Shane is a 1953 American Technicolor Western film starring Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur and Van Heflin. Shane was the last feature film and the only elisha cook jr. film of Arthur’s career. In 1993, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. Shane, a laconic but skilled gunfighter with a mysterious past, rides into an isolated valley in the sparsely settled Wyoming Territory in 1889.

A drifter, he is hired as a farmhand by hardscrabble rancher Joe Starrett, who is homesteading with his wife, Marian, and their young son, Joey. Shane goes to town alone to buy supplies at Grafton’s, a general store with an adjacent saloon. Shane enters the saloon where Ryker’s men are drinking and orders a soda pop for Joey. Chris Calloway, one of Ryker’s men, ridicules and taunts Shane by throwing his drink on him, but Shane ignores him and leaves.

On Shane’s next trip to town with the Starretts and other homesteaders, he defeats Calloway, and then he and Starrett win a bar room brawl against most of Ryker’s other men. Frank “Stonewall” Torrey, a hot-tempered ex-Confederate homesteader, is taunted and forced to draw his gun by Wilson, who then shoots Torrey dead outside the saloon. Ryker’s men, they find new resolve to continue the fight. With the purpose of killing him, Ryker invites Starrett to a meeting at the saloon, ostensibly to negotiate a settlement. Calloway, no longer loyal to Ryker, warns Shane of the double-cross. Resolved to protect Starrett from an ambush, Shane intervenes, even knocking Starrett unconscious to save him.