"Head'em off at the Pass!"

Cafe Society
1

When I look for the origin of this phrase, all I get are claims that it’s from old western movies, but nobody ever givens an actual cite. I’m not a big fan of westerns, but I don’t recall anyone ever saying this in a western. (Unless you count Blazing Saddles, but it was already a cliche by then, and that’s the reason they used it there, as the script makes clear. That’s also why Telly Savalas as Ernst Stavro Blofeld says “We’ll head him off at the precipice” in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. For that line alone Blofeld deserves to die.)

Did anyone ever say this is a western movie?

A search online reveals one claim for its use in a western, by Tim McCoy as “Trigger” Tim Rand in the 1940 movie Arizona Gangbusters, but I can’t find corroboration for this, and have never seen the film myself. The same discussion board claims that William Boyd (playing “Hopalong Cassidy”) must have said it in one of his films, which is a pretty weak claim.

https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.movies.past-films/c/m3Ig5gRRbjU?pli=1

Anybody got anything better?

(The phrase makes sense, of course. If you want to set an ambush for someone, you go for the one place you’ll know they have to be. If a narrow pass is the only or by far the shortest way through, you can bet the party you want will be there. By that logic, the stand of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae is one of the places where this cliche would have been appropriate. But I can’t picture Leonidas saying “We’ll head the Spartans off at the Pass!” about the situation.).

2

What I don’t get is, if you are in a chase, don’t you have to catch up to ‘em anyway to get to the pass before ‘em?

3

Not if you take a shortcut.

4

Nitpick: It was the Spartans heading off the Persians at Thermopylae.

5

“Gosh, dangit! I always forget about the shortcut!”

Stranger

6

Here’s an entire book on westerns entitled Head 'em Off At The Pass, but in the maqterial I can access online it doesn’t credit anyone with actualy saying that:

Head `Em Off At the Pass!: 94 Westerns You Should Watch (Watchable Movies) Paperback – December 21, 2011

by J. M. Harrison (Author), Mike M. Fisher (Editor), & 1 more

7

Here’s an example from the TV show Maverick. It’s pretty clear from the dialogue that they consider this a cliche:

8

And here’s a 1959 recording that sounds like the soundtrack to an old western entitled “Head 'em off at the Pass”. Again, they clearly knew this was a tired old line in 1959

9

Life Magazine from 1946 using the phrase as a cliche

Life, October 7, 1946 page 98

Article – Traditions that are Sacred to Western Fans

10

Evidently Leo Rosten used it in his 1941 book Hollywood:The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers. He was using it – you guessed it – as a typical Western cliche.

[

Hollywood: The Movie Colony, the Movie Makers

books.google.com › books
](Google Books)

Leo Rosten · 1941 ·

11

Here is apparently an actual case of the line being used in a western movie – The Oklahoma Cyclone from 1930

From the imdb “comments” page:

A very early 1930 “talkie”, where , according to comments, they had no idea how to make a talking movie. It’s six years older than the movie I cited above.

The “quotes” page agrees that the lines were spoken:

You can watch the movie in all its glory here

12

I don’t care what the haters say. I could not live without the Internet, even vicariously. That was fun to watch.

13

Come on, it has to be older than 1930! I’ll bet it was first used in a silent film, like “No, no, a thousand times no!” and “Curses, foiled again!”

14

Maybe it was used in books first. Weren’t there a lot of cowboy stories in pulp magazines or somesuch?

15

Yes. Note, for example, the Richard Harris character in Unforgiven, who travels with a biographer and thereby earns income from the pulpy stories the writer collects and sends back east.

As soon as I saw the OP, I was willing to bet this comes from the tradition of Western storytelling that predates the movies. I don’t have a cite, but that was my hunch and it certainly looks like it’s drifting that direction.

16

yep, westerns were the first dime novels and they were written mostly by people who had never been west for the most part some of them interviewed people who went west and came back east and the like …heck “max brand” lived in what now would now be Germany

17

Comprehensively reached international cliche status by 1939.

Two Antipodean examples, both referencing westerns.

The Timaru Herald, 28 Oct 1939 on the South Island of New Zealand was saying that talkies weren’t taking advantage of the new medium to do anything different. Whether true or not, it implies the phrase was a standard of the silent movies.

“Westerns Still Important”
BONE AND SINEW OF MOVIE INDUSTRY Time and circumstances may change Hollywood, but they do not change the western film except in minor particulars. Since the introduction of sound, there has come about in them the inclusion of speech, the cloppety-clop of horses’ hooves, the explosion of six-guns, the twang of guitars, and the reedy tenor of the singin’-shootin’-ridin’ hero—but that is all.

Speech has replaced titles for phrases such as:— “Bill, you an’ Ed go thataway. Sam an’ I’ll ride thisaway. We’ll head him off at the pass!” “Travers, I’ll give you just one hour j to get out of town. … etc etc.*

The Daily News (Perth, Western Australia) of 22 August 1940 refers to a thesaurus of cliches that film critic Frank Nugent could make reference to.

‘Came The Dawn’ Dept

JUST before Frank Nugent, America’s most pungent and best-known
film critic, joined 20th Century-Fox recently as a screen writer, his ribald New York colleagues gave him a ‘Thesaurus’ to take with him to Hollywood.

It provides him with ‘lines of sparkling dialogue to meet every situation’ in which his screen writings may land his characters.

Here are the situations. You’ll probably recognise some of them: —

THE LAW

‘You’re coming down to headquarters with me. The D.A. wants to have a little talk with you.’

MEDICINE …

etc

THE SHORTEST DISTANCE

'Let’s take the short cut, Tex and head ‘em off at the pass.’

…

This was boilerplate text from a news service. Its the sort of filler crap that would have appeared in dozens of newspapers at the time, so you could assume everyone, not just Frank Nugent’s hoity-toity friends, got the joke.

18

you know its funny but if they had illustrated the stories most dime novels wouldn’t be all that discernible from comic books …oh here’s an interting free website where they scan old dime novels

19

We should have a whole thread devoted to this topic. Some of my favorites are:

“Don’t worry, kid. She’ll wait for you. Not all broads are like Joey’s.”

“I haven’t done anything to her … yet!”

“It’s not me. I’m not crazy. It’s those fools down in the village. They don’t understand me!”

“Don’t shoot! You might hit the girl!”

“Do you mean to say that thing in the lake is nothing more than a giant one of these?”

“You are either very brave … or very foolish.”
“Perhaps … a little of both.” :smirk:

20

So, is the shortcut to get to the pass, or is the pass itself the shortcut?