George Stevens directing SHANE -- A ghostly dissolve

"If any actor has ever created a character who is the personification of evil," says filmmaker Woody Allen, "it is Jack Palance."

Most movies show a major villain cantering into town on a towering black charger, with quivering mothers shuttering windows as the little ones hide in their petticoats and their men look down at their shoes in shame. In contrast, the director of SHANE makes his town look deserted as Palance rides down a muddy street on a horse specially picked to be too small for the actor. The animal almost creeps as it walks, as if it is trying to be quiet with each step, and the effect is subtly grotesque, a kind of dark mirror image of when Shane majestically came down from the mountains in the beginning of the film. "He's just bad news," says Woody Allen about that shot. "Serpentine."

Then Stevens has Palance enter the local tavern, and in the middle of his walking toward the camera, for no apparent reason, he does an odd dissolve, showing Palance fade away from the background and reappear in the foreground.

"It's one of the most puzzling dissolves I've ever seen," Allen admits. "I can't imagine what it was for. It must have been to cover up a mistake. I can't think of any other reason for it."

I can -- the effect turns Palance into more than a mere man. He becomes a baleful specter possessing the power to almost disappear and reappear at will.
____________________

FOR CONSERVATIVE MOVIE LOVERS is the name of an ongoing series of written essays on cinema appearing at BIG HOLLYWOOD, a leading conservative website focused on reforming America's poisoned popular culture:

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[mvies77]

He is so evil the dog is afraid of him before he even enters the room.

[BodomChildBreeder]

im so glad i noticed this today in film studies... one of my fav villains now and he onky arrives like half way through thre movie lol!

[Finkelgruber]

Palance's black panther like acting that made the movie. Without him it would have been a good, but not a special movie. And it was Alan Ladd's best performance..

Without those two, it would have been an average Western.

[801liveable]

allen is right..PALANCE is the epitome of evil..finest portrayal of a gunfighter in moition picture history..palance had only 18 lines in this movie still was nominated for an academy award..

[realfunny7]

i've been watching this movie since '53 -& never payed attention to that - cool

[dutch99958]

the dissolve is visually memorable.. It implies that Wilson (Palance) is impatient to get a killing job done . The dog sensing evil too is brilliant.