Joey runs about the family home, pointing his toy gun and “shooting” everyone. Joey’s fascination with Shane, and the growing violence in the valley, manifests itself in a scene near the end of the film, as his father Joe is gearing up to face the ruthless cattleman and his henchmen at the local saloon. In a line tailor-made for the NRA, Shane explains, “A gun is as good or bad as the man using it.” But as Marian replies, “We’d all be better off if there wasn’t a single gun in this valley, including yours.” Joey is constantly asking questions of Shane, who obliges Joey with stories and advice on how to be a quick-draw artist, which doesn’t please Marian at all. Oftentimes, action and even dialogue scenes are filmed in a long shot, as if the viewer is observing from a curious yet cautious distance. "Shane" is mostly experienced through the eyes of Joey. Shane also develops a friendship with young Joey (Brandon deWilde), who looks up to the buckskin-wearing six-gun shooter in wide-eyed wonder. Why does Shane get involved? There are hints that he may have some past association with Marian (Jean Arthur), the wife of Joe Starrett, and Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), a hired gun brought in by the cattleman to goad the settlers into getting shot. As the film opens, he rides across their property, and then into their lives after he sees that a wealthy cattleman is aiming to force the family, and many others, off their land. Shane is a gunfighter, but spends most of the film in an uncertain domesticity with the Starrett family. “A man has to be what he is,” Shane (Alan Ladd) tells young Joey (Brandon De Wilde) at the close of George Stevens’ Oscar-winning Western.
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