George Stevens’ Shane (1953) is a fairly tight adaptation of the 1949 novel by Jack Schaeffer, and has become celebrated as an archetypal Western, as the classical Western, in fact, an overtly mythic distillation of the historical migration of Anglo-American pioneers into the Wyoming Basin. Shane is set in the dying days of the West, mere months before the Superintendent of the US Census for 1890 would declare the frontier no more. It was, of course, this event that prompted Turner's compelling need to mark the ‘significance’ of the ‘closing of a great historic movement [in] American history’. It is often thought that with Shane the genre is ‘recognised’: Northrop Frye's concept of literary Romance, of a mortal hero who is, nonetheless, marvellous in his actions and superior to those around him, is combined with a profound sense of elegy of the passing of the agrarian frontier, usurped by the encroachment of urban-technological modernity.

In this reading, Shane celebrates the ‘Winning of the West’ and the emergent civilisation at the same time as it mourns the loss of the sense of freedom and individualism that the frontier had supposedly engendered.