You don’t have to be writing a Western to learn something from Westerns. For instance, the Final Duel. Don’t know if most Westerns have one but many do, and many of those are classic movie showdowns. I found You Tube clips for four of these classics and I thought it would be instructive for you to play them side by side and see how they compare. I do have a penchant for Spaghetti Westerns, which will be represented by A Fistful Of Dollars, The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly and Once Upon A Time In America. Another favorite is Unforgiven, so we’ll look at the final duel of that movie between Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman. I found the script for that movie so we can check out what it looks like on the page. Vamos!
- UNFORGIVEN
Checking out the Final Duel in Unforgiven we find a situation where Munny (Eastwood) has the draw on Little Bill(Hackman). This isn’t going to be a fair fight. It’s an execution. Usually the “fast draw” results in the winner but here Eastwood’s got him dead to rights. So how do we add conflict? Simple. The gun misfires and now we don’t know who is going to come out of this bar alive. Here’s the script scene with the video to follow:
It has become a very formal moment and there are, figuratively speaking, only two people in the room, Munny and Little Bill... and WW Beauchamp is watching them, scared to death, but this is it, what all those Easterners dreamed about, the showdown in the saloon. MUNNY (the shotgun pointed right at Little Bill) He should have armed himself if he was gonna decorate his saloon with the body of my friend. LITTLE BILL I guess you are Three-Fingered Jack out of Missouri, killer of women and children. MUNNY (a little drunkenly) I have done that... killed women and children... I have killed most everything that walks or crawls an' now I have come to kill you, Little Bill, for what you done to Ned. (to the others) Now step aside. boys. And as the deputies nervously move aside Little Bill helps to isolate himself by stepping forward boldly. LITTLE BILL He's got one barrel left, gentlemen. After he has used it, pull your pistols and shoot him down like the cowardly, drunken scoundrel he is. Little Bill looks back at Munny bravely and... Munny looks down the barrel at Little Bill and after a tense moment he pulls the trigger. CLICK. The hammer falls but it is a misfire and what happens next happens in maybe five seconds as all hell breaks loose. LITTLE BILL (drawing) Misfire! Kill the sonofabitch! And Little Bill aims carefully and... Munny hurls the shotgun at him and... BLAM!... Little Bill fires wildly as the shotgun hits him and... Clyde has his pistol out and is pointing it at Munny and... Munny is pulling the pistol from his own belt and he drops to one knee and... BLAM!... Clyde fires and misses and... Little Bill is about to squeeze the trigger when... BLAM!... Munny shoots him and... BLAM!... Little Bill shoots just as he is hit in the chest and... BLAM! BLAM!... Fatty fires wildly and... Munny is aiming too and BLAM!... Clyde gets it in the face and... BLAM!... BLAM!... Fatty isn't even aiming while... Andy aims carefully, he can kill Munny but... Munny turns and points his weapon at Andy and... Instead of firing Andy panics and tries to turn his body sideways to ward off the blow and... BLAM!... Munny fires and... Andy gets it high in the rib cage and... Charley turns and runs for the back and... BLAM! BLAM!... Fatty is backing up and firing from the hip and then he turns to run and... Munny aims deliberately from one knee and BLAM!... Fatty goes down, shot in the back... And suddenly... there is a terrible silence that is broken only by the awful, dying groans of Clyde and the coughing of the bystanders hiding behind tables and chairs in the thick black smoke and... Munny is still down on one knee pointing his pistol and looking through the thick smoke for someone to shoot but it seems there are no threats left.
- ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST
This is the showdown between Henry Fonda and Charles Bronson. We got the motivation from Bronson’s side during the harmonica flashback showing that years before Fonda killed Bronson’s brother by hanging him, jamming the harmonica in the young Bronson’s mouth, the kid collapsing and killing his own brother in the process. Pretty ballsy to go Flashback during the Final Duel but they pull it big time.The spaghetti Western music over is classic.
- A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS
“When a man with a .45 meets a man with a rifle, the man with the pistol is a dead man.” Classic Clint. Iconic imagery as he guns down no less than five dudes to get to Ramon, the black hat in this tale. It’s Clint so we know he ain’t gonna die (you know, like with all of Neo’s Matrix fights) but it’s the STYLE that makes this a classic. The original touch is they both have to load guns before shooting. Then the Morricone showdown music, the punch ins on the eyes, and….
- THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UGLY
“In this world there’s two kinds of people. Those with loaded guns, and those who dig.” Clint, in the same damn poncho as the last movie, sets up a three-way, all-or-nothing fast draw here with Eli Wallach (as a Mexican bad ass? Really?) and Lee Van Cleef. Winner gets $200,000 in stolen cash. Second place gets a set of steak knives…. Bad Mamet reference, sorry… the other two will likely get killed. In this clip they take their places at 4:30 or so. They don’t shoot ’til 7:30. That’s THREE SOLID MINUTES of ECU’s on eyes, intense bearded faces and the classic building, driving Morricone’s music. The complication here– and what you should take away for YOUR movie, even if it’s not a Western– is that there always IS a complication. A twist you didn’t see coming. The tension created is not just who will survive but who will shoot who first. Tarantino has used this dozens of times where three people have guns drawn on each other. It’s a cliche by now, but the reason that is is because of classic showdowns like this. The twist of emptying Wallach’s gun the night before gives him the edge. That and he’s the fastest gun in the Italian West. Pretty cool stuff!
