BD 123 Shane

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domino harvey
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#26 Post by domino harvey » Mon Feb 29, 2016 9:59 am

Amazon canceled my order, so I guess the original release is gone. That's okay, unlike On the Waterfront there's really no need to have different aspect ratios for this one, but it was an interesting curiosity nonetheless

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bugsy_pal
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#27 Post by bugsy_pal » Tue Mar 01, 2016 9:31 pm

They cancelled mine too - I'm a bit bummed about it :(

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kuzine
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#28 Post by kuzine » Wed Mar 02, 2016 6:28 am

Actually, when I received the cancellation e-mail, I followed the link in that e-mail to the product page and it showed up as in stock there from Amazon ("few remaining"). Ordered again immediately and it shipped in the meantime....It was out of stock again soon after, but strange anyhow that earlier orders weren't honoured but cancelled.

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domino harvey
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#29 Post by domino harvey » Thu Mar 10, 2016 10:00 am

Interestingly, the US Blu-Ray has also gone OOP and is fetching $60+ on the Marketplace. Really kicking myself for not picking up the MoC when it was like ten pounds because I thought it wasn't worth the effort of reselling my Warners Blu!

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Drucker
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#30 Post by Drucker » Thu Mar 10, 2016 10:56 am

Like Sorcerer, the regular Warner blu seems to be in stock on Amazon CA, fwiw.

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hearthesilence
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#31 Post by hearthesilence » Thu Mar 10, 2016 11:00 am

Image

Shane, come back!

Anyway, frustrating considering all the work that went into that release, but they did say it was a limited edition. So it goes...

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MichaelB
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#32 Post by MichaelB » Thu Mar 10, 2016 11:15 am

Eureka is bringing out a single-disc edition that will contain virtually everything from the two-discer apart from the widescreen versions. Which, as Domino correctly says, are no more than a historical curiosity.

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bugsy_pal
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#33 Post by bugsy_pal » Thu Mar 10, 2016 8:08 pm

There is an Australian bluray of Shane which I cold pick up dirt cheap (as I live in Oz). But I will not, because many Paramount releases here do not include any of the extras found in US or UK releases. Why this is the case, I don't know - but it seems very common with their releases.

Reviews are not always available to verify the presence or absence of extras, but they certainly aren't mentioning them on the packaging. With Chinatown, for example, they clearly Photo-shopped the back cover artwork to remove the listing of extras, and left a big space there.

I don't want to get too far off topic, but before Christmas I finally bit the bullet and bought 'It's a Wonderful Life' on Paramount BD for $8 on special. I believe that the US and UK versions have both the original and colourised versions. There was no mention of the colourised version on the Australian packaging, so I took it home and popped it in the player, expecting to see the black and white version - but instead we get the colourised version! WTF?

Anyway, I'll be getting MOC's Shane when it's reissued.

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Luke M
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#34 Post by Luke M » Thu Jun 09, 2016 7:54 pm

I just placed an order for the 1-disc Shane (along with The 'burbs) for about $34 on Amazon.uk. It's interesting that you can easily get MoC and Arrow releases for under $20 but getting a Criterion at $20 is a bi-annual event.

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tenia
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#35 Post by tenia » Fri Jun 10, 2016 2:10 am

Luke M wrote:It's interesting that you can easily get MoC and Arrow releases for under $20 but getting a Criterion at $20 is a bi-annual event.
So Criterion is thus much more likely to sell at a higher price to people who can't wait (or don't know they should).
I'm wondering if it translates into more high-price sales.

Noiradelic
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#36 Post by Noiradelic » Fri Jun 10, 2016 3:04 am

Luke M wrote:I just placed an order for the 1-disc Shane (along with The 'burbs) for about $34 on Amazon.uk. It's interesting that you can easily get MoC and Arrow releases for under $20 but getting a Criterion at $20 is a bi-annual event.
Counting the Criterion site's flash sales, a quarterly event. And with coupons etc., you can get them under $20 during the B&N sales.

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Luke M
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#37 Post by Luke M » Fri Jun 10, 2016 1:01 pm

tenia wrote:
Luke M wrote:It's interesting that you can easily get MoC and Arrow releases for under $20 but getting a Criterion at $20 is a bi-annual event.
So Criterion is thus much more likely to sell at a higher price to people who can't wait (or don't know they should).
I'm wondering if it translates into more high-price sales.
The Brits have a lower tolerance for higher prices of DVD/Blu-rays, maybe?

