In another thread about movies today I got thinking about Sonny being shot in The Godfather, and how it showed him basically standing in place and being jerked around like a ragdoll, which is probably a pretty accurate depiction of being shot with a submachine gun. However, in Pulp Fiction, Vincent is blown halfway across the room by a submacchine gun of the same caliber.
So that got me thinking about when that particular trope got started. In old westerns, people just grabbed their chest and dropped. Shoot a guy on a balcony with a rifle, and he just collapsed and usually fell off the roof.
In many of the cop movies (Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde for example), gunshot effects were still shown pretty realistically.
Thinking forward from there, the first movie I can remember in which a bullet sends a guy flying is in Dirty Harry, because they made his .44 magnum a co-star of the show, pretty much, so it had to have a dramatic effect. Since then, it’s almost become a hollywood standard that when people get shot they should go flying backwards.
I also thought it might coincide pretty much with the invention of the device they use to pull an actor off his feet and look like he’s ‘blown away’.
This is just a thought: might not it have started with James Bond shooting someone with a speargun, and then it moved to conventional firearms from there?
In Shane, when Jack Palance shot the sodbuster, it blew him away pretty good. Somewhere I heard an interview with one of the filmmakers, and he said that they wanted to get away from the cliched clutch-chest-and-slowly-sink-to-the-ground stuff that had become the norm in Westerns. That was in 1953.
I remember a scene from Bullitt, which came out in 1968, of a guy being thrown at least a half a dozen feet, and up several more, after being blasted with a shotgun. IIRC, that was the first time I saw the ‘blown away’ device used in a movie.
My vote will side with the Shane reference, although my first thought was for Bullitt which came 15 years later. I was quite young when Shane came out but I saw it as a first-run showing. Before that, if memory serves, you hardly saw any blood and surely not much reaction to the bullet’s force.
Just the other night I began watching the so-called classic Mildred Pierce which was touted by TCM spokesguy Robert Osborne as being Joan Crawford’s only Oscar performance. It was like all the movies of the era as far as shooting deaths went: loud smoky gunshots, shootee grabbing some portion of his/her upper body, showing some measure of agony on the face and falling into the camera. Until Shane, filmmakers just followed the Hayes code and didn’t even think about realism.
I’ll gladly back off my impression if somebody can point to a movie before 1953 with any more gore and gunshot reaction than Shane.
Actually the old style is more realistic.
People don’t get knocked off their feet by any shotgun whatsoever.
The Mythbusters have demonstrated this in one of their episodes.
If it would work like films nowadays the person shooting would also be knocked off his feet.
Maybe the being knocked several yards away is too much effect, but some flailing about would be in order. Seeing the occasional real-life shooting on TV news coverage suggests to me that the “blown away” feature is an exaggeration, but victims don’t just hug their wound, grimace for the camera, and fall in a neat lump forward to the ground.
I do know from the little hunting I did much earlier in my life that there’s not a great deal of movement after the prey is hit. Blood, yes. But no gigantic reaction.
I would suspect combat veterans would be a good source for real-life occurrences. I have yet to see a human being shot in my actual presence.
Some people, when shot, immediately go into shock and they don’t scream or make any noise at all. I’m trying to think of a pop-culture reference everyone has seen, but I can’t. The West Wing episode when the President got shot is a good example, his Deputy Chief of Staff Josh is shot, but no one sees or hears him because he is slumped silently against a wall.
Sometimes when someone gets shot, they aren’t even aware of it until after the fact. Reagan for example wasn’t aware a bullet had hit him until a little bit later.
And sometimes when someone gets shot they scream like you’ve never imagined and make the kind of noises that most people would hope never to hear. That video recently shown over in the Pit where the police officer shoots the Airman is a good example of that.
The amount of blood is also dependent on many factors. Where the person was hit, what type of round, what caliber of round et cetera. Getting shot isn’t necessarily extremely bloody or extremely clean, it would depend.
If you’ve ever seen Kill Bill or any Quentin Tarantino movie you’ve got a good idea of what bad wounds don’t look or act like. The human body doesn’t have blood under such pressure that when there is a major wound it shoots out with the force of a geyser. Nor does the human body explode out 50 gallons of blood in any situation.
Maybe I contributed to our getting away from the OP’s basic question? As I read the post it sounds like the main issue is when the idea that a lot of reaction to a gunshot wound (typified by the getting knocked some distance away) was how gunshot wounds ought to be depicted.
The idea that the effect has become a physical abnormality, if not an impossibility, is less the issue than when filmmakers began to contribute to the illusion in exaggerated and over-dramatized ways.
I still contend it was made most graphic as early as Shane and would love if someone can point to an earlier example.
If I have misread the OP’s intentions, I’d like Sam Stone to clarify what is really being asked for in this thread.
Apologies for any hijacking I have contributed to.
George Plimpton got blown away in Rio Lobo (1970). I remember watching a made for TV documentary about George being in the movie and how the stunt was set up using some type of hydraulic equipment to jerk him off his feet and slam him back up against the wall. It was a one-take only shot.
Definitely, the ‘realistic’ way to portray gunshots is the way they used to. I’ve seen plenty of real gunshot wounds in old war footage - and these are people being shot by high-power bullets much more powerful than even a .44 magnum. They just collapse. No one is knocked off their feet. So the old, ‘grab your chest and die’ depiction is the correct one.
My question was really about timing. When did the ‘standard’ for how to depict a gunshot change from the ‘realistic’ portrayal to the notion that people get blown off their feet by the impact?
I don’t remember Shane. What did Jack Palance shoot the guy with?
And it should be said that there are still plenty of realistic depictions of gunshots in the movies. Saving Private Ryan, for example. It just doesn’t seem to be the norm any more.
Palance (Wilson) uses a handgun, no idea what model. The character being shot (Elisha Cook, Jr.) is blown maybe 10-15 feet by the blast. Other shootings in the movie have less dramatic depictions. Lots of blood in the fistfights, but just the one yanked-off-the-feet gunshot.
It would be worth your time, I propose, to rent a copy. This movie broke ground in several areas and has been coupled with John Wayne’s Stagecoach (which to me is a much weaker film) as the beginnings of the Adult Western, of which High Noon is also representative.
You might want to check the video of two famous shootings, Lee Harvey Oswald and Ronald Reagan. Both of them should be available somewhere on the Web.
In fact, “hug his wound, grimace for the camera, and fall in a neat lump” is an almost exact description of Oswald, who was shot point-blank.
Reagan’s moves aren’t indicative of anything, because he was being shoved into his limo by Secret Service agents. But remember, no one even knew Reagan had been hit until an agent checked under his jacket, and found blood.
One of the most realistic shootings I’ve seen in a movie was in Grand Canyon. Steve Martin’s character is confronted by an ill-tempered mugger. Martin offers his car keys, but the mugger only wants his wallet, and is so annoyed at Martin for wasting his time that he shoots him point-blank in the leg and walks away. Martin stands in shock for a split second, then collapses, vomits and passes out without being able to talk.
A couple of years ago, a client shot his lawyer outside a court (probably in California) that was captured entirely on video. The lawyer couldn’t run away but tried to hide behind a skinny tree. The {ex}-client shot the lawyer seven times from a distance of a few feet. Not only wasn’t the lawyer blown away but unless you heard the narrative of the newscaster you wouldn’t have known he was shot at all from his reaction. After the client walked away he ran for help, although I think he soon collapsed.
I hate the blown backward scene. Of course, I also hate the similar scene in which a guy is punched and flies back through a window at fifty mph. :smack:
