‘Shane’: The classic movie Morgan Freeman always wanted to remake
Morgan Freeman has done pretty much everything that an actor could dream of. He’s been in box office-smashing thrillers, Oscar-winning dramas, and Broadway plays. He’s helmed movies and played supporting roles. He’s played the president and God. He’s lent his voice to penguin documentaries and Conan the Barbarian. Come to think of it, he’s done plenty of things that even the most ambitious actors couldn’t dream up.
It should also be noted that Freeman isn’t just a commercially successful star; he’s one of the most respected actors in Hollywood. He won the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ Oscar in 2005 for his performance in Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby, and earned four other nominations to boot. He’s worked with the biggest actors in the business, from Michael Caine and Tom Cruise to Scarlett Johansson and Helen Mirren.
Everyone makes a fuss about the whole Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon theory, but no one talks about the Morgan Freeman version of the game. The reason for this oversight is probably that Freeman has made so many movies with so many stars that it wouldn’t be a particularly fun undertaking to connect the dots. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon would turn into Two Degrees of Morgan Freeman, which is hardly worth doing.
But we digress. The point here is that Freeman, who is now in his late eighties, has conquered the world of acting unlike any other star, and yet, there is one project he hasn’t done. During an appearance on the Jennifer Hudson Show in 2024, the Oscar winner revealed that he has always wanted to do a remake of a classic 1953 western.
“Alan Ladd Jr and I decided that we should redo Shane,” he said, after acknowledging that “it’s too late now.” He then turned to the audience and said, “Try and think of me in that role. Would have been interesting.”
Directed by George Stevens and starring Alan Ladd, Shane is, on the surface, a formulaic western about a wisened gunslinger reluctantly embroiled in a dispute between a humble family of homesteaders and a predatory cattle baron. This is the general plot of a dizzying number of John Wayne movies, let alone westerns starring other actors.
However, Shane is considered by many to be the high water mark against which all others westerns judged. It is regularly cited as one of the greatest movies ever made, and its influence is so deeply ingrained in cinema that it’s hard to trace. One of the most recent and explicit examples is its presence in the 2017 western-inflected Wolverine movie Logan, in which characters watch the film and quote some of its lines.
Ladd wasn’t even 40 years old when the film was made, but he had the griseled look of a man who had seen more than his fair share of hardship. His son, Alan Ladd Jr, became a power player in Hollywood, and was even responsible for greenlighting the Star Wars franchise when he was the president of 20th Century Fox. He worked with Freeman several times as a producer, first on the 2005 film An Unfinished Life, and again in 2007 on Gone Baby Gone.
As an industry mogul with excellent intuition (Star Wars alone makes him look like a genius) and the son of the original Shane, it’s hard to think of anyone more qualified to cast a remake of the movie. Given that Freeman is now more than twice the age that Ladd was in the film and Ladd Jr died in 2022, however, it does indeed seem as though that ship has sailed.
