The great animal "actors" in Shane

One of the elements that make Shane one of the best Westerns ever (or for that matter among the best films of any type) is the great interaction of animals in various scenes, from the lone deer standing in the river watching the approaching rider in the opening scene to Stonewall Torrey's faithful dog pawing at the casket as it's lowered into the grave, to the frightened horses and cattle trying to escape as Van Heflin and Alan Ladd battle on the stage set.

Well, last night I watched the special feature of that DVD in which George Stevens Jr., son of the director, talked about this and other features of that film.

Turns out the spot in the river where they built the sodbuster cabin where the squatter and his wife and child were to live was a favorite location for the wild deer in that opening scene and which later comes in the yard in another morning scene to eat vegetables from the garden, awakening the boy. In fact, the deer was a pest who kept going into the river at that spot day after day after day to the point that the crew went to considerable time and trouble trying to chase it away so it wouldn't show up in other scenes! So one of the prettiest scenes in the film was just the result of a pesky deer.

Another of my favorite "actors" in the film was Stonewall's dog who played such a sentimental scene at the graveyard. But according to Stevens Jr. who as a teen worked on this movie on location with his father, this was the least trained, least dependable of several dogs and other animals on that set. Darn thing kept wandering off instead of doing what they wanted it to in various scenes. Like for instance when Torrey gets gunned down by Jack Wilson and his friend is carrying the lifeless body past the isolated farms, the dog was supposed to be trotting faithfully behind his dead master, but kept wandering off to explore the country side. To get the desired action, the head wrangler who furnished and worked with all the animals had to drape himself belly down on the horse, playing the dead body. Then the dog faithfully followed his real, live master!

They also had a problem getting the dog to sit faithfully at the graveside, so this time the wrangler got down in the grave and they lowered Torrey's wooden casket on top of him, resulting in a great shot of the worried-looking dog tentatively pawing at the wooden casket as it was lowered into the grave. Stevens Jr. said that with the dog and with one of the extra's mournfully playing taps on the harmonica, a lot of the actors and crew actually teared up during the scene and were startled moments after the cut when the wrangler started hollering for someone to let him out of the hole!

There was a later scene still at the graveyard when Brandon de Wilde was holding the dog on the leash when the dog again tries to wander off, and Stevens Jr. points out the boy yanking him back with the leash. In another scene in the saloon as Shane faces off with Jack Wilson, there's a great shot of another dog lying between them that looks at the two men, gets up and leaves the room. "Good dog," Stevens said.

But the scene that always puzzled me the most was how the heck they got those horses and cattle to "act" so frightened in the big fistfight scene with the horses rearing and pulling at their reins tied to the hitching rack and the cattle breaking their corral to escape. Stevens Jr. revealed the secret--standing just out of camera range but in full sight of the horses and cattle on that soundstage set, they had a guy from the crew dressed in a bear suit! The horses and cattle were frightened out of their minds by a fake bear!!!

Ahh, the magic of Hollywood!

May I hijack your thread and ask for a show of hands about the ending?

How many of you think Shane died at the end?

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It's been a long while since I read the book, but I seem to recall that it had something about a body being found later in the mountains that could have been Shane. Or maybe I'm confusing it with the book on which another film was based, Warlock.

We have one clue from George Stevens Jr. in that special feature on the DVD that I was talking about in my first post. Stevens Jr. said his father came back from World War II and that the first movie he saw after 3 years of no movies was a John Wayne Western that caused the senior Stevens to complain that "they were using guns like guitars--someone would get shot and he'd get up and keep shooting." After all the death and destruction he saw in Europe during WWII, Stevens said, his father wanted to make a movie that showed guns as deadly weapons, not just props. So in the scene where Shane demonstrates to the boy how he can shoot, Stevens cranked up the sound so that the gunfire is unusually loud. I remember, too, when I first saw the film as a boy in a movie theater, the roar of the gunfire was really surprising. Also, Stevens was the first to attach cables to actors and jerk them back as they get shot. In the scene where Jack Palance as Jack Wilson guns down Elisha Cook Jr. as Stonewall Torry, Stevens Jr. said his dad first had the street watered for 2 days until it was inches thick in mud (causing Cook to slip as he walked) and then he had two big stagehands grab the cable attached to the small Cook and give it a hard yank when he's "shot." As a result, Cook lands on his back in the mud and slides a short distance. Same is seen with Palance when he crashes backward into those barrels.

So, in the final shoot-out, Shane is the only one of the wounded who is not knocked down by the shot that hits him, therefore one might assume that the bullet (or was it buckshot?) did not hit him as squarely and may have just clipped him some (maybe just being hit by a few buckshot in a "near miss" instead of catching the full charge. So he doesn't go down, he doesn't appear to be bleeding much, he can still walk and talk and can still mount his horse and stay in the saddle. It would have made more sense to clean and treat his wound before leaving--if it were treatable. But he gets way up in those mountains and is still in the saddle, so I figure he wasn't hurt that badly and likely did live.

By the way, don't mind the "high-jack" at all. This open to anything about Shane or about animal actors or whatever anyone wants to talk about.

That was a great post rufnek, and for the record I like to believe he also didn't die. All that stuff you're talking about makes me want to get the DVD, sadly my VHS copy just doesn't seem to have any of these extras you're referring to.

I really want to see those extras. Thanks for bringing them up, Rufnek. I am obsessive about all things to do with animal training; especially dog related.

I have watched Babe about 1000 times just try to figure out how they might have trained the animals to do certain behaviors, then I practice on my dogs.

Yeah, I love the added features to a lot of the DVDs that are missing on VHS. Like subtitles--it really helps with films where there is gunfire or other noises or when young people are using slang with which I'm unfamilar or especially in English and other foreign films where sometimes it's hard to understand what they're saying. But what I like best is that a whole lot of the DVDs feature a running assessment of the film in voice overs by the actors or writer or director or someone who has inside knowledge where they tell you how they managed to get a certain shot or that this line was ad libbed or the actor suggested this bit of business, etc. One thing I learned from George Stevens Jr.'s discussion was that his father used telephoto lenses to shoot a lot of the outdoor scenes, which brought up the Teton mountains in the background to where they looked like they were looming over the scene. He pointed out a few wideangle shots where the mountains looked like small hills on the horizon, but with the telephoto lens, you can almost reach out and touch them.

He also talked about how they had planted vegetation to get a certain look from some of the scenes, like a clump of trees, one on one side of the dirt road and two on the other that was used as the frame--doorway, if you will--for the farmers when they were coming into town. He pointed out that small town consists of a few buildings all on the same side of the street, which was often the case in real towns of the Old West. And he said that in most Western films, buildings were on both sides of the street because often one or more of those buildings were blocking the sight of Culver City or some modern location in the background, since the films were being shot on the studio lot.

It's worth the price of the DVD just to hear how Stevens went about preparing and shooting Shane. For instance, Montgomery Clift was cast to play Shane, William Holden was to be the farmer he befriends, and Katherine Hepburn was to play the wife. But because of delays, Clift and Holden had other commitments when they were preparing to shoot, so Stevens picked up a list of players who the studio had under contract and in 3 minutes picked his cast.