Shane (1953)
Directed by George Stevens
A weary gunfighter attempts to settle down with a homestead family, but a smouldering settler and rancher conflict forces him to act.
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What critics compared Shane to
Some things are a little on the point like the clips from the Western Shane (a clear influence on this story) being watched by the group in a hotel room.
Not only does Logan make explicit reference to Shane, the film borrows the genre’s self-critical eye, questioning our need to mythologise heroes.
Traversing dusty American backroads haunted by the ravages of social downturns, this trio of interlocking misfits morph into warped western characters, a notion blatantly underlined by a scene in which Xavier and Laura watch Shane.
A closer analogue is the 1953 western Shane, which Mangold quotes liberally.
But mostly the movie is brilliantly on point in its influences — the 1953 Western classic Shane plays a key role — and how it ties in to the previous movies without being beholden to them.
Mangold uses clips and quotes to draw a pointed comparison between Logan and the protagonist of Shane, the 1953 Alan Ladd Western about an aging gunfighter whose attempts to settle down with a family lead to tragedy.
Ryan Gosling exudes no-sweat professionalism in Drive, a shamelessly entertaining genre movie from director Nicolas Winding Refn that plays like an exalted episode of Miami Vice or a stealth version of Shane.
Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman are on fine form as the terrifying heavies, but it's Gosling who anchors the movie with a strong, silent (and undeniably pretty) performance that's oddly reminiscent, as is the set-up, of the 1953 Alan Ladd western Shane.
With Gosling like an outsider gunslinger trying to protect a decent but compromised family - and sharing a chaste love for the wife and a grudging respect for the husband - Drive at times feels like a super-charged, modernised version of George Stevens' classic western, Shane.
Argento and Bertolucci included references or quotations to several American Westerns, including High Noon (in the opening scene), The Searchers (in the closing scene), Shane (again, in the closing scene), as well as 3:10 to Yuma (in a line of dialogue), John Ford�s cavalry trilogy (brief shots in Monument Valley), and numerous others, in effect making Once Upon a Time in the West the first post-modern Western.
Shane would never do this, although Wilson (Jack Palance) might have in Leone's universe.
In appearance he channels Jack Palance’s Wilson in George Stevens’ Shane, the sure-shot (and coffee-drinking, like Killer Joe) dark spirit called forth to take on the new, eponymous threat.
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Thus, when a man named Angel (Brandon Perea) comes to their aid, he is following a noble trail laid down by the hero of “Shane” (1953), who rode to the rescue of the Starretts, in their imperilled homestead.
Palmer in particular shines with an easy exuberance that feels entirely her own, and Kaluuya embodies the precise kind of laconic cowboy masculinity that defined the leading men of movies like George Stevens’ Shane .
In George Stevens's Shane the Johnson County war is enacted on two planes: the sodbusters confronting the pioneer rancher Ryker on a realistic level; Alan Ladd's angelic Shane facing up to Jack Palance's evil gunslinger Wilson in a mythic manner.
Think of Alan Ladd in Shane when he sets off to confront Jack Palance's black-hearted gunslinger: you can see it in Ladd's eyes - he's not sure he's gonna win.
He’s an old-school craftsman, an heir to filmmakers like George Stevens ( Shane , A Place in the Sun )—his movies are intimate and expansive at once, and he has a love for, and an understanding of, melodrama: He’s unafraid of intense emotions, written out in a filmmaking language that’s bold yet fine-grained, and audiences today seem to have lost touch with that vocabulary.
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Then, in the spirit of Alan Ladd in "Shane," he protects and avenges the bullied younger brother (Brendan Meyer) by breaking many bones of many sociopathic jocks in a brutal bar fight.
It's a heart-wrenching portrayal of unfulfilled Wyoming love, but this time, we don't mean Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur in Shane.