Clint Eastwood has been able to pick up the Western genre right where he left it, nine years earlier with The Outlaw Josey Wales. Where he left it, though, was on its sickbed, and what comes entirely natural to Clint Eastwood might well have seemed teeth-gnashingly self-conscious and pretentious to one such as John Wayne, alongside whom Eastwood, with not yet a dozen Westerns notched on his gun, is still in the position of a tenderfoot. To have so closely copied the story pattern of Shane may have seemed a guarantee of mythical "correctness." But it would be well to remember that a Western connoisseur of the day, Robert Warshow, found in Shane a lamentable example of the "aestheticizing tendency" of the genre, too stripped to the essentials for its own good. He was probably right at the time, but he might not have been so hard on it if he could have dreamed how far that tendency would go. With Michael Moriarty and Carrie Snodgress; directed by Eastwood. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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