Shane is a 1953 American Technicolor Western film starring Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur, and Van Heflin.

[9] It also features Brandon deWilde, Jack Palance, Emile Meyer, Elisha Cook Jr., Edgar Buchanan, and Ben Johnson.

[10] Shane, a laconic but skilled gunfighter with a mysterious past,[6] rides into an isolated valley in the sparsely settled Wyoming Territory in 1889.

A drifter, he is hired as a farmhand by hardscrabble rancher Joe Starrett, who is homesteading with his wife, Marian, and their young son, Joey.

Though they have claimed their land legally under the Homestead Acts, a ruthless cattle baron, Rufus Ryker, has hired various rogues and henchmen to harass them and force them out of the valley.

At Torrey's funeral, the settlers discuss abandoning their struggle and leaving the valley, but after witnessing one of their homesteads being destroyed in a fire set by Ryker's men, they find new resolve to continue the fight.

[11] It was the first film to be projected in a "flat" widescreen 1.66:1 ratio, a format that Paramount invented to offer audiences a wider panorama than television could provide.

[12] Although never explicitly stated, the basic plot elements of Shane were derived from the 1892 Johnson County War in Wyoming, the archetypal cattlemen/homesteaders conflict, which also served as the background for The Virginian and Heaven's Gate.

[13] The physical setting is the high plains near Jackson, Wyoming, and many shots feature the Grand Teton massif looming in the near distance.

[15] A careful review of Shane's gun-skill demonstration to Joey shows Alan Ladd firing with his eyes closed.

[17] The final scene, in which the wounded Shane explains to a distraught Joey why he has to leave ("There's no living with a killing"), was a moving moment for the entire cast and crew, except Brandon deWilde.

"[16] Director George Stevens originally wanted Montgomery Clift and William Holden for the Shane and Starrett roles; when both proved unavailable, Stevens asked Paramount executive Y. Frank Freeman for a list of available actors with current contracts; within three minutes, he chose Alan Ladd, Van Heflin, and Jean Arthur.

She accepted the part at the request of Stevens, who had directed her in The Talk of the Town (1942) with Cary Grant and Ronald Colman, and The More the Merrier (1943) for which she received her only Oscar nomination.

[18] When asked if he enjoyed the movie, the author of Shane, Jack Schaefer, replied, “Yeah, I did, all except for that runt", referring to the five-foot-six-inch (168 cm) Ladd.

[19] In 1989, Schaefer told the Oberlin alumni magazine that his Shane character was supposed to be a “dark, deadly person" whom he had hoped would be played by George Raft.

Using a newly cut aperture plate in the movie projector, and a wider-angle lens, the film was exhibited in first-run venues at an aspect ratio of 1.66:1.

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

"[26] Woody Allen has called Shane "George Stevens' masterpiece", on his 2001 list of great American films, along with The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, White Heat, Double Indemnity, The Informer, and The Hill.

It reimagines the story of the Shane, with Ken Parker as a lone hero protecting a broken settler family in the American West.