Too Many Obvious Studio Soundstage Scenes

I guess there is just not pleasing some folks.

How about taking nearly every other western film director(pre-Shane) to task for building western towns the exact same way for decades,so we don't see Culver City in the background.

The Searchers has a few soundstage scenes,the killing of Futterman for one,directed by one of the masters(Ford),im sure Unforgiven made 40 years later has some soundstage scenes,with respect to you,it is a rather pedantic observation.

How about concentrating on the positive aspects of that scene,the drama of the fight,the interplay between husband and wife(Heflin & Arthur),the annoyance of Joey,"bang","bang",banging away on his toy gun,the cattle jumping the goddamn fence,as a whole,that's one of the great scenes in any film,be it a western or any genre,just because it was filmed on a soundstage does'nt make it any less powerful.

I saw the film recently. Somehow it felt like being filmed on sound stage, yet you can see cows really far and some houses. So I was always wondering how much of it is actually filmed in sound stage as it all felt somewhat fakey, but transitions (if there were any) were unnoticable.

Even in the 1960's when I was a kid, tens of millions of Americans watched 'Bonanza' and their sound stage sets were jaw-dropping - so phony they wouldn't pass muster in a high school play. Jackson Hole is SO GLORIOUSLY beautiful the whole movie should have been made there complete without one phony set. Still I like all the good stuff enough to forgive.

For me the most obvious use of an indoor/outdoor soundstage set was the Barnyard Dance sequence. A beautiful sequence, but almost spoilt by its artificiality. But it was sadly commonplace in its time. It seems to have taken well over half-a-century for the cinema to totally liberate itself from the theatre.

Yet, ironically, many silent films appear to have an entirely natural look. The use of electric lighting and the introduction of sound recording seem to have been at least partly responsible for the anti-cinematic stageyness that was common in Talkies.

I've read that Elia Kazan's "East of Eden" (1954) was a favourite of art directors because no outdoor scenes were shot on the soundstage.

Films like Shane and The Searchers were made under the studio system. The studios had a lot of say over the budget, hence the indoor sets. On site location only really began to a limited degree in the later forties, although Westerns for obvious reasons went on site in the thirties. Stevens and Ford likely had to accommodate themselves to studio wishes.