This has been next-up on the AFI list for a loooong time, because it is legitimately hard to persuade Jess to watch a western, especially when I only like 20% want to watch it myself. But we powered through it today, and ironically this was one of her favorites on the AFI list.

The premise of the movie is that there’s a family of homesteaders with their li’l farm, right. And the free-range cattle ranchers who were there before the homesteaders moved in are angry that they’re taking up “their” ranching land, so they’re trying to drive them out.

In rides Shane, a cowboy with a mysterious past who definitely has some shooting in that past. He’s like one part haunted by his violent past and trying to flee it, and one part clearly a badass who wouldn’t mind too much if he got in a fight. Tensions escalate and hijinks ensue.

I won’t spoil the plot past that, but ironically I had the ending spoiled for me decades ago — in the movie The Negotiator, Samuel L. Jackson has a debate with I guess Kevin Spacey about what happens at the end of this movie. At the time I watched it, I had never even heard of this movie, so for decades now, all I’ve known about this movie is that the ending is ambiguous in a particular way. (Fun fact: I actually misremembered this conversation as happening in Pulp Fiction because you have to admit that “Samuel L. Jackson has a meta conversation about an old pulp movie” really really sounds like something from Quentin Tarantino, right?)

Anyway, three things about this movie:

  1. There is a really weird love triangle here, where the homesteader’s wife super-clearly has the hots for Shane. Through most of the movie, this is just subtext in glances and whatnot, but then at one point in the movie, the homesteader dude tells her “if I die, at least I know you have someone to take care of you,” so I guess he sees it, too. And then later she and Shane have a conversation that feels like it should end with them just getting it on. Old movies always make you read between the lines to figure out when characters have sex, but I don’t think they’re supposed to have in this movie, but… maybe?

  2. This is another western that leans into being Confederacy friendly. The bad guy (Jack Palance!) is a “Yankee” and he picks a fight with a sympathetic character by being all like “the Confederacy sucked, and Stonewall Jackson sucked and Robert E. Lee sucked,” and we’re supposed to be I guess identifying with the angry former Confederate soldier who’s pissed off at this. Very weird to modern eyes.

  3. But the weirdest thing of all is that the homesteader dude is chopping at a giant stump with an ax. Like, what are you even doing here, man? This is the slowest way in the world to chop down your stump (like, saws were invented by then, right?) And even when you’re done, all you’ll have is… a stump that’s slightly lower to the ground. What’s your endgame here? This should just be a bit of background action to fill a scene, and I’d let it go if it were, but it turns out to be one of his first significant interactions with Shane that they team up to hack up this stump.

Overall, though, my take isn’t quite as positive as Jess’s. I think the movie is basically fine, but not more than that. It actually reminds me of Unforgiven or GTA IV in that it wants to be about how violence is bad and a trauma-stricken guy trying to get away from all that, but then also it wants to be clear that he’s a total badass who can fuck some people up, and the movie thinks that’s very cool. I’ve certainly seen worse westerns, but this one at best is just a reasonable example of the genre, not anything that transcends it. I don’t think you need it on the AFI list, we’re already good with westerns there.