![]() Stevens joined the US Army Signal Corps and was sent to Europe to shoot documentary footage. The Talk of the Town, whilst still a comedy, offered commentary on mob rule and the meaning of justice, signalling Stevens was already turning more serious-minded at a time when he was planning to join the war effort and was becoming fervently anti-Nazi. Stevens ran into trouble on Penny Serenade (1941) and Woman of the Year (1942), both of which were subjected to heavy interference and reshoots, but had further success with The Talk of the Town (1942) and The More The Merrier (1943). He followed it with the much-love Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers vehicle Swing Time (1936) and other musical-comedies, and ventured into historical adventure film with 1939’s Gunga Din, a costly production that still proved a major hit. Finally breaking with Roach as he was itching make more substantial films, Stevens got his first shot at directing a feature at Universal, with The Cohens and Kellys in Trouble (1933), but it was Alice Adams (1935), starring Katharine Hepburn, which made his name. ![]() This proved the key to Stevens’ career, as he subsequently shot dozens of Laurel and Hardy shorts, as well as writing gags for them. ![]() Stevens helped make comedian Stan Laurel a movie star by applying his photographic ken to make Laurel’s eyes register on film, as their light blue hue was hard to pick up on standard film at the time. Stevens, a California native born in 1904, had dabbled in photography since he was 10 years old, and his expertise by the time he hit his late teens quickly landed him working as an assistant cameraman for the independent impresario Hal Roach. Stevens’ emergence as a maker of serious, thoughtful, often epic films in the 1950s stood in stark contrast to his reputation as a great comedy filmmaker in the 1930s and ‘40s. A grand sprawl of screen heroes from The Man With No Name to John Rambo to Robocop and Wolverine and beyond have Shane in their genes, even if so many of them discarded the original meaning of the character. Perhaps Shane is self-conscious almost to fault, one reason why its reputation in some quarters has declined in recent years, but it’s hard to get away from how exactly Stevens read both the audience of the 1950s and the imagination of other filmmakers. ![]() Plenty of movies had dealt with similar themes before, of course, but Shane set out to distil the theme on a level of perfect representation, mythologising a genre and placing it in a vital dialectic with its audience, presenting the very idea of cinema heroism in a mythic cartouche, enclosed by elemental moral drama. If Seven Samurai(1954) laid down the essential blueprint for genre films about a diverse team of heroes banding together to fight an enemy, Shane did the same for any movie about a solitary hero with a violent past trying and failing to find a new life, eventually forced to pull the guns out again in the name of a righteous new cause. The word ‘iconic’ is certainly overused, but if any film deserves the appellation it would be George Stevens’ Shane, a film that became an instant reference point for a specific branch of modern cinematic storytelling.
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