From the ones I’ve seen, it was a long standing Western convention that horses didn’t get shot. Many a gunslinger killed a mounted man at more than a hundred yards using a six-shooter. The horses never seemed to be in danger.
Not long ago I watched one of the first spaghetti westerns, “A Fistful of Dollars”. There is a scene where one set of bad guys opens fire on a whole Mexican cavalry unit with a Gattling gun. After firing hundreds of bullets, a couple dozen men are dead, but the horses are hardly bothered. Now this could just be because of low budget filmmaking—it is easier to tell an actor to fall off a horse than to train a horse to fall down. But since spaghetti westerns overturn many Hollywood expectations, I take it to be a jab at convention.
In our movie, two horses get shot out from under their riders. First, Ned Pepper’s horse is killed by “La Beef”. Cogburn makes fun of him for shooting the horse and not the man. Second, in the big gun battle at the end, Cogburn is never hit with a bullet, but Ned Pepper shoots his horse out from under him. So instead of the traditional scene with the hero wounded on the ground with the bad guy closing in, we have the hero stuck under his dead horse with the bad guy closing in. Deliberate parody?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
5 comments:
Oh, good point about the horses. I hadn't considered those two incidents in our movie as being related and significant, but surely they are. So our main good guy and our main bad guy (I think Pepper, not Chaney, becomes the bad guy of interest) both get their horses shot out from under them ... is that supposed to be some sort of metaphor for a dying genre/breed?
Also, what did you make of the scene where Mattie is talking about the superstitions surrounding the white on a horse's feet: There's an old song that says: One white foot buy 'em, two white feet try 'em, three white feet be on the sly, four white feet pass 'em by.
Does that gain significance later? I didn't pay much attention to the horses. But it seemed chock full of meaning when she said it.
And, DW, for people like me who have only a passing familiarity with the lingo, could you explain the concept of a spaghetti western?
Sure. Starting around 1964, some Italian filmmakers began making westerns. They mostly shot their films in one of the deserts of Spain and thereby had a lot of Spaniards as extras. A consequence of that choice was that the setting of the movies was usually Mexico and/or the border. They are known as spaghetti westerns both because of the Italian filmmakers and because of how bloody they were. They were made on small budgets and, maybe because of that, were quite inventive. Unlike the tradition western with good guys and bad guys, these movies tended to have our guys and the other guys with none of the guys being all that good.
Sergio Leone is the best known of these filmmakers.
I cared more about the fate of those horses than most of the doomed characters. The emphasis on the horses might have been because they were such an invaluable commodity, whereas I got the feeling in this cinematic Old West, a man's life wasn't worth much.
Post a Comment