You see it all the time in the Warner Bros. and Disney cartoons from decades ago. Wherever there’s an outlaw or bandit who kidnaps a maiden fair, usually some attractive saloon wench, he inevitably ties her up on some train tracks for the hero to rescue, which he usually does by picking her up. Apparently, the Dillenger wannabe just ties up the girl and places her on the tracks, not even securing her to it. And she, being of a shapely womanness, is too feminine to roll out of the fucking way
Did this ever happen? Was it like “walking the plank” for pirates? Or just something dreamed up by cartoonists to emphasize the dastardlyness of the swarthy criminal?
I don’t know about cartoons, but I can’t remember a movie in which rope was not used to do the tying. It may not have been a tie worthy of a Boy Scout, but the ropes were always there.
Do you have any actual examples of an untied woman sitting helplessly on a track?
On a related note - how about when someone is tied to the platform slowly dragging them into the big blade at the old sawmill? I think Snidely Whiplash did that as well as the old railroad bit.
Any real-life cites?
A more modern version would be James Bond and the laser in Goldfinger (IIRC)
Michael Ondaatje does not provide a cite, but in the poem ‘In Boot Hill’ from ‘The Collected Works of Billy the Kid’, he makes the claim that
‘some (of the dead) were pushed under trains - a popular
and overlooked form of murder in the west.’
It is plausible - I’ll continue to hunt for something in his sources.
Real life? No. But the theatrical version is also traced back to Augustin Daly, in his play The Red Scarf.
Note that in Under the Gaslight, it’s a man tied to the tracks, and a woman rescues him. It’s also a man on the buzzsaw in The Red Scarf, though I don’t know how he was rescued, since the play has been lost.
