shooter and shootee in same frame.....?

[archangel]

hi guys,
just a small update.
been watching lotz of old TV westerns on YouTube.
mainly on CarrieOK4059, i think that's the right name..........
anyway, episodes of Lawman and Tombstone Territory feature shooter-shootee situations a few times.
maybe, because of budget and a "disposable" medium mindset lead to this happening.
oh, and, i think i was it in the High Chaparral a coupla times as well.
cheers,
archie.

[dave jenkins]

Great work!

[archangel]

yup, they are the ones in HN.
was watching the latest Lawman upload tonight and i counted two in the final showdown.
James Drury guest stars as Dan Troops brother in this one and dispatches the main baddy with 2 shotgun blasts before being shot about 3 x himself.
and it's all in the same frame.

High Chaparral: the Doc Holliday episode. Doc, played by Jack Kelly, shoot a Mexican in the head a very close range. Bullet hole in head included.
best,
archie.
PS: looks like Eastwood was very wrong about this type of thing.

[dave jenkins]

According to Frayling, Clint Eastwood said:   "You had to shoot separately, and then show the person fall.  And that was always thought sort of stupid, but on television we always did it that way...

The code for TV was even stricter than the one for films, so maybe what Eastwood was thinking about was the TV standards and practices (which were in a sense derived from the motion picture ones), and later in his mind conflated movie/TV censorship issues. In any event, when he worked for Leone, American TV is pretty much what Eastwood knew about.

Once again, HD: great job.

[cigar joe]

 

[archangel]

hi,
thank you all for your interest.
here's another thought..........
maybe, if he had lived, Eric Fleming would have been even bigger than Clint Eastwood.
i like Clint - who doesn't?
BUT.
Fleming is certainly a better actor, based on Rawhide, thanks to Carrie.
he engenders a certain trust and gravitas that Clint just doesn't.
also Steve McQueen in Bullitt is really an early Dirty Harry.
again, more trust and gravitas, than Clint.
archie.

[dave jenkins]

Back to movies.  Recently watched Gun Crazy (1950) and This Gun For Hire (1942).

Both broadly follow the Hays guidelines. For example in Gun Crazy a boy shoots a chicken using a BB gun. The boy firing the gun is in one frame followed by a still of the dead chicken in the next frame. In This Gun For Hire there is even a closed door between the shooter and shootee.  Alan Ladd fires a gun at a closed door behind which there is a woman. You never see the woman being killed but hear the noise of her falling to the floor.

Both scenes are probably more effective than if they had been filmed with the shooter and the shootee in the same frame.

The Hays code unintentionally contributed to the mise en scene of many films, sometimes for the better. Some of the euphemisms developed for sex are quite inventive.

It's worth noting that your movie examples come from the 40s and early 50s. The TV shows you mention seem to be later, when the hold of the Code was weakening. Early TV was an odd beast: there were the industry Standards and Practices that had to be adhered to, but then sponsors might have additional proscriptions as well. This is particularly true when a single sponsor was dominant, as with things like Kraft Mystery Theater. But things loosened up over time.

[archangel]

hi,
more.
"The Professionals" 1966.
j.

[archangel]

hi,
and more.
Rio Bravo. (1959)
Dean Martin shoots a guy in the saloon.
j.

[drinkanddestroy]

Just read the book "A Personal Journey With Martin Scorsese Through American Movies," which is basically the text of a documentary Scorsese made for BFI in the mid-90's in honor of the 100th anniversary of cinema.

on pp. 154-155, the following passage is spoken by Arthur Penn: The old studio system was so hypocritical. They were constantly fearful of being accused of instilling in youth the glory of the outlaw. So they had these rules that you couldn't even fire a gun in the same frame with somebody getting hit. You had to literally have a film cut in-between.
So I though that if we are going to show this, we should show it. We should show what it looks like when somebody gets shot. That shooting somebody is not a sanitized event, it is not immaculate. There's an enormous amount of blood, there's... a horror of change that takes place when that occurs. And we were in the middle of the Vietnamese War. What you saw on television every night was every bit as, perhaps even more, bloody than what we were showing on film."

As we've discussed, there were many instances in which this "rule" wasn't kept, for whatever reason.... But this idea that shooter/shootee could not be in same frame was not made up by Frayling or Eastwood out of whole cloth

[stanton]

I never assumed that it was made up by them, but there are much too much examples which prove that this rule wasn't a rule in the decades before. So when it ever was a rule or some kind of an unspoken law, the question is when (if ever) was it an rule?
And if it was a (written or unwritten) rule still in the 50s, why could so many films ignore it?

[drinkanddestroy]

I never assumed that it was made up by them, but there are much too much examples which prove that this rule wasn't a rule in the decades before. So when it ever was a rule or some kind of an unspoken law, the question is when (if ever) was it an rule?
And if it was a (written or unwritten) rule still in the 50s, why could so many films ignore it?

yeah, maybe if he was talking about the 40's or 50's, I could understand it; but what is surprising is to see that quote by Penn mentioning Vietnam, which means he had to be talking about sometime in the '60's.

UPDATE: Looking back at the quote, Penn starts by saying, "The old studio system was so hypocritical." (emphasis added). So maybe he wasn't saying that rule was still being enforced in the Vietnam-era (when the studio system was crumbling). Maybe he was referring back to the heyday of the studio system, say in the 40's, and then comparing that period (when such rules were enforced) to the 60's. Who knows. I pasted the entire text of the quote, so there is no further context to it.

Two things are certain: I) at some point, there was some rule about not showing shooter/shootee in same frame;
 II) that rule was broken long before Sergio Leone ever made a Western

[stanton]

Maybe in the 30s, when the Hays Code was installed. We had some examples of the 40s too, hadn't we?
A lot was already possible in the silent era (nudity and violence) which was not only in the USA not possible for 3 decades, before the 60s changed everything. But since the 30s the censorship was permanently changing by films which pushed the boundaries a little bit further, and when that was accepted it became a mainstream custom a few years later. But in the 60s everything developed pretty fast in all directions.

[cigar joe]

I've read that it began to crumble during WWII, newsreels were showing grittier violence than the films that followed.

[noodles_leone]

I don't know where that came from either, it may have been more a 1950's  television convention at the time, it sure is a topic that needs a bit more investigation.

I'm listening to an Interview Eastwood gave to a French radio station about 20 years ago, where he talks about it. He says they weren't allowed to do it on Rawhide.

The list of things they couldn't do on Rawhide that Leone could do (because he was "an unkown Italian") is shortly after the 1 hour 38 minutes mark in the podcast:

https://www.franceculture.fr/emissions/les-nuits-de-france-culture/clint-eastwood-jai-ete-lhomme-de-nulle-part-pendant-45-ans