My American Literature Lesson on Shane

Gary North - August 11, 2017

Here is a sample lesson from the Ron Paul Curriculum: my analysis of the movie. This course is for seniors: American Literature. I teach the course with movies from 1915 on. Why? Because America's greatest contribution to literature has been its movies. Second, students prefer watching movies to reading books. This way, I can teach the basics of literary criticism based on documents the students have actually completed. Maybe. Possibly. I hope.

They watch a movie on Monday and Wednesday. I offer a lesson on Tuesday and Thursday. On Friday, there is a writing assignment and a review of the week's work.

Shane won an Academy Award for "Best Cinematography, Color." If there had been an Oscar for "Best Movie to Make a Fight Between a Man 5'7" and a Man 6'2" Seem Equal," it deserved to win: Alan Ladd vs. Ben Johnson.

Reading assignment:

Gary North, "A Matter of Motivation: Elisha Cook and Jack Palance in Shane." Download here.

Of all the villains in the history of Westerns, Jack Wilson set the standard of evil. Palance was perfectly cast.

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.