiences, Ford, Huston, Wyler, and so on. And here I was avoiding the subject. Until I found Shane — it was a western, but it was really my war picture. The cattlemen against the ranchers, the gunfighter, the wide-eyed little boy, it was pretty clear to me what it was about.”

Ever since the war, he had become acutely aware of the depiction of violence on screen, and the gaping difference between Hollywood violence and what he had seen at Dachau. “At the time we made this picture there was a great vogue of kids with cowboy hats and cap pistols going bang, bang, bang. . . In the popular movies we saw western guys with guitars, not six-shooters.” Stevens now knew better. “A gunshot. . . is a holocaust. It’s not a gesture of bravado, it’s death.”

So that was the guy who decided to film Shane: a man whose long-standing admiration for America’s popular conception of the mythic west was now haunted by war. It would be his first (and, as it turned out, his only) western as a director, and he was determined to do the job right, infusing the audience with deep emotions reminiscent of those quiet moments of communion achieved long ago in his parents’ theater.

“What I wanted this film to do,” Stevens said, “was catch something of how people looked and lived, their home ways, their manners and ways of doing things, and most importantly the violent character of the six-shooter. . . I wanted to show that a .45, if you pull directly in a man’s direction, you destroy an upright figure. I wanted to make that one point.” How he went about doing all of that — the directorial decisions, the editing, the clever cinematic tricks — would change the way westerns were made forever after.

Previous posts in the series “Jack Schaefer, George Stevens, and Shane”

Part 1

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Two books about George Stevens. Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film by Marilyn Ann Moss and George Stevens: Interviews edited by Paul Cronin (the same guy who did that great book Herzog on Herzog, which I referenced in our Grizzly Man series) are both worthwhile. Unlike guys like John Ford, Stevens enjoyed articulating the decisions underlying his art, and these books are chock full of his thoughts on his films, Hollywood, and much else.

George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey. This excellent, illuminating documentary was produced, directed and narrated by Stevens’ own son, George Jr. You can Netflix it, or purchase it at the usual places. Well worth your time.

Martin Scorsese on George Stevens. The renowned director of our time explains what he admires about one of the greats of the Golden Age of filmmaking in this article written for TCM.

For author Jack Schaefer (1907–1991), one such figure was Wilbur Daniel Steele, a then-popular but now-forgotten writer of the 1920s and ’30s. In his heyday, Steele won so many O. Henry awards (eleven in all) that he was eventually banned from the contest. “The best short story writer there has ever been,” Schaefer believed, ever thankful that Steele’s work had taught him at a young age that “Writing short stories is a craft” and that “Words are beautiful things.”

Conservative movie lovers who admire the 1953 film Shane, based off of Schaefer’s first and most famous book, should be thankful as well.

Growing up in Cleveland a century ago, reading and writing were early passions for Schaefer. “My parents were both readers,” he said. “There was always a houseful of books. They didn’t stop me or try to check my reading habits. I just read everything in sight. . . When I was a kid I read more Tarzan stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs than anything else.”

He earned his undergraduate degree at Oberlin, studying Greek and Latin and the great classics, but his graduate studies at Columbia University proved to be soul-killing. Schaefer grew to despise “the silly jargon and critical gobbledygook that flourishes in the snobbish little quarterlies” that academics regularly published, considering them “a dull and stupid waste of time. All that piling up of detail! And for what purpose?”

The last straw came when

I had what I thought was a bright idea for my thesis. I wanted to do research on the development of motion pictures. At that time I had an aunt who reviewed films ready to assist me. Besides that I had a tremendous interest in films. The thesis committee at Columbia just laughed at me. They said that movies were merely cheap reproductions of stage plays. After that I left Columbia. I have never been back and have never regretted leaving at all.

Schaefer ultimately became a journalist, writing millions of words of editorials, reviews, and other assorted filler for various small newspapers on the Eastern seaboard. By 1944 he was editor for the tiny Norfolk Virginian-Pilot, overworked and getting nowhere.

