Collective Action, Pardner!

Most U.S. movie critics thought that Paramount's Shane (TIME, April 13) was just a rattling good western about homesteaders v. cattle owners. Last week Manhattan's Communist Daily Worker got around to reviewing the picture, which has just moved into neighborhood theaters, and found a significance in it that all the bourgeois reviewers had missed.

The Worker likes the picture's historically "accurate" description of the conflict between the landed proletariat and the "terroristic" cattle barons, but it deplores the fact that Hero Alan Ladd follows "the Hollywood strongman tradition," which, "coupled with extreme emphasis on a series of bloody fist fights, constitutes . . . capitulation to current Hollywood standards." Another deviationist error: "The wives of the homesteaders . . . are shown urging their husbands to give up and move on. This is an insult to the great tradition of pioneer women . . ."

The Worker draws a modern parallel: "Just as the cattle barons of the '70s, '80s and '90s sought to appropriate unto themselves the range of the public domain, so today, under the Eisenhower Administration, are the modern barons seeking to convert their grazing permits in national parks and other public areas to form a permanent tax-free title." But the main trouble: The film "tends to glorify individual--as opposed to collective--action."

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