So the year begins! I’m not one to go with trends, so I’m not doing a “Best of 2012” list just yet…mainly because I haven’t seen a lot of the movies that people are putting on their lists.
Gimme some time and maybe I’ll do one around Oscar season.
I’m ALSO not doing another list that would be perfect for January 4th.
You see, that’s the day that the REAL James Bond was born in 1900. American Ornithologist James Bond lent his name to Ian Fleming for a little book called Casino Royale…you won’t have heard of it.
That list, too, is coming, but I’m not quite ready to write it yet.
Luckily, January 4th was a pretty eventful year in history. What I’m going to write about was inspired by an event in 1847.
It’s the day that Samuel Colt sold the first revolver to the US government, starting a gun culture that doesn’t seem to be letting up. I’ll try to keep my own politics out of this here article…but I can’t make any promises.
I do love a great movie shootout, though.
Here are just a few of my favorites:
ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968)
Directed by Sergio Leone
Written by Sergio Leone/Sergio Donati/Dario Argento/Bernardo Bertolucci
The cinematography of Sergio Leone’s five Westerns could rival that of the great John Ford’s 500, but he also knew his way around a gun. All three of his Man With No Name films with Clint Eastwood included tons of great shootouts that could only have been filmed by the great Italian Western director.
But his masterpiece is the first sequence of his epic Once Upon A Time In The West. Jack Elam, Woody Strode and Al Mulock are all waiting at the train station for Harmonica (Charles Bronson, who took the role when Eastwood turned it down). When it doesn’t look ilke he’s on the train, they start to leave. That’s when they find out that they brought two too many horses.
It takes about five minutes to get to any action and then it’s over in seconds…but it’s an exercise in patience and sound design. Three against one with hardly any music (although Ennio Morricone did write a score for the scene, it wasn’t used). Just the ambient sounds of a windmill, a fly and footsteps.
Beautiful (and funny) filmmaking for an ugly world.
THE WILD BUNCH (1969)
Directed by Sam Peckinpah
Written by Sam Peckinpah/Walon Green/Roy N Sickner
Not to constantly bring up a filmmaker who’s not even on the list, but we all know that John Ford could shoot a shootout.
He pretty much revolutionized the Western, after all. But a little film from 1969 pretty much left everything that Ford ever did in the dust.
Sam Peckinpah didn’t just want to kill people with his guns. He wanted to show what bullets could REALLY do to a human being. And not just men, either. Women were killed in The Wild Bunch. Quite a few of them, in fact.
But the shootout I want to write about is the climactic firefight at the very end of the film. The Bunch has just made a “What the hell?” decision, knowing that their time is truly over. It doesn’t matter if they all die, they have to take this Mexican gang out. These guys killed Angel (Jaime Sanchez), so they must die. Unfortunately, they also have a Gatling gun.
Every shootout since owes a huge debt to Sam Peckinpah and his “ballet of death.” The slo-mo, the geysers of blood, the “heroes” getting killed…it’s all here, just waiting to be exploited by every filmmaker who ever decided that his characters should hold guns.
If you ever see a list of the best shootouts that doesn’t include this one, run away.
They’re wrong.
THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)
Directed by Brian de Palma
Written by David Mamet
Suggested by a book by Eliot Ness/Oscar Fraley
Kevin Costner has held a lot of guns in his time as an actor (Open Range also has a GREAT shootout), but never as well as he held on as real-life FBA crusader, Eliot Ness. His version of “upholding the law” often meant using dead bodies as decoys, but he was a decent man who only wanted to keep alcohol off the streets because it was illegal. Of course, Al Capone (Robert de Niro) was NOT a decent man, who did everything he could to make more money, especially if it caused more chaos for the cops.
When a key character is killed in a barrage of bullets, you know that no one is safe…and there will be a LOT of blood.
The final shootout of the film, though, is where it’s at for Brian de Palma.
Taking place in Chicago’s Union Station and echoing the Odessa steps scene from Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin, the scene is exciting and, if you don’t know what’s going to happen to that baby, incredibly armrest gripping.
The final moment between Costner, Andy Garcia and Vito D’ambrosio is one of my favorite scenes of ANY movie.
HARD-BOILED (1992)
Directed by John Woo
Written by John Woo/Barry Wong/Gordon Chan (uncredited)
Chow Yun-Fat was already a huge star in Hong Kong, but The Killer and Hard Boiled were the movies that made him a star in America, before he had ever uttered a word of English on the screen.
Ok, maybe a few words, but not many.
It was a toss-up between the two movies. The Killer is where Chow first held two guns, shooting them at the same time, but Hard Boiled wins out if only because of the final hospital scene that out-Die Hards any of the Die Hard movies. I mean, the whole movie is basically one two hour shootout, but that last sequence is amazing.
Taking Peckinpah’s “ballet of death” to new heights, John Woo (in his last Hong Kong film for years) pulled out ALL the stops…including a baby putting a fire out. While the entire hospital burns down around them and nurses are running for (and typically losing) their lives, Chow and Tony Leung shoot their way to freedom.
It’s beautiful and horrible…and more fun than a barrel full of knives.
HEAT (1995)
Written and Directed by Michael Mann
While everyone was waiting for Al Pacino and Robert De Niro to finally make a movie together, they had no idea what they were in for when the movie eventually came out.
First off…the two acting titans only had two scenes together, so that was a huge disappointment for some. For the rest of us, though, the movie became legend with its epic look at two sides of the same coin. Pacino on the cop side of the coin and De Niro on the robber side. The two characters may have been enemies, but they were very much the same.
None of that matters in the giant bank robbery in the middle of the film, though. When De Niro’s crew rob a bank, Pacino’s crew are onto them and one of the biggest outdoor shootouts in film history commences.
The crazy thing about this shootout (besides its length) is the fact that De Niro and Pacino’s relationship was based on a real cop/robber relationship, which Michael Mann had already made a film of called LA Takedown.
That movie included this same shootout. He decided that he had not caught it properly in that TV movie, so he remade the whole movie, making it an epic of cops and robbers duality.
Then, in an act of life imitating art imitating life, a group of bank robbers were inspired to rob a bank in the same way as the boys in Heat. Not a great idea, since that robbery ended with a very similar shootout. Both robbers were killed sometime after the cops had to call for more ammo to be sent in.
