I just saw this, with pictures of actual rope bridges in the world:
It seems to me that whenever you see a Rope Bridge in a movie, you almost invariably see that same bridge collapse later, taking Bad Guys with it, or almost taking the Good Guys, usually.
**Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Shrek
The Man who Would be King
The Bridge of San Luis Rey** (This one took down Good Guys, but it had deeper meaning in this film).
The Rope Bridge is the Chekhov’s Gun of movie bridges.
About the only cases I recall where the bridge didn’t collapse were
**The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Monty Python and the Holy Grail**
and, arguably,
Sorceror
It was a more substantial bridge, but, then again, they were driving a truck over it.
There’s a rope bridge constructed in the original(Ronald Coleman version) Lost Horizon It’s overseen by one of the visitors, Barnard, played by the great character actor Thomas Mitchell. This is a good bridge, it doesn’t fall, and helps the locals in Shangri La get from one side of a gorge to the other much easier.
This aerial shot of Isengard from the first LotR movie has tons of rope bridges and rickety walkways that are all still intact at the end of the film. They do get destroyed in the third film, when the Ents flood the tower, but it’s not a dramatic focal point of the scene, just background stuff getting wrecked.
The Simpsons episode “Mr. Plow” features Homer driving his snowplow across a very rickety, Sorcerer-like rope bridge. After successfully crossing, he looks up and sees a gigantic steel suspension bridge he could’ve used instead.
In Kung Fu Panda the Furious Five fight Tai Lung on a rope bridge, with Mantis holding the entire bridge up during the battle.
I don’t remember a rope bridge in GBU, can you refresh my memory? Of course, cutting down a rope bridge in that movie would have been pretty anti-climactic anyway, in more ways than one.
I think it’s after Blondie has abandoned Tuco in the desert. Tudo manages to make it to a small town and crosses a rope bridge over a dry riverbed. Then he goes into a store, constructs a new revolver out of pieces, and robs the store.
Found it. The rope bridge is at the beginning of this clip. Damn, Eli Wallach was fucking brilliant in that movie.
Thanks. And agreed- it wasn’t an Eastwood movie at all, it was totally Wallach’s film. The scene with Tuco and his brother is the best part of the movie - “You chose your way, I chose mine. Mine was harder!”
Because showing Tuco staggering across a swaying rope bridge is more visually interesting than having him staggering down the street? It’s also a nice transition from him walking through the wilderness to finally reaching a town.
Rope bridges always seem to be built with little or no redundancy. If it were up to me the bridge would be held up by twenty lines of rope instead of three or four.
