‘Shane’: The Richard Gere performance inspired by a classic western
Richard Gere has really been able to make the most of his acting career. Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, he was the quintessential movie star, through films like Looking for Mr. Goodbar, An Officer and a Gentleman, and Pretty Woman. In his later years, he took on more independent challenges, such as a shady fixer in Norman and a terminally ill documentary maker in Paul Schrader’s Oh, Canada.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing for Gere – his pro-Tibet views have caused friction with any Chinese-backed projects – but he’s a massive star with a vast array of great performances to his name. Having led such a varied career, Gere has had to take inspiration from many different sources. Some of them are always apparent, like his role in the 2009 police movie Brooklyn’s Finest.
The Golden Globe winner plays Eddie Dugan, a long-serving member of the NYPD who is facing retirement. After decades of mediocre service, he has just one week to turn his career around and actually make a name for himself. It’s not a great film – as middling as Dugan’s police work, some might say – but it turned a decent profit at the box office, and it’s always good to see Gere interact with other top names like Ethan Hawke, Don Cheadle, and Wesley Snipes.
Brooklyn’s Finest was directed by Antoine Fuqua and heralded as the director’s return to the crime subgenre for the first time since the phenomenally successful Training Day. To promote the film, Fuqua spoke with Venice Magazine about some of the characters. One of them was Dugan, which allowed the director to explain how a 1950s Western had affected Gere’s performance. “That’s Shane,” he said. “He hangs his guns up, and turns his conscience off, and in our case, instead of a little boy who brings him back, you got a girl. And he has to do it, he has to go and pick his gun back up. He didn’t even have the guts in the beginning of the movie to kill himself. But he had to go into hell. Into the heart of darkness.”
Directed by double Oscar winner George Stevens, Shane – a favourite of Morgan Freeman’s, by the way – stars Alan Ladd as the title character. A retired gunslinger, Shane attempts to put his bloodthirsty past behind him, but is pulled out of retirement when the inhabitants of the farm he is working on, including a young boy who idolises him, enter the crosshairs of a ruthless cattle baron.
Much like Shane, Dugan is also a once-promising talent who has been ground down by years of trauma. In Brooklyn’s Finest, Eddie is pulled out of his slump by the discovery of a human trafficking ring, spurred on by his relationship with sex worker Chantel (Shannon Kane). Though not exactly a carbon copy, Eddie was clearly influenced by Shane’s character arc. The two characters meet very different fates; however, Eddie survives his encounter with the traffickers, while Shane rides off into the sunset after getting shot, presumably to die.
Two movies in entirely different genres made over five decades apart from one another shouldn’t have this much in common, but Fuqua is clearly a student of the game. He was able to recognise a story element he liked in one setting and, with a few tweaks, transplant it into an entirely different one.
