I confess this took me about four seconds before I got soda up my nose.
I prefer to never see him at all
I can die happy now.
How about the Steel plate Clint wears under his poncho in the gunfight?
It would probably weigh at least 40lbs.
He could still be shot in the head or legs.
Only if it’s in the script.
Who wore it better: Clint or Mick Jagger?
Marty McFly
The Clint Eastwood scene that bothers me is when him and Morgan Freeman are talking about Jerkin’ It.
Your Mind’s Eye can’t unsee that.
I can’t believe it hasn’t really occurred to me before now, but… the problem with that scene is not the gun being wet, the problem is that the kind of bubble bath shown in the scene, with the big mound of suds sufficient to hide a gun, was basically impossible and didn’t exist before the invention and wide marketing of soaps with modern surfactants in the, I think, late 1920s to early 1930s. It’s a useful movie convention because it lets you put someone in a bathtub while concealing their nudity, but unless the movie is set after the third decade of the 20th Century, it’s a technical anachronism.
But then, as the man says, movie logic doesn’t have to make sense.
Maybe Tuco’s bean-rich diet was helping with the frothing?
The relevant episode, in case you want a refresher.
Clint’s not the only one shooting people from the bath. Fake Blofeld tries to shoot Bond from a mud bath in Diamonds are Forever
Notes:
1 – Surprisingly, there IS a mud bath scene in Ian Fleming’s original novel Diamonds are Forever. But the guy in the mud doesn’t bring a gun in with him.
2 – Reportedly the scariest thing about this scene is that the “mud” was really mashed potatoes dyed yellow. Over the course of filming and under the hot lights, they went rancid. Yet an actor got into them, and Connery mucked about in them. Yecchhh.
My wife yells at the TV, “Why don’t they call the cops?” when the characters are fannying about calling Mummy or whoever. Or “?Why is she running down the road instead of dodging to one side?” to avoid being run over.
“It’s in the script,” I say.
I think you’re mixing your scenes. In “High Plains Drifter”, he’s taking a bath when the woman he sexed and then ignored stormed in with a gun and tried to blow him away.
In the “Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”, Tuco (the Ugly) was the one taking a bath when one of his many enemies found him. Instead of shooting Tuco immediately before he could react, he made the mistake of gloating and taunting him. After Tuco killed him, he said; “If you’re going to shoot, shoot. Don’t talk”.
I’m trying to dredge up memories from many years ago. I believe there was a scene earlier that established that the bad guy was a really good shot and always hit his target directly in the heart.
IRL, were the pistols of that era anywhere near consistently accurate enough that a person would bet his life like that?
Also, IIRC the Man with No Name (Eastwood) advised/taunted him to aim for the heart…
Here’s the scene:
A Fistful Of Dollars (1964) - Aim For The Heart Ramon
Well, the issue there is which gun?
Cap and ball revolvers don’t use metal cartridges. Instead, the work kinda like a musket. You load powder into one of the chambers in the cylinder, then ram a ball or bullet on top of that (typically using a ramrod that is built into the pistol), and then put a seal of wax or grease over the top to help keep things sealed and to prevent a chain fire (powder residue accidentally igniting other chambers in the cylinder, which is very bad in a revolver since only one of the chambers is actually facing the barrel and the rest are blocked by the revolver’s frame). Then a percussion cap is placed over the nipple (or cone for those of you who giggle like a child at the term “nipple”). Then you rotate the cylinder and load the next chamber, and repeat until all of the chambers are loaded.
(Actually in practice you’d probably load the powder and balls into all of the chambers first, then you’d turn the gun around and put all of the caps on at once).
The grease at the front of the cylinder will prevent water from getting in that way, but the percussion cap at the rear isn’t going to form a perfect seal at the rear, so water could get into the powder that way.
For a revolver firing metal cartridges, you just shove a metal cartridge into each chamber and you’re done.
So, what gun did Tuco have in the bathtub? Cartridge revolvers were new, but they did exist at the time of the movie’s setting. Cap and ball revolvers were more common, having been produced for many years prior to when the movie is set. So either type of revolver is possible. But which one did he actually use? Well, here’s the issue. He used both.
Here is a side by side image of two parts of the bathtub scene. On the left, he’s holding a cartridge revolver, firing blanks since it’s a movie scene and not real life. On the right, he’s holding a cap and ball revolver, because that part of the scene doesn’t involve any actual shooting.
In real life, Tuco would have been most likely carrying a cap and ball revolver, just because they were much more common at the time. It would have fired ok if he immersed it in bubbles, but the powder might get wet and not fire if he actually submerged the pistol into the water.
The pistol is a Colt Model 1851 Navy revolver. Colt didn’t start making a cartridge version of the 1851 Navy until around 1870. The movie is set in 1862.
Cartridge weapons existed prior to the Civil War, but they weren’t common since brass was expensive and difficult to produce. Cartridge weapons proved their worth during the Civil War, and improvements in brass production after the war allowed cartridge weapons to become a lot more practical. Cartridge weapons quickly replaced cap and ball type weapons in the years immediately after the Civil War.
Yep, that’s it. Also, instinct dictates shooting at the largest target, which is the torso. In FPS games, I always shoot at the chest, and my head shot stats are always very low.
I do not get guitar relic’ing.