cmvgor wrote:I've seen this event a number of times, but can't name any titles:
In the desert, trying to get out of it, and short of water. Someone takes the last drink from a canteen, or tries to take a drink and finds it empty.
They throw in away, with no thought to the possibility that they may find
water later, and will want to refill the durn thing.
Yes, or they have very little water and yet while passing the canteen each manages to spill a splash on the dirt, always without notice, let alone regret. And of course the guy stranded prostrate in the desert has to look up into the blazing sun.
My worst is how when firing the six-shooter so many jerk the gun, as though thrusting it toward the target might make it more accurate or forceful. Or how ammo is fired off in celebration or otherwise worthlessly, as though ammo could be cheap in the middle of nowhere.
And I've always been surprised we don't see more mounts shot dead or wounded. Wouldn't you think the West, and even more especially Civil War battlefields, would be littered with wounded horses? I would have thought the "horse scream" (or whatever a wounded horse does) would have become a Western staple (though I realize animal suffering was always anathema while thousands of dead cowhands were but what put people in the seats).
Then there are the recurrent fisticuffs. Just how many punches can John Wayne sustain within a given film? I'm not a mondo dude but even so I know an average human being would be down for at least a few weeks over punches that come by the tens in many the Western.
Gotta love how the injuns ride in orbit around the circled wagon trains, for target practice, as though their lives were nothing, which opens up a whole range of Indian cliches.
Just how cheap was life in "the West", which is to ask what Western film-making might have been had it from the beginning adhered to something like a realistic appreciation of how much an individual values his own life, in any era or context?
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