“Primarily as a means of relaxation,” he said later, “I started writing fiction late at night.” A lover of stories written in the “direct old-fashioned manner. . . in the ancient tradition of tale-tellers,” he soon gravitated to Westerns. Schaefer knew that “Most people ask, ‘Why write Westerns?’ They’re one step above comic books,” yet he was attracted to the way the genre supported almost Arthurian notions of heroism. In the wild West, Schaefer believed, “the energies and capabilities of men and women, for good or for evil, were unleashed on an individual basis as they had rarely been before or elsewhere in human history.”

To that end, he decided to write “a short story about the basic legend of the West,” a tale “classical in form — stripped to the absolute essentials, starting and moving in a straight line to an inevitable conclusion.”

One glaring roadblock was that he had never been west of Ohio in his entire life, so he relied on books and his imagination to see him through. “I didn’t use any particular book as background for Shane,” he said, “simply general notions out of years of desultory reading of western material with no notion of ever using any of them in writing of my own.”

As his story developed, it focused was on a young boy in 1880s Wyoming and the strange, mysterious gunslinger, haunted by a violent past, whom he idolizes. Schaefer’s hero is a dangerous man, one with “sharp, hidden hardnesses in him,” but also one “in whom a boy could believe in the simple knowing that what was beyond comprehension was still clean and solid and right.” The author later mused that, “I believe that Shane had the qualities of my father. Of course, my father wasn’t Shane, but he that sort of man.” Fathers, it could be said, are the ultimate idols, and Shane brims with respect for the bonds forged between young boys and worthy, heroic father figures.

Eventually, the short story grew into a short novella that Schaefer titled “Rider from Nowhere.” “Finally I sent it to Argosy,” he said. “I didn’t know anything about markets. I had only one copy of this Western novella and that was single-spaced. I didn’t even include a return envelope.”

Miraculously, after several months the long-running pulp magazine accepted it, and published it as a three-part serial in the fall of 1946 (misspelling his name on the cover, natch). Soon he began landing other short stories in magazines like Boy’s Life, Collier’s, Blue Book, and the Saturday Evening Post. After he divorced his first wife in 1948 and remarried, his second spouse wisely encouraged him to give up the day job and try to make it as a full-time writer.

To do that, he needed to become a novelist, so he dug out his first publication, “Rider from Nowhere,” and set about expanding it, beefing up certain episodes and adding a few new chapters. The resulting typescript, now titled Shane, was shopped around the big publishing houses. “We were in New York without a cent,” Schaefer remembered later, “with me selling a pint of blood every now and then.”

After some disheartening rejections, an enterprising agent got the book published in 1949 by Houghton Mifflin. While never a bestseller, it sold nice and steady, and soon attracted the attention of Hollywood. Throughout his ensuing career as a novelist, it was Shane — Schaefer’s very first story, a tale about a boy and his haunted, heroic idol — that remained his most popular.

There’s a kind of coda to the creation of Shane. While living in Connecticut in the early 1950s as a popular Western novelist (before his move out west to New Mexico), Schaefer learned that his own longtime idol, Wilbur Daniel Steele, was living in retirement close by. Remembering how influential the man’s work had been during his youth, he endeavored to drop in for a surprise visit.

“I drove out there,” Schaefer remembered decades later, “and saw an old man in tennis shoes and a sweater. I introduced myself and said something about two of his stories, ‘Thirst’ and The Man Who Saw Through Heaven.”

What happened next was entirely unexpected. “He got down on the grass and started to cry. Said he didn’t know that others still read his work.”

“Writing short stories is a craft,” Schaefer was wont to say. “Words are beautiful things.”

That they are. And so are idols.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Read the novel Shane by Jack Schaefer. “I used to say and still say that the best books are short,” opined Jack Schaefer. “The best books can be read in one sitting and at one time.”

Shane fits this notion to a tee — at around two-hundred pages, it can be leisurely finished in three or four hours. There are many editions available, but make sure you get one based off of the original 1949 version and not the 1954 scholastic reissue, which edited out a few handfuls of “hells” and “damns.” I can recommend the critical edition published by the University of Nebraska’s Bison Books imprint, which includes essays on the novel, an interview with Schaefer, and many other items of interest.

