When Jack Schaefer’s novel Shane first appeared in France, the translator did a curious thing: he snuck Brandon De Wilde’s famous movie line “Shane! Come back!” into the text. That bit, of course, never appeared in the novel. But the fact that the unethical (aw heck, let’s be generous and downgrade the charge to “impish”) translator felt obliged to include it, either by himself or on orders from his editors, speaks volumes about the power of George Stevens’ cinematic version of the tale.

“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.” (more…)

Back in the summer of 1951, Jackson, Wyoming was a sleepy town nestled amidst a vast untamed wilderness, and George Stevens was there in the valley shooting a film called Shane. To maintain as much creative control as possible, he acted as both Producer and Director.

“I personally like to see films that are the work of as singular a consciousness as possible,” Stevens explained about his decision to do two exhausting and difficult jobs at once. But as with everything, there was a price to be paid. “It’s like trying to be a traffic cop and write a poem at the same time. You need an executive head to handle all the vast paraphernalia of moviemaking. You need another, more sensitive head to get the delicate human emotional values you are trying to put on film.”

The making of Shane, then — indeed, the making of most great films — is largely a tale of an artist using all of his powers and guile and energy to bend the technology and the paraphernalia to the arduous task of making those delicate emotional values come to life on an empty screen.

*****

The opening of Shane. A little boy, played by young Brandon De Wilde, stalks a large-horned buck with an unloaded rifle. The buck is startled by something in the distance, looks up — and there, poised right between its antlers, is a distant horseman lazily riding toward us. (more…)

One of George Stevens’ filmmaking maxims was: “The camera is not the instrument. People are always the instrument.” Nowhere in his oeuvre is this more evident than in Shane, perhaps the most peculiarly cast A-grade Western in Hollywood history.

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. (more…)

By Christmas of 1964, nowhere was safe for thirty-four-year-old Sean Connery.

It started with the fan letters — fifteen hundred per week. Then came the mobs rushing gates at movie premieres and personal appearances — screaming, fainting, tearing at his clothes, all demanding time, autographs, kisses, and more. Soon, even walking down the street incognito or taking his family out to dinner became perilous endeavors.

“The whole damn thing took over,” said his then-wife, the Academy-Award nominated actress Diane Cilento. “He really didn’t know who he was. People would call over to him things like, ‘Hey, Bondy, where’re you off to next?’ or ‘See any Soviet agents lately?’ It became impossible to have any sort of life. . . .It got madder and madder with each film.”

Every time it looked as if matters couldn’t get any worse, they did. In Tokyo (where they greeted him with screams of  “Bondo!”) Connery was using a bathroom urinal when he heard a quiet click. Startled, he glanced up to see a Japanese photographer peeking around his shoulder with a Nikon. On another occasion, after graciously signing his name for an elderly lady at the airport, she reacted with a look of horror. “No, no!” she said, “I wanted James Bond.” Director Terence Young, who was with Connery, remembers that “Sean sort of crumpled. It suddenly occurred to him that he was no longer a human being, he was a symbol.” (more…)

A kung-fu flick with fancy wire work is still a kung-fu flick and a revenge flick with CGI is still a revenger . Some may confuse “Wolverine” with a superhero film, but make no mistake, it’s a revenger of the best kind: a B-level plot with A-level action — all meat and potatoes without a vegetable anywhere in sight.

This is one of my favorite genres, especially when it comes to the smaller, lesser known – or better yet – less respected members of this family. Sure, there’s “Star Trek II,” “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “The Sting,” “Man on Fire,” and both “Kill Bill” films – love ‘em all, and so do you, but here are five you may have missed that are even more satisfying than their better known cousins.

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1. Death Wish II (1982) – Michael Winner’s first “Death Wish” (1974) is often mistaken as a revenge film when it’s really a vigilante film. For we purists that distinction matters. The original may show up on all kinds of Top 10 Revenge Film lists but at no time does Bronson’s Paul Kersey look for the thugs who murdered his wife and raped his daughter. What he does do is take it to the streets as an avenging angel to overcome his own sense of helplessness. Don’t get me wrong, it’s great because punks get blown away and liberal critics howl, but a revenger it is not. (more…)