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Drucker
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#38 Post by Drucker » Wed May 31, 2023 12:20 pm

I revisited this last night, after intending to for years, as my first watch really didn't do much for me. I must not have been in the right mood as the film totally blew me away. Westerns are one genre I'll watch nearly anything, and feel like I have a pretty good handle on the classics, but Shane still sticks out as being a really unique feeling film. The first moment I began to feel that way was in the first scene at the bar where Shane is shooed away. I think there is some combination of the technicolor imagery and utter silence of so much of this film that really makes it stand out. I know these aren't necessary fully unique to this particular film, but the way Stevens portrays and uses silence I found to be terrifically effective. Does Shane do a better job than most westerns of stripping the plot to its essence like this? Ryker is a gruesome antagonist, but his speech about building the country is beautiful and makes you sympathize with him. Chris Calloway is also emblematic of what works so well: the man slowly changes over time without getting basically any screen time, merely reacting to events. Wilson was brought in to scare the homesteaders, but achieves very little in terms of his overall goal.

Is the brilliance of the film that actually very little happens? Stevens gives us the perfect amount of character and story development without duplicating anything? A single fight and a character changes, a single stand-off, a single death in the whole film? The stakes keep raising as the film progresses but Stevens gets the most out of each scene and feels like he leaves it alone.

Anyway, those are my scattered thoughts for the day. I don't know why it didn't click with me a few years ago, but it certainly did last night.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#39 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed May 31, 2023 2:37 pm

It's really grown on me too over time. My thoughts from the 50s project a few years back:
therewillbeblus wrote:
Sun May 10, 2020 10:44 pm
I know this isn’t a board favorite but I’ve come around to liking this one over the years after an apathetic reaction in college. I find the action scenes to be engaging, well-choreographed, and occasionally intense- especially the Palance/Elisha Cook Jr. dare. It’s a fun western, and also one that explores the complicated questions of natural or constructed identities, and how vigilantism initiates harm no matter how good the intentions, creating a moral paradox that has been explored many times since (most recently, The Dark Knight comes to mind).

Shane’s disruption to the family system is interesting to experience without Heflin’s emasculated patriarch reacting as strongly as expected, even as he is on the verge of being cuckolded. Shane’s projected role becoming his identity by everyone, including the child, makes his own predicament complex. His reactiveness to sound insinuates a more traumatic root to his response than your average western when this occurs, uncovering a brewing of nervous tremors that sit permanently under the guise of calm confidence, and the boy’s point-of-view on events lends to a forced maturation in vulnerabilities of adults, which conflicts with icon-worship ideals. These are conscientiously not reduced to fantasies but show how men can actually become heroes in a subjective sense within the confines of reality and their own fallibility. This is no epic or exceptionally intelligent western a la Ford or Mann, but among the cute western-melodrama programmers, it’s one of the better standouts.

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Drucker
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#40 Post by Drucker » Wed May 31, 2023 4:09 pm

I had no idea the forum was so lukewarm on this, though I suppose it doesn't generally crack the top 10 in our western lists. I'm surprised even in your praise you damn it as not exceptionally intelligent. It may lack the power of Mann or intelligence and profoundness of Ford, but I found it be a truly emotional picture. Shane is a doomed man that cannot outrun his identity, and while this is certainly a not uncommon theme (The Searchers, The Gunfighter), I found Alan Ladd's performance to be really powerful, especially with how quietly he plays the part. And that ending is just incredible. The scene doesn't need to drag out, because the conflict has been brooding for the entire film. Quick and to the point, it still packs the same punch a longer more drawn out and dramatic ending would have.

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Black Hat
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#41 Post by Black Hat » Wed May 31, 2023 4:55 pm

Funny thing for the east coast sports fans among us, for years and years Mike Francesca would say Shane was his favorite movie so eventually I watched it and to my surprise liked it a lot. Unfortunately, I don't remember much about it besides thinking the corny aspects worked quite well.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#42 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed May 31, 2023 5:25 pm

Drucker wrote:
Wed May 31, 2023 4:09 pm
I'm surprised even in your praise you damn it as not exceptionally intelligent. It may lack the power of Mann or intelligence and profoundness of Ford, but I found it be a truly emotional picture. Shane is a doomed man that cannot outrun his identity, and while this is certainly a not uncommon theme (The Searchers, The Gunfighter), I found Alan Ladd's performance to be really powerful, especially with how quietly he plays the part.
Huh, I’m certainly not “damning” it as unintelligent (everything I said before that is pretty clearly recognizing depth and complexity ignored in most everything I’ve read on the film!) but comparing it to certain filmmakers who pitch their focuses on skillfully unpacking the western with relentless pursuit. I think Shane is way more laid back and implicit in its depth, but very explicit in the thinly-explored aspects more often acknowledged (sexuality and the like). I suppose I meant intelligently directed rather than thematically-sewn, since the filmmaking is less formally pronounced than those other two I mentioned, and can at times pass for a more programmatic genre entry. But I also won’t pretend to know what Three-years-ago-‘Me’ was thinking, especially since I’ve always felt that the final showdown in the bar was expertly constructed. It’s one of the few western showdowns I rewind and watch at least a second time through every viewing, just to catch the clever editing and blocking going on, so I obviously don’t think Stevens is a slouch either!

