MOVIE CHRONICLE
201
stroying
in
the black figure of Jack Palance a Spirit of Evil just as
metaphysical as his own embodiment of virtue, he fades away again into
the more distant West, a man whose "day is over," leaving behind the
wondering little boy who might have imagined the whole story. The
choice of Alan Ladd to play the leading role is alone an indication of
this
film's tendency. Actors like Gary Cooper or Gregory Peck are in
themselves, as material objects, "realistic," seeming to bear
in
their
bodies and their faces mortality, limitation, the knowledge of good and
evil. Ladd is a more "aesthetic" object, with some of the "universality"
of a piece of sculpture; his special quality is in his physical smoothness
and serenity, unworldly and yet not innocent, but suggesting that no
experience can really touch him. Stevens has tried to freeze the Western
myth once and for all in the immobility of Alan Ladd's countenance.
If
Shane
were "right," and fully successful, it might be possible to say
there was no point in making any more Western movies; once the hero
is
apotheosized, variation and development are closed off.
Shane
is not "right," but it is still true that the possibilities of fruit–
ful variation in the Western movie are limited. The form can keep its
freshness through endless repetitions only because of the special character
of the film medium, where the physical difference between one object
and another-above all, between one actor and another-is of such
enormous importance, serving the function that is served by the variety
of language in the perpetuation of literary types. In this sense, the
"vocabulary" of films is much larger than that of literature and falls
more readily into pleasing and significant arrangements. (That may ex–
plain why the middle levels of excellence are more easily reached in
the movies than
in
literary forms, and perhaps also why the status of
the movies as art is constantly being called into question.) But the ad–
vantage of this almost automatic particularity belongs to all films alike.
Why does the Western movie especially have such a hold on our im–
agination?
Chiefly, I think, because it offers a serious orientation to the prob–
lem of violence such as can be found almost nowhere else
in
our culture.
One of the well-known peculiarities of modern civilized opinion is its
refusal to acknowledge the value of violence. This refusal is a virtue,
but like many virtues it involves a certain willful blindness and it en–
courages hypocrisy. We train ourselves to be shocked or bored by cultural
images of violence, and our very concept of heroism tends to be a
passive one: we are less drawn to the brave young men who kill large
numbers of our enemies than to the heroic prisoners who endure
