Any comments on this film would be greatly welcomed, and those comments do not have to deal with the alleged racism.
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
ken123 wrote:Yep - The " racism " never entered my mind in regard Mexican - Gringos until I heard the producer comments. I always had taken the film, if anything, after that early sequence, as anti - racist. It was pretty bold, at the time of the film's release, to question segregated cemeteries.
I don't mean to get off track here, but I've read that before about Shane and it never seemed to fit or jibe with the movie, at least to me. I TRIED to ee it that way...but the more I watch it, the more I think of Shane as an allegory about WWII and the Nazis... After his experiences in Germany at the end of the war, Stevens was really shaken up. Somehow, that just makes more sense to me, that it was about WWII and all the countries involved. Some times you have to stand up and fight against real evil... and Stevens had first hand knowledge of that evil. I have no idea if my ideas are remotely true.... I don't remember reading anything Steven's said about communism or WWII being an influence on him. I do know that he had a strong sense of justice, and I don't think he would have leapt onto the communism bandwagon that hurriedly.MikeBSG wrote:A very interesting discussion of "The Magnificent Seven" can be found in the book "Gunfighter Nation" by Richard Slotkin. He emphasizes the image of Mexico in Westerns, from Ford's "Rio Grande" to Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch." He sees "Magnificent Seven" as basically a Cold War allegory arguing that American involvement was necessary to stop the expansion of Communism in third world countries. Interestingly, he also sees that as the point of "Shane," in which Shane has to save the (Anglo) sodbusters from the bad guys.