In terms of storytelling Stevens locates Shane where melodrama and medieval romance are indistinguishable, and the romance elements are unusually elegant for a western. They enable Stevens to displace the melodrama from the landgrabbers and homesteaders onto their surrogate gunslingers, Alan Ladd and Jack Palance, who fight as if on behalf of allegorical abstractions like knights in The Faerie Queene. Stevens thus isolates the good guy and bad guy from the Wyoming town life, where the only modern dramatic particularities might have been found, giving Ladd and Palance the stylized distinctness of chess pieces.

By aestheticizing the corny white-hat-vs.-black-hat story in this way Stevens sets Shane apart from the run-of-the-mill western without complicating the plot at all. Whereas The Faerie Queene has several highly developed levels of meaning that fill out its conventional encounters, Shane has only the populist sentiment in favor of the small farmers, and a sense that they represent a more efficient future. Yes, the movie sees the rule of law as making the difference between civilization and banditry, but that doesn't stop it from celebrating the violent and unauthorized murder of the villain by the hero. With Shane Stevens artfully changes the packaging but not the contents--it says "new recipe" on the outside but inside it's the same old cheese. The only thing that gives it resonance is Brandon de Wilde as the little boy who follows the white knight on his rounds, entranced, and who then calls after him when his work is done and he rides off into the landscape.

Shane is stylistically a fancy piece of work compared to High Noon, which has the didactic quality of a Sunday school parable. The point is that there are times when a man has to do what he's called on to do, no matter how unpleasant the task or dire the possible consequences. The story singles out the one man in town who instinctively understands this from all the cowards, compromisers, appeasers, etc., winnowing out the chaff like the Almighty on Judgment Day. Unlike Shane High Noon is in black-and-white and makes the "honest" choice of running in actual clock time: the 84 minutes of the movie cover 84 minutes of screen action. By analogy I suppose you can make it into a liberal message movie, or say that it's about the undeniable need at times for self-defense. I don't object to the idea that manhood may include actively standing your ground, but the script seems a little more retrogressive than that. The problem is of course that up north the man who deserved to be hanged escaped the death penalty. This is a classic device of the right-wing law-and-order melodrama, such as Clint Eastwood's 1971 cop picture Dirty Harry, in which villains knows how to exploit technicalities and loopholes in the law. Yes, violent self-defense is sometimes necessary, but a movie like High Noon chooses to show the time when it can't be avoided and it gets there by a dramatic device that is not really representative of the usual case. Carl Foreman's script is very high-minded and the direction is austere, but the movie's pleasure is to show the bad guys getting blown away outside the normal processes of law.