High Noon and Shane are a little different, as far as pervading ideology goes. Shane focuses more on the domestic and advocates a heteronormative, family-centric taming of the landscape. I think it's that, the cinematography, and the archetype of Shane (and he's so close to being a stock character because of that, but it's hard to call the textbook definition of the lone-gunfighter-knight-errant a stock character rather than an archetype) that keeps it on the classics list. It's certainly not one of my favorites, either...but I think I automatically get disowned anyhow for preferring Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood.
Interesting trivia: Jack Schaefer may have written the novel, but it was A.B. Guthrie -- Pulitzer-winning author of The Big Sky, The Way West, and four other connected novels about the West -- who did the screenplay for Shane, and Guthrie stole some stuff almost word-for-word from Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". Guthrie was good at bringing the meta into his work, though I found it a little heavy-handed in Shane.
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branchandroot
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Date: Jul. 5th, 2006 02:34 pm (UTC)Interesting trivia: Jack Schaefer may have written the novel, but it was A.B. Guthrie -- Pulitzer-winning author of The Big Sky, The Way West, and four other connected novels about the West -- who did the screenplay for Shane, and Guthrie stole some stuff almost word-for-word from Frederick Jackson Turner's essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History". Guthrie was good at bringing the meta into his work, though I found it a little heavy-handed in Shane.