Meanwhile on the home video front...
Shane (George Stevens / 1953)
The Ballad of Little Jo (Maggie Greenwald / 1993)
Two more Westerns, coincidentally forty years apart...
First up,
Shane, the classic from director George Stevens, starring Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur and Van Heflin. I had borrowed this on DVD before, but now I own the Blu-ray, and it is
definitely one of the all-time greats. The aspect of the story which really impressed me was the fact that the character Shane is truly a mystery. We don't really know who is, or where he came from. We know he's quick with a gun, we sense a dark past, and we sense that he's trying to turn over a new leaf by working with the Starrett family. We sense that he doesn't want to get involved in any trouble, but trouble arrives anyway in the form of belligerent cattle baron Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), his henchmen, and the later arrival of Shane's opposite number, the sinister Jack Wilson (Jack Palance), after which he's forced to rely on the gunslinging talents which he had attempted to forsake. In a way, Alan Ladd's Shane kind of reminds me of the "Superman speech" made by David Carradine as the title character in
Kill Bill: Volume 2 (2004). Shane is a former killer, a kind of Western
Übermensch, who in working for the Starretts is attempting to be just another guy, a working man. Jack Palance's Wilson, on the other hand, has no such illusions, and in fact harbors a bemused supervillain-like contempt for most of the people around him. One gets the feeling that when Ryker enlists Wilson as a show of force against Van Heflin's Joe Starrett and his fellow homesteaders - whom he refers to as "squatters" - he really has no understanding of just what sort of force he is unleashing. Inevitably, things come to a head and Shane must face down Wilson as well as Ryker and his men.
Next, we have a wonderful little film called
The Ballad of Little Jo. I had heard
of this movie for a while now, and I decided to make a blind purchase of the Kino Lorber Blu-ray edition. And it really is a
very good film, very moving and very elegiac. It's based on an incredible true story which took place in the late 19th century. It deals with Josephine Monaghan (Suzy Amis), a young woman from somewhere in the Eastern U.S. who has an affair with her family's portrait photographer and has a child out of wedlock. Banished by her family in disgrace (the child having been adopted by her sister), she heads out West and finds that a young woman living alone there has precious few options. After narrowly escaping an attempted rape, Josephine decides to cut her hair, scar her face with a razor, and attempt to pass herself off as a man named "Jo," eventually finding work as a shepherd. She eventually falls in love with a Chinese laborer nicknamed "Tinman" (David Chung) who very quickly figures out that "Mr. Jo" is no Mister. Suzy Amis is wonderful in the lead role, and the rest of the cast is equally distinguished. Ian McKellen plays a very volatile and dangerous man named Percy who befriends Jo. Bo Hopkins plays Frank Badger, a none-too-bright but gregarious man who gives Jo the shepherding job. And very early on, the late great René Auberjonois makes an appearance as a slimy traveling salesman named Hollander. Also, there is a beautiful, folky musical score by David Mansfield, mainly centered on acoustic guitar. I was deeply moved by this movie and I love it a great deal. I would heartily recommend it to anyone who hasn't seen it.
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