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Rayon Vert
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#43 Post by Rayon Vert » Wed May 31, 2023 10:33 pm

Count me in the pro-Shane group and it's nice to see such appreciations. I definitely think I understand TW's defense of his initial review - however not at any moment during its running time do I ever think of it as a near-"programmatic" entry. Quite the contry. Despite the simplicity I think it often feels, if not "epic', then very mythic and not completely real - for example, the way the little cabin is foregrounded in that vast empty horizon with blue sky above, the way Shane arrives out of nowhere and plays a role almost like a guardian angel. There's something ambitious in that sense, that if anything makes Mann's works by contrast more like near-programmers (which is saying nothing about their quality or depth, since I admire and love several of them more than Shane).

Andrew Sarris spoke about this film and the films that buffer it, A Place in the Sun and Giant, as comprising an "American Dream trilogy" and looking back on Shane thought it ponderous and "overelaborated". One might agree or disagree with that assessment, but I think he's reacting to something along the lines of what I feel when I watch the film, kind of like an attempt to make a Big Statement out of a small story that invites that sort of potential criticism.

On the topic of esteem for this film, I think also of Woody Allen in interviews often mentioning this as one of the (few?) Hollywood films he admired.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#44 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed May 31, 2023 10:45 pm

Yeah I meant programmatic in the sense of embodying a classical formula without flashy auteurism. I completely agree that the nuances transport this into mythicism without overstating its epic scope through production aesthetics, which in many ways is more impressive. A lot of this feedback is focusing on the one line of misperceived negativity in my initial writeup, but I didn’t mean it as such, and hope that the two preceding paragraphs highlight enough notices of admiration of its complexity to negate these queries. I'd love to get a conversation going on how the film portrays the moral paradox of vigilantism, the intricacies of how Shane fits into the family system to stabilize it (or not) and why, the attention to his traumas pitted against the tragedy of his facade and how becoming an accidental idol seals his fate and contributes the most utilitarian good to the group, or how the boys-eye-view works -consistently or not- to exhibit the flaws of adults as a necessary revelation for the child to mature, but one that is deeply sad by irreversibly shattering his illusory innocence in the process. Does he now have a chance of being spared from a fate like Shane's, or does that awakening bring him into finally coexisting with Shane as an 'equal' sober partner, thereby forging a real intimacy -even from afar looking at his back- in contrast to the games that anticipated this stage?

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Rayon Vert
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#45 Post by Rayon Vert » Wed May 31, 2023 10:57 pm

Thanks for fleshing out what you meant by programmatic, it's getting clearer still!

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Drucker
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#46 Post by Drucker » Thu Jun 01, 2023 11:13 am

TWBB agreed about the moral paradox of vigilantism, and definitely didn't mean to imply you're calling the film unintelligent.

I think there are two components that really make the film special. Shane really is like a guest out of nowhere. We the audience get so little information about him, but Ladd's acting clearly communicate a man trying to assimilate into a normal life. There's significantly less backstory about him than say Ethan in The Searchers. I think about Tony Sopranos rant about Gary Cooper in High Noon, and yet Ladd here not only embodies that mythology so well (a man needing to step up and being a man) but before taking that step he has revealed so little about himself, and his tenderness in the scenes leading up to the first fight are so effective. I think this gets to what you're saying TWBB about how well he acts and communicates what you've outlined above.

Your question about 'vigilantism' is great as well. We don't have single lawman in the film that I can remember? Nobody who stands up to proclaim themselves sheriff. In fact there doesn't seem to be any real greater push for law & order from the broader community, nor acknowledgements about the larger federal government! In fact, the movie's protagonists appear to be Confederate sympathizers, which may explain this. The character that you would think would have a desire for outside law and order, the restaurant owner, seems pretty content with letting Ryker control the community, and asks that guests of his establishment not disturb him. In the absence of formal authority, the community requires a Shane, lest the little people be run roughshod over.

