Shane is a classic Western in the self-conscious mode of High Noon, out to make a legend of a simple man and a metaphor of the challenges of the West. Oddly enough, it works both as poetry and as harsh realism. Alan Ladd may not seem to be the stuff myths are made of, but his presence in Shane lends the film a nice twist, his small stature emphasizing both the child Joey's possessive aggrandizement of his hero, and the cinema's uncanny ability to make Davids and Goliaths out of puny good guys and ratty criminals. And of course Shane is a classic American figure, the nomadic male who wanders into small-town lives and leaves them panting for more. One of the film's most celebrated beauties is its use of landscape, not as backdrop but as an integral setting for an isolated community cut off from the rest of the West by the jagged, forbidding, mist-enshrouded Grand Tetons. George Stevens' play of close-ups and long-shots emphasizes not the lyricism of these folk but their very awkwardness, their loneliness (as in the moment when a little girl raises her hand in greeting as a man's body, strapped to a horse, passes by). In the early fifties, children everywhere echoed Brandon De Wilde's poignant cry, "Shane, come back...", something they must remember now when their own children emit a plaintive, "ET, phone home." Though it is set (and was made) in an "age of innocence" (compared to a latter-day Western like The Wild Bunch), still Shane's violence was anything but muted. As Everson and Fenin write in The Western, "The scene in which Elisha Cook, Jr., is knocked over backwards from the blast of a killer's six-shooter was quite a jolt after years of clichés in the presentation of gunfights."