A few quick items in response to that piece.  First, it was not about “bad directors” (although some were plain bad, including Aronofsky), but about overrated directors.  Alfred Hitchcock is nowhere near the worst director ever (I was probably too harsh to label him “slightly better than mediocre”), but it is a travesty to label him the greatest director of all time, as so many have.  The same holds true for David Lean (I appreciate Great Expectations, Brief Encounter, and swaths of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I just think he doesn’t deserve to make the top 20 list). Second, I neglected three directors who clearly should have made the list: Roman Polanski (somebody stop the Chinatown cult!), Spike Lee (how can he make race relations this dull?), and Tim Burton (damn you for ruining Sweeney Todd).  Third, two corrections:

(1) Rebecca and Suspicion are the same film, not Notorious and Rebecca; (2) the Orlando Bloom reference was to Black Hawk Down, not G.I. Jane, and I apologize for the obvious mix-up. 

Now, to the real question: the top-ten greatest directors of all time.  This is truly a rough decision – there are at least two score great directors who could make this list.  Here is my one basic criteria: directors who provide me the most viewing pleasure over the course of their career.  That means telling a great story in the best possible way.  Subjective?  Sure.  Deal with it.  I’ll admit that this list skews toward older directors, not because older movies are generally better than newer movies (though I think they are), but because directors in the period 1920-1960 generally made more movies, which means more opportunities for directors to shine. 

I’ll start by explaining why certain directors are not in the top ten. 

Francis Ford Coppola:  He had a period of unbelievable creative magic.  Within a ten year period, he made Finian’s Rainbow (1968), a charming musical; The Godfather (1972), which requires no commentary; The Conversation (1974), perhaps the creepiest movie ever made; The Godfather: Part II (1974), which matches its predecessor in quality; and Apocalypse Now (1979), a mad journey into the heart of darkness.  Then he was done.  How this talented filmmaker went from The Godfather to the atrocity that was Jack (1996) is utterly bewildering.  It was tough to keep him off the top ten list. It was even harder to boot someone from that list to make room for him. 

Peter Jackson:  I believe Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy to be the finest directorial effort of all time, surpassing even Citizen Kane.  That said, Jackson hasn’t done anything else.  King Kong was overlong and CGI-obsessed.  He has shown that he can produce with the best of them – District 9 is brilliant – but he needs to direct more great movies before he belongs in the top ten. 

Christopher Nolan: I believe Nolan will one day make the top-ten list.  He’s that talented.  Watch one of his early efforts, Following (1998) if you don’t believe me – on a budget of $6,000, he creates a taut thriller.  His last five movies have all been terrific: Memento, Insomnia, Batman Begins, The Prestige, and The Dark Knight. He is one of the few modern directors for whom I check the IMDB calendar to see when his next movie comes out.  I look forward to Inception with bated breath.  For now, however, it’s too early to chart his trajectory with certainty. 

Orson Welles:  Citizen Kane requires no explication – it is justifiably seen by many as the greatest directorial job ever.  His Othello is similarly creative and inspired.  The Magnificent Ambersons follows the pattern.  But Welles destroyed himself and his career, and the fates should never forgive him for wasting his unparalleled talent. 

Peter Weir:  I love Weir.  He is always creative and interesting.  Although I didn’t enjoy Master and Commander as much as others, The Truman Show, Fearless, and Gallipoli are all minor masterpieces.  As far as the top ten, my heart says maybe, my brain says no. 

Stanley Kubrick:  Overrated.  Yes, he directed the wonderful Paths of Glory, Spartacus, and Dr. Strangelove, but 2001: A Space Odyssey is an abomination, A Clockwork Orange doesn’t hold up, The Shining is made a parody by Jack Nicholson’s scenery-chewing. He’s inconsistent, and that’s what knocks him off the list, as it should. 

Vincente Minnelli:  The best director of musicals of all time came close to making the list, too.  Meet Me in St. Louis is delightful.  An American in Paris is a joy for the senses. The Band Wagon is the best parody of Broadway ever made; Brigadoon is pretty if unfaithful to the source material (they cut a couple of the best songs from the Broadway version); Gigi is gorgeous; Lust for Life is well-done.  Few directors have Minneli’s grasp of the music that film can be, the vibrancy that film can create.  Again, this is just a case of ten being too few to fit him. 

