I've come across another Mandela effect online, this one involving the classic Western, Shane. Some people - and I'm one of them - are convinced that after calling out "Come back, Shane!" several times, little Joey Starrett's final words in the film are "Bye, Shane."
This changes the meaning of the film's ending by turning it into something about growing up and the death of the old West. Yet any time you find this final scene online it seems to be missing those two words. Have we misremembered the film?
No, because here is the full version and you can clearly hear Joey call out "Bye, Shane".
Do people posting clips online end the scene early because they've become convinced that the famous "Come back, Shane!" ends the film? Or has television's cavalier attitude to cutting films short to trail the next programme infected them?
I don't know, but I did once work out that Joey Starrett would have been 73 when Shane was released. And I have also written about the career of the boy who played him, Brandon deWilde.
And now we have the correct ending, another question arises. The last we see of Shane, he is slumped in the saddle and riding through a graveyard. Is he already dead?
You may say this is reading too much into the closing shot. But as someone pointed out, George Stevens spent 18 months editing the film, so nothing you see on the screen is there by accident.
The reality of the American frontier and its celebration by the cinema were remarkably close in time. Buffalo Bill was a major figure in the real West and lived to appear in films about it.
Or take Shane. This classic Western is set in 1889, and Brandon deWilde was nine when he played Joey Starrett.
Which means that his character would have been 73 when the film came out in 1953.
Where would he have watched it? In a city somewhere? Or did he do what Shane told him and stay to farm his parents' land?
It's hard to think of a similar telescoping of time in a British film. The nearest that occurs to me is that Henry Stephenson, who played Mr Brownlow in David Lean's 1948 film Oliver Twist, was born in 1871, the year after Dickens died.
Incidentally, there is some accidental telescoping of time in this trailer. If you look closely, you will see a car travelling on the road behind Shane as he rides in from out of nowhere.
And I don't think my point about Joey being able to watch Shane is original, but I can't find where I first read it.Ian Bannen will always be Jim Prideaux from Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to me, but he enjoyed a long and varied acting career. Here is one of its more outré moments.
The Deserter was a 1970 Western designed as a vehicle for the Yugoslavian theatre and film matinee idol Bekim Fehmiu.
He's not in this clip, but it's remarkable who is. Bannen is the languid British officer, while the grizzled old General is the great American film director John Huston and the young officer who serves them both drinks is Brandon deWilde.
deWilde played the little boy Joey in Shane - I have blogged about him and his misfortunes before. This was to be his last Western and almost his last film: he died in a car crash in 1972 at the age of 30.
My post about Sunday's music video turned into an essay on the acting career of its singer Brandon deWilde. There I wrote about how he made his Broadway debut as a seven-year-old to universal acclaim.
But can a seven-year-old act?
It seems he can. I have found a video of an interview with his co-star in The Member of the Wedding, Julie Harris, in which she talks about the moment when he stopped parroting his lines and became an actor.
Julie Harris won five Tony Awards for her stage appearances, starred with James Dean in East of Eden and ended up in the Dallas spin-off Knots Landing. She died in 2013.
Harris played a 12-year-old girl in The Member of the Wedding. She was 25 when the play opened on Broadway and a year or two older when the film was made, yet I still find her performance compelling.
The third star of the play was the wonderful Ethel Waters, the first black woman who, among many achievements in music, theatre and film, was the first African American to star on her own television show.
So keen were his parents not to spoil the boy that DeWilde wasn't told he had been nominated for an Oscar for Shane and didn't find out until some years afterwards. That seems a pity.
He must have known about Look magazine's awards though. The photo shows him. aged 11, after he has been honoured for his performance in Shane, and Audrey Hepburn who had won for hers in Roman Holiday.
Born in April 1942, Brandon deWilde* was the darling of Broadway at the age of seven. Acting alongside Ethel Walters and Julie Harris, he played John Henry West in the first production of Carson McCullers’ play The Member of the Wedding.
He took part in 492 performances and won a Donaldson Award for the best male debut in a play. (Charles Boyer had won it the year before: Denholm Elliott was to win it the next.) When he appeared in his second play aged nine, he was on the cover of Life magazine.
And as an 11-year-old he starred in his own comedy series, Jamie. He must have been a pro: it was broadcast live.
deWilde was 10 when The Member of the Wedding was filmed – he naturally won a Golden Globe. You can watch the whole film on YouTube.
But by then he had already recorded a film performance that was to make him immortal.
George Stevens took two years editing Shane, but his care resulted in a Western that the world took at its own high estimation: an instant classic and a candidate for the greatest ever made. And deWilde played Joey, the little boy who cries out "Shane! Come back!" at the end of the film.
Given what a gruelling life this sounds for a boy, it’s nice to know that, put up to it by his screen mother Jean Arthur, he began filming that scene by pulling faces to make Alan Ladd laugh.
deWilde received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor, but both he and Shane's other nominee Jack Palance lost out to Frank Sinatra.
And that was as good as it got for him, because he suffered from the male child star’s curse: he did not grow tall and kept his boyish looks too long.
He was still playing orphans in peril as a teenager and, in an echo of Shane that directors must have been aware of, his best adult performances saw him cast as a younger relation who first idolised and then saw through a charismatic older man.
So he appeared alongside Warren Beatty in All Fall Down and Paul Newman in Hud. But his characters in these films were 16 or 17 and he was 19 or 20 when he played them. His performance in Hud was widely praised, but you don’t go on to be cast as a leading man from parts like those.
And when he appeared in his second Western as a teenager - Night Passage with James Stewart and Audie Murphy - his character was inevitably called Joey. He had become a walking touchstone of cinematic authenticity while he was still making his way as an actor.
Soon he was going downhill and he was left with little besides Disney films, guest appearances on television shows and work in regional theatres.
In the 1960s he began hanging out with David Crosby and Gram Parsons, and even with the Beatles when they were filming Help! in the Bahamas. Paul McCartney said of him:
"He was a nice guy who was fascinated by what we did. A sort of Brat Pack actor. We chatted endlessly, and I seem to remember writing Wait in front of him, and him being interested to see it being written."
deWilde hoped to have a music career and return to acting at 40 when a wider range of character parts would be open to him. And he must have had talent: it was said that the only person who harmonised better with Gram Parsons than he did was Emmylou Harris.
Together Again appears on a collection of Parsons' early recordings, but the singer is Brandon deWilde.
His music career and return to acting were not to be. He died after crashing his car in July 1972 at the age of 30.
* He was billed as De Wilde in his earlier films and probably changed it to deWilde in an attempt to get people to pronounce it properly. The name is Dutch and has three syllables.
