One of the landmark and most enduring Westerns of the 1950s, George Stevens' Shane struck a chord with audiences at the time of its release, and continues to influence admirers today, even as it served as a template for the series of groundbreaking spaghetti-westerns of Sergio Leone.
Alan Ladd plays the titular gunslinger, the archetypal ''man alone'' who wanders into town and shortly afterward becomes embroiled in a conflict between a group of Wyoming homesteaders and the nefarious cattle baron who has designs to wrest away their land. As the conflict escalates, and a romance develops between Shane and homesteader Marian Starrett (Jean Arthur in her last screen role before an early retirement from motion pictures), a who's-who of studio system character talent revolves through the production - Van Heflin, Jack Palance, Elisha Cook, Jr. before the proverbial ride into the sunset...
Writing in The New York Times in 2001, Woody Allen said: ''Shane, I think, is [Stevens'] masterpiece. I've seen it many, many times. Certainly more than 20.'' The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present George Stevens Shane in this standard single disc edition on Blu-ray in the UK.