I think the film works because we are dropped into a community with an already existing dynamic, given very little explicit backstory about that dynamic or how it's playing out in the larger world, and Shane (with a perfect performance, again) sets things straight, without too much change in the initial community dynamic.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: BD 123 Shane

#47 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Jun 01, 2023 3:25 pm

Interesting thoughts - I agree that the film is effective for how it drops us into an existing dynamic, but more specifically because of what Shane's intrusion unveils about the value underneath the iceberg of these surface-level dynamics (disorder, complacency) and what he lacks that they have. The boy is infatuated with Shane (everyone kinda is) because he represents freedom from the rote orchestrations of the community, a lone wolf who has no ties and can thereby elastically engage as he pleases. But the elisions of Shane's past, only filled in tacitly by his traumatic reactions to noise etc., in contrast to connected systems he crosses paths with, insinuate a conversely tragic narrative: That instead of the liberated lone wolf he appears as externally, he's plagued with loneliness internally.

The iceberg theory is applied across other parties involved. The boy and we may be inclined to view the father as cowardly next to Shane, and we'd probably assign such a diagnosis and move on to idolize Shane in a lesser film. But Stevens doesn't let us get away with such a simplified impression, and actually works to build one of the core themes around this rejection of the audience's "child-eyed" positioning throughout the story. He engages us on an adult level and posits that perhaps allowing us to rest in fantasy is akin to treating us like children, or rather permitting us a reductive perspective when there's endless complexity able to be acknowledged as subtext without overemphasizing it. This challenge also prompts us to validate Shane's humanity as more than his cool exterior, creating a reciprocal relationship of mutual respect in unpacking the layers of perspective between viewer and character.

So the pat, polarizing comparison between the two men only works under the child's-eye fantasy of what "heroism" is and what it can accomplish. If Joe stood up to these villains without any support from the law, he knows he would die and leave his family traumatized, poor, and even more vulnerable to harm. So for a man who is responsible for others and connected to his social context, his complacency is the most heroic path he can take in a realist world. He's fated to these conditions, but can choose to cower or face the triggers within. Joe subverts traditional expectations of what masculinity and protection look like in how he accomplishes this, which includes inaction around the threat of cuckolding when something shiny and new comes alongside him and forces feelings of inadequacy to contend with the less-sexy duty of sticking to his roots to keep the family system safe and stable.

On the other hand, Shane's circumstances of being segregated from communities has led to him developing more violent survival skills, further determining his role within new contexts as a disrupter. He doesn't belong anywhere, so he inherently agitates norms within systems as he enters them. His existence will affect the community against his will even when he's trying to just keep his head down, because that disruption causes tensions to brew outside of his control, so (much like Joe's ownership of his agency under his own powerless circumstances) he may as well participate with his will if the system will revolt aggressively either way.

This may result in eruptions that are actionably thrilling and exciting and extreme, in the eyes of the boy and the audience, but the trauma and isolation and pain that occur inside his heart -or outside the margins of the frame- are implicitly acknowledged. I think Heflin's character and performance are essential for this to succeed, since his character's mannerisms inform the realist landscape of the town's dynamic and paint a rich portrait through subtle restraint. As previously mentioned, Heflin isn't dumb; he knows what Shane's presence gives his wife and son, that just by simply existing without roots Shane shines as a sexy mirage of 'possibility' outside the banal mechanics of corporeal preservation they endure in Sisyphean routine. He is a man who recognizes the part of him that is frustrated and humiliated by Shane's presence, half-resents him but ultimately understands it's a systems-issue and not an intention of the man himself. He basically spends the film wrestling with a sea of personal and interpersonal impulses alongside his daily duties, and continually arrives at a humble place of balance for the sake of the people he is connected to and loves most. Heflin makes it clear that this requires a lot of therapeutic effort to unblend from emotional drives toward logical ones, but without forcing the spotlight onto him with pity, which reflects the character's modesty via film grammar. It's a marvelous tweak on the typical role of the threatened patriarch, proposing that the most 'masculine' (read: protective) intervention we can take is one of wise restraint rather than rash assertiveness.

I think the film asks an interesting question about systems: Do variables (in the form of people like Shane, or otherwise) need to exist to disrupt complacency, and improve functioning for other members of the system? How do these people in thankless roles develop as outcasts of communities, only to magnetically return to them to be of assistance, but never a 'part of'? Is it an organic or learned moral code that allows some to return in the form of Shanes vs all the rogue gangsters who make up their own sense of ordered morality? I love how that last question isn't even attempted to be touched - it's an elision as much a mystery as Shane's history, a mythic piece of amusement a child might wonder about while they still can. The rest of the adults live in the real world, where that really doesn't matter. What matters is that some Shanes exist alongside the evil who may have come from similar circumstances of exclusion, because thank god for that.

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