The current thread dealing with the number of ways to skin a cat has caused me to think of something I know I heard in a Western but I will allow for the possibility it may have been from another genre.
Some crotchety older guy is explaining to the people trying to care for a man who has been wounded (probably shot) that he has “a hole big enough to throw a cat through.”
I did a Yahoo! search on the entire phrase and came up with some non-movie hits which all seemed to apply to gunshot wounds or problems with vehicles.
I just want to know what movie I would have heard that in and who would have been saying it about whom.
Please tell me you at least have heard the expression even if you can’t ID the movie.
That has to be it. I’m not even looking at your link to say it had to have been Slim Pickens referring to a cow/bull that Jeff Bridges and Sam Waterston shot with a Henry rifle. Now I’ll check your link.
It might have been transformed from the older phrase, ‘No room to swing a cat’, earliest attribution: Richard Kephale’s Medela Pestilentiae, 1665, ‘They had not space enough (according to the vulgar saying) to swing a Cat in.’ I don’t know if it’s been adapted to a movie though, the plot sounds a little tedious.
Does settle the gun issue. Sharp’s and not Henry. Henry was in Silverado and others.
What’s so memorable is the romance between Harry Dean Stanton and Richard Bright and the gal who was Slim’s niece or something. Stanton comments on how she’s “like Bambi.”
Modifying the phrase a little got many more Yahoo! Search hits, all relating to wounds and vehicles and structures. It was the Rancho Deluxe version I was trying to remember, though. A vivid image!
Swinging cats sounds familiar, too. It would seem that not just everybody loves cats!
