Did anybody else see the long interview (monolog?) with Woody Allen in the Sunday NYT a few weeks ago? He said his favorite American movie is Shane and went on at length with a bunch of observations on the subleties in the movie, mostly in the interrelationship between Shane and the farmer and his wife and their son with whom Shane was living and helping battle the ranchers.
This caused me to watch the video to see all the wonderful things I'd missed the first time around when the movie came out in 1953. Well, the movie is okay, perhaps among the best westerns but far from the best western, let alone the best American movie. I guess it was a mistake to trust the judgment of a quintessential New Yorker on westerns. Alan Ladd just wasn't an authentic gunslinger or even a cowboy, in the way he talked, dressed rode or handled his gun. He looked too Hollywood, too much like Roy Rogers and his horse too much like Trigger. The straw that broke the camel's back for me was the way he twirled his gun before putting it back into its holster after dispatching the bad guy played by Jack Palance.
In my opinion, off the top of my head, The Gunfighter, The Oxbow Incident, Red River and High Noon are all better, or at least more authentic, westerns than Shane. (I'm sure there are others that don't immediately come to mind.)
