Reception
The film opened in New York City at Radio City Music Hall on April 23, 1953. According to Motion Picture Daily, "opening day business at the Music Hall was close to capacity. The audience at the first performance applauded at the end of a fight sequence and again at the end of the picture.
Bosley Crowther, after attending the premiere, called the film a "rich and dramatic mobile painting of the American frontier scene" and noted:
| “ | Shane contains something more than the beauty and the grandeur of the mountains and plains, drenched by the brilliant Western sunshine and the violent, torrential, black-browed rains. It contains a tremendous comprehension of the bitterness and passion of the feuds that existed between the new homesteaders and the cattlemen on the open range. It contains a disturbing revelation of the savagery that prevailed in the hearts of the old gun-fighters, who were simply legal killers under the frontier code. And it also contains a very wonderful understanding of the spirit of a little boy amid all the tensions and excitements and adventures of a frontier home. | ” |
Crowther called "the concept and the presence" of Joey, the little boy played by Brandon deWilde, as being key to "permit a refreshing viewpoint on material that's not exactly new. For it's this youngster's frank enthusiasms and naive reactions that are made the solvent of all the crashing drama in A. B. Guthrie Jr.'s script."
Shane ended its run at Radio City Music Hall on May 20, 1953, racking up $114,000 in four weeks at Radio City.
Nearly 50 years later, Woody Allen called Shane "George Stevens' masterpiece" and said it is on his "list of great American films, which include, among others, ... The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, White Heat, Double Indemnity, The Informer and The Hill by Sidney Lumet.... Shane...is a great movie and can hold its own with any film, whether it's a western or not."
Read more about this topic: Shane (film)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)