Alamo Fast Draw Episode 41 Shane Update

23 October, 2008 (00:07) | Fast Draw Talk Show, Western Movies

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Alamo Fast Draw: All right then, I’ll start out with Blackbird. You got little tidbits and stuff for us tonight?

Gunfighter Blackbird: I guess so. Do you want to hear them on the first few seconds of the program?

Alamo Fast Draw: Well let’s just go ahead and start with that and let some people have a chance to collect their thoughts.

Gunfighter Blackbird: I was kind of hoping for five or six minutes lled.

Alamo Fast Draw: Okay.

Gunfighter Blackbird: Do we have room for that?

Alamo Fast Draw: Yeah. We got it.

Gunfighter Blackbird: ‘Cuz that would be good ‘cuz then I can shoot.

Well, I was just meaning to talk about one of the earlier pictures we talked about, Shane. After the dust settles from the last program, I wanted to cover the evidence, finding the reasons to interpret the gun smoking in the gun blowing in Shane. I’m pointing to one particular picture in Guns of the Old West Magazine number 38 which did a special on the guns in Shane or what they supposed at the time they put that article together, were the guns of Shane. They never really get any credit for it, but it’s still one of the most interesting articles anyway. Specially, because they reprinted some of the very best still photographs from Shane.

This particular photograph I’m talking about shows Shane drawing and firing a gun. I won’t say that I first saw this immediately when I first came across the picture because I wasn’t looking for it, but after a time, it dawned on me that there was no smoke in this photograph and that could mean a number of things, but usually it means that they’ve taken a posed picture with the idea of adding smoke later on.

If you try to take photographs while the guns are smoking, you’re gonna end up usually with a lot of smoke and not very good action shot. There’s no smoke in the picture and then if you look at the gun in Shane’s hand, there’s no trigger work going on. The trigger finger is outside of the trigger guard.

Alamo Fast Draw: I wouldn’t have noticed it.

Gunfighter Blackbird: Well, if you’re trying to figure out why there’s no smoke that’s one of the things you might look for. Is anybody shooting?

Alamo Fast Draw: [Laughs]

Gunfighter Blackbird:If they’re shooting, they have to be either fanning with one arm, or they have to do it by trigger work. So, there’s no trigger work going on; nothing inside the trigger guard.

The next thing you notice is that you have a good silhouette of the sixth shooter. And all through the action, sixth shooters we know have an ejector rod. At the thickness of the silhouette, or the side view of the fixed gun… The fixed gun… It thickens the profile a little bit. There’s no ejector rod shadow. The ejector rod for some reason isn’t there.

If you look closer, you’ll see a spot about 3 quarters of a distance down the barrel. Now, you would expect to see such the spot if you took the ejector rod off a single action. If you removed it and left a little hole there where the screw is, and the rod is bare. There’s no screw there. There’s no ejector rod there. So, that’s another odd thing.

With all of these things that are sort of anomalies or acronyms or if you want to call them oddities, you really have to try to explain what you see in terms of what you see.

You can’t explain your theory. You have to explain it in terms that will make it clear to people why a thing is missing or why a thing is out of place or how for whatever reason it differs from the original picture. Now, in this case, we can put these things together and get an idea of what’s going on.

One is, there’s no ejector rod. You don’t need an ejector rod of course while you’re firing a gun, but the ejector rod on a double action like a Colt 1878 model, is a little bit wider than on a single action.

It seems that when they were working with both the single and the double action and going in and out of the holster, the gun was packing up quite a bit in the double action version because it was too wide. So they finally, apparently, removed the ejector rod and when you watch the film in motion in the few scenes that show it, the ejector rod is indeed gone.

From there, you have to say well I guess we’ll have to assume that there’s a double action being used better than a single action because it seems to be fanning the gun in the scene. I’m talking about the climactic scene in Grafton’s Saloon.

The ejector rod is too wide, but apparently they didn’t know it until they got into using it. There’s no trigger guard. There’s no trigger work going on because Alan Ladd has been practicing his single action shooting with a regular single action and that gun is no good for fanning. The finger work is disconnected because there’s no reason for him to put the finger in the finger guard.

There’s no smoke in the picture because he’s not actually firing. He’s just posing and going through the motions of drawing and firing which he practiced many times before from practicing with a single action. He’s doing it in single action style even though the gun that he’s holding is the double action that was used in the final end battle.

Okay, that’s a lot of facts.