Who Will Stand Up to Trump at High Noon?

When I was a teenager, my older brother took me to see “Shane.”

I wasn’t that into westerns, and the movie just seemed to be about a little boy running after Alan Ladd in the wilderness of the Tetons, screaming “Sha-a-a-a-ne, come back!”

I came across the movie on Turner Classic Movies the other night, and this time I understood why the George Stevens film is considered one of best of all time. (The A.F.I. ranks “Shane, come back!” as one of the 50 top movie lines of all time.)

The parable on good and bad involves a fight between cattle ranchers and homesteaders. Ladd’s Shane is on the side of the honest homesteaders — including an alluring married woman, played by Jean Arthur. Arriving in creamy fringed buckskin, he is an enigmatic golden gunslinger who goes to work as a farmhand. Jack Palance plays the malevolent hired gun imported by the brutal cattle ranchers to drive out the homesteaders. Palance is dressed in a black hat and black vest. In case you don’t get the idea, a dog skulks away as Palance enters a saloon.

It’s so easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys, the right thing to do versus the wrong. Law and order wasn’t a cliché or a passé principle that could be kicked aside if it interfered with baser ambitions.

The 1953 film is also a meditation on American masculinity in the wake of World War II. A real man doesn’t babble or whine or brag or take advantage. He stands up for the right thing and protects those who can’t protect themselves from bullies.

I loved seeing all those sentimental, corny ideals that America was built on, even if those ideals have often been betrayed.