Fritz Lang:  M is the best foreign language film ever made.  Period.  It is tight and tense and incredibly driving.  Metropolis is fantastic too.  Perhaps if I’d seen more Lang, I’d put him up in the top ten (the only other films I’ve seen of his are Fury and The Big Heat), so I’ll claim ignorance here. 

Fred Zinneman: Perhaps the best conventional director of all time – a man who simply puts on camera what needs to be there.  He’s not the artist that any of the top ten are, but he did create The Day of the Jackal, A Man for All Seasons, Oklahoma!, From Here to Eternity, and High Noon, a list to be reckoned with. 

Victor Fleming:  How hard was it to come up with this list?  I had to leave off the guy who directed Captains Courageous, The Good Earth, The Wizard of Oz, some of Gone with the Wind, A Guy Named Joe, and Treasure Island.  He also directed lots of films that ain’t quite as great, so his percentage is what keeps him off the list. 

Stanley Donen: Stylistically, Donen was tops.  He directed On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, Charade, Damn Yankees!, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Two for the Road.  The pure fun that is Seven Brides could put him on the top ten list.  But Donen just can’t knock anyone else off. 

Robert Rossen: His resume is simply too short.  Three fantastic movies: Body and Soul, All the King’s Men, The Hustler.  A great career.  Not a top ten one. 

John Huston: The best adventure director of all time, responsible for The Man Who Would Be King, Moby Dick, The African Queen, and The Maltese Falcon.  Again, not enough versatility to put him over the top. 

George Stevens:  Tough to keep off the list, tough to make room.  The Diary of Anne Frank, Shane, A Place in the Sun, I Remember Mama, Gunga Din – versatility, certainly, brilliance, certainly, sweetness, certainly.  Off the list?  Hesitantly, yes. 

The Top Ten Greatest Directors of All Time

10.  Steven Spielberg:  This will be the most controversial pick on the list, to be sure.  He’s got big hits, and he’s got big misses.  His hits are clearly terrific – Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Schindler’s List, Jaws, Saving Private Ryan.  His misses are pure awfulness – A.I., 1941, The Terminal, and the misery that was Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Of late, far more misses than hits.  Still, that early canon of films, plus Schindler’s and Saving Private Ryan puts him over the top.  No better popcorn filmmaker has ever been born.  Yes, I hate his politics.  But his artistry, when he’s at the top of his game and when he’s comfortable with the script, is unmistakable.  Watch this scene again: 

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Nobody – nobody – directs action better.  And Schindler’s List proved he can do drama, too.  Is he the deepest guy on the list?  Nope.  Does he belong here?  I say, yes.  

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9.  Michael Curtiz:  How can I possibly put the man who directed the monstrous farce that is Mission to Moscow on this list?  Because he also directed Casablanca, the best movie of all time; White Christmas and Yankee Doodle Dandy, two of the best musicals; The Adventures of Robin Hood, one of the best adventure movies; Mildred Pierce, one of the best melodramas.  Other films: The Sea Wolf, Angels with Dirty Faces, and Captain Blood.  Renting his film canon, Mission to Moscow aside, is almost entirely wonderful. 

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8.  Ingmar Bergman:  No one made images like Bergman.  The Seventh Seal is easily the darkest movie ever made, and it’s got some of the most stirring pictures ever put on screen.  His version of The Magic Flute is a delight.  Then there are his others, like Fanny and Alexander, Through a Glass Darkly, The Virgin Spring.  Do you watch Bergman for a laugh?  Not unless by laughter you mean suicidal depression.  But no finer image-maker has ever stood behind a camera. 

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7.  Billy Wilder: Nobody ever mixed drama and comedy like Wilder.  And he was a master at getting great performances from his actors.  Jack Lemmon was his muse, and he used him to the fullest: he made the ultimate Matthau/Lemmon comedy in The Fortune Cookie, the ultimate Lemmon comedy, Some Like It Hot, and the beautifully understated The Apartment.  If Lemmon wasn’t his muse, William Holden was – and he’s got masterpieces like Sunset Blvd. and Stalag 17 to prove it.  Or maybe it was Audrey Hepburn – Sabrina, and Love in the Afternoon.  And that isn’t even looking at Witness for the Prosecution and Double Indemnity. The guy was a classics factory.  And all of them are fast-moving and fun to watch. 

