Welcome to "Saturday Night at the Movies."

I'm your host, Glenn Holland.

Tonight's movie is the classic 1953 Western "Shane."

The screenplay by AB Guthrie Jr. and Jack Sher was adapted from Jack Schaefer's 1949 novel of the same title.

"Shane" was directed by George Stevens and stars, Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, Van Heflin, and Brandon deWilde with support from Jack Palance, Ben Johnson, Edgar Buchanan, Emile Meyer, and Elisha Cook Jr.

In 1889, a weary stranger rides into an isolated valley in Wyoming territory and stops at the homestead of a farmer, Joe Starett, his wife, Marian, and their young son Joey.

Joey is fascinated by the stranger who's dressed in buck skin with a nickel-plated pistol in a holster strapped to his thigh.

The stranger is polite but wary and Starett keeps a shotgun trained on him wanting to know why the stranger has stopped there and what his business might be.

Starett's homestead has been repeatedly vandalized by men working for cattleman Rufus Ryker, who raises his cattle on the range that has now been given over to farms by the Homestead Acts.

Ryker's men continually act to intimidate the settlers, many of them immigrants who are trying to eke a living out of the land the cattlemen had once used to graze their stock.

While Starett interrogates the stranger who gives his name as Shane, a group of Ryker's men ride up and threaten Starett.

When Shane stands up to them, Starett recognizes him as a friend and a potential ally, and hires him as a ranch hand, much to the delight of young Joey.

As Starett and Shane work together on the farm, Joey comes to idolize Shane while at the same time Shane and Starett's wife Marian feel a growing attraction for each other.

But even as Shane tries to settle into the daily routine of farm life, he finds himself being increasingly drawn into the middle of the smoldering range war between Rufus Ryker's men and the towns folk who just want to farm their homesteads in peace.

Jack Schaefer grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where his father was a good friend of poet Carl Sandburg.

Jack read widely as a child and later referred to himself as a literary nut.

After studying English at Oberlin College and Columbia University, he had a long career as a journalist for the United Press.

He began writing fiction in the mid-1940s as a form of relaxation.

A fan of the works of Zane Grey since his youth, Schaefer was a student of the Old West, but was also familiar with classical mythology and the works of 19th century novelists like Charles Dickens and Alexander Dumas, as well as pulp writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of "Tarzan."

In 1946, Schaefer had a three-part story, "Writer From Nowhere," published in Argosy Magazine.

He later reworked this story into his first novel, "Shane."

At the time, it was published in 1949, Schaefer had never been west of northeastern Ohio.

Several major themes come together in "Shane" to raise it above the level of the standard Western.

One theme is the changing nature of the west to the wake of the Homestead Acts of 1862 and 1866 that opened up millions of acres of government land to homesteaders.

The migration of settlers to the open land that previously provided grazing for vast herds of cattle, as well as the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 meant, if not an end to a particular way of life, at least the accommodation of that way of life to a new set of realities.

Most of the lore of the Old West and the stories that spread glorified, and to a certain extent, created that lore is set in the 41 years between the California Gold Rush in 1849 and the closing of the frontier in 1890.

As the West changed and saw more settled communities and its territories one by one became states of the Union over the years, there was less and less room for those men and women who had been, in various ways, responsible for the West becoming more civilized in the first place.

The story of "Shane," both the book and the motion picture is in many ways a story about a man trying to find a new way to live when it has become clear to him that his previous way of life is no longer viable or desirable, but it is also the story about the rough birth of a new settled West and how that birth was enabled, in part, by those later unable to find their own place in it.

Initially, director George Stevens had wanted Montgomery Clift to play the part of Shane and William Holden to play Joe Starrett.

When they proved unavailable, Stevens asked Paramount Studios for a list of actors who were available and quickly chose Alan Ladd and Van Heflin for the leading roles instead.

He also cast Jean Arthur as Marian Starrett.

He had directed Arthur in the comedy "The Talk of the Town" with Cary Grant and Ronald Coleman in 1942, and the romantic comedy, "The More the Merrier" in 1943, for which Arthur was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Performance by an Actress.

Arthur was 50 years old and semi-retired when she was cast in "Shane," but she agreed to be in the film as a favor to Stevens.

Despite attempts to make her look younger, the 13-year age difference between Arthur and Alan Ladd is a weakness in the movie's romantic subplot.

Ladd had some difficulties of his own.

Although he was a popular leading man in both Westerns and film noir in the '40s and '50s, Ladd was quite short for an actor, standing about five foot seven.

John Houseman, the producer for Ladd's 1946 film noir "The Blue Dahlia," later said of him, "Since he himself was extremely short, he had only one standard by which he judged his fellow players, their height."

Directors usually made accommodations to allow Ladd to appear taller when working with other actors.

When Jack Schaefer, who wrote the novel "Shane," was asked whether he had enjoyed the film, he replied, "Yeah, I did.

All except for that runt."

Despite his tough guy movie roles, Alan Ladd was uncomfortable with guns.

The scene where Shane demonstrates his shooting skill for Joey required 116 takes before it was right.

Even then, Ladd was shooting with his eyes closed.

In the few later shooting scenes, his gun is sometimes pointing in the wrong direction when he fires.

Jack Palance had his own problems with another staple of the movie Western.

He wasn't comfortable around horses.

He had trouble both mounting and dismounting, and it took many reshoots of one scene before Palance finally managed to dismount perfectly.

Director George Stevens decided to save both trouble and film by using that same clip to serve for all of Palance's dismounts in the movies and ran it backwards to serve for every occasion when he mounted his horse as well.

One of the key elements in the success of "Shane," both as a novel and emotion picture, is the character of Joey Starrett, who loves and admires Shane without fully understanding what sort of man he is or what motivates the choices he makes.

Jack Miles, book editor for the Los Angeles Times, wrote in a retrospective in 1991, "What makes 'Shane' different, what makes it a classic among Westerns, is that it is the story told by a boy.

Schaefer understood that the Western is an American boy's dream of the world as it should be."

In the movie, Joey was played by 10-year-old Brandon deWilde, who had debuted on Broadway in "The Member of the Wedding" when he was seven.

DeWilde was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, at the time the youngest person to be nominated for the award.

He was something of a terror on location and was egged on by Jean Arthur, who had taken a liking to him.

In the moving final scene, when Shane has been wounded and explains to Joey why he has to leave, "There's no living with a killing," Every time Ladd said his line, deWilde, who was facing away from the camera, would cross his eyes and stick at his tongue, making Alan Ladd laugh.

Finally, Ladd had to call on the boy's father to get him in line.

"Make the kid stop or I'll beat him over the head."

After that, deWilde played it straight.

"Shane" proved popular with both audiences and critics.

Even Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, who was no fan of Alan Ladd's, praised the film.

He wrote, "'Shane' contains something more than the beauty and grandeur of the mountains and plains, drenched by the brilliant Western sunshine and the violent, torrential, black-browed rains.

It contains a tremendous comprehension of the bitterness and passion of the feuds that existed between the new homesteaders and the cattlemen on the open range.

It contains a disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gunfighters, who were simply legal killers under the Frontier code, and it also contains a very wonderful understanding of the spirit of a little boy amid all the tensions and excitements of a frontier home."

Please join us again next time for another Saturday Night at the Movies.

I'm Glenn Holland.

Good night.