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6.  Charlie Chaplin:  It would be a crime to leave Chaplin off this list.  Watch him toss around the globe as Hitler in The Great Dictator and tell me who you’d put in his place.  The Kid is as affecting as any movie ever made.  Modern Times is chock full of amazing sequences, and so are Modern Times, The Gold Rush, and many of his others.  The silent movie era was never so magnificent. 

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5.  Frank Capra:  In my review of the top ten most overrated directors of all time, I wrote this about Martin Scorsese: “In the musical Damn Yankees, a group of hapless baseball players sing the following lyric: ‘You’ve gotta have heart / All you really need is heart!’  Martin Scorsese never saw that musical.  His films are entirely devoid of anything resembling likable characters.  They are cold and calculating and ruthless – and boring.”  If Scorsese is the epitome of the heartless director, Capra is the embodiment of heart on screen.  It’s a Wonderful Life is simply the most heartfelt movie ever made (and it’s Jimmy Stewart’s best performance).  From It Happened One Night to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Meet John Doe to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, nobody made movie magic like Capra.  If you can sit through all his films without crying and smiling simultaneously, I’m betting there’s something wrong with your tear ducts or your cheek muscles. 

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4.  Elia Kazan:  Reviled by the Hollywood left, Kazan was also one of Hollywood’s greatest directors.  His IMDB reads like a top ten list of films: A Face in the Crowd, East of Eden, On the Waterfront, Viva Zapata!, A Streetcar Named Desire, Gentleman’s Agreement, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.  The performances Kazan elicited from his actors are groundbreaking and astonishing.  Unlike some others on this list, Kazan’s films do not date (other than Gentleman’s Agreement, perhaps) – they remain timely and prescient.  And they’re quick-moving and entertaining, which is tough to do with heavy drama.  He does it with ease. 

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3.  John Ford:  The man revolutionized movie making, and is worshipped widely for all the right reasons.  First off, the Western is the American genre, and Ford was the best.  Name the best Westerns of all time, and you’ll be sure to come up with Stagecoach, The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.  The Informer is an early masterpiece, and there’s no movie more fun than The Quiet Man (plus, the cinematography is enough to bring a tear to your eye).  Mister Roberts is a chock full of great performances (Lemmon and Cagney stand out, of course).  How Green Was My Valley is a beautiful film.  The Grapes of Wrath and Young Mr. Lincoln are rightly credited with making Henry Fonda the quintessential American actor. 

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2.  Akira Kurosawa:  Nobody plumbed the depths of human emotion like Kurosawa.  Ikiru is known by few outside the film buff community, but it is a masterful expression of human hope and tragedy.  Ran is exciting and thrilling and brilliant.  Throne of Blood is a wonderful adaptation of Macbeth.  The Seven Samurai is tremendous, an adventurous expose of the best and worst mankind has to offer.  Rashomon is a groundbreaking exploration of perspective.  I could keep going, but there’s no point – few will argue with Kurosawa’s placement on this list.

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1.  William Wyler:  Underrated beyond all rationality, Wyler was a master of all genres.  He covered gothic romance (Wuthering Heights), period pieces (Jezebel) light comedy (How to Steal a Million and Roman Holiday), film noir (The Desperate Hours and Detective Story), epic (Ben Hur), morality tale (Friendly Persuasion), horror (The Collector), western (The Westerner) and wartime drama (Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives).  His first tier films are unmatched (Dodsworth, Ben Hur, and The Best Years of Our Lives deserve to make anyone’s top ten list), and his second tier films (The Big Country, The Heiress) are better than most first-rate directors’ first-tier films.  If you don’t believe Wyler’s range, watch these three scenes back to back:

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That’s not even the best scene from The Best Years of Our Lives (the movie contains perhaps the most beautiful love scene in screen history, between Harold Russell and Cathy O’Donnell – and, in a lesson to Aronofsky and Lynch, he didn’t need to show T&A to do it).

Whom would you put on the list?