Last night when I got home from classes, I turned on the TV to find something to watch while unwinding from the five hour class and the drive home. There on one of the channels was an old black and white western movie. As a child, I thrived on westerns and thought how fun it would be to watch one again. The star of the movie was a guy that was in a lot of westerns back then, but I have already forgotten his name by this morning. He was leading a wagon train across the western territories to California when they were attacked by Apache Indians. They circled the wagons for defense. There were at least 20 wagons in the circle so the circumference of the circle had to be 200′. I sat there watching and thinking how predictable the scene was going and that’s when I noticed something. The part of the movie about the attack went on and on while the star had a conversation with one of the settlers and while saving his love interest in the movie. While this went on, I noticed that one of the Indians that was wearing a noticeably different shirt than the rest was riding by every few seconds. Then I noticed another attacker that was distinguishable from the rest, and then another and another. Pretty quickly, I knew what each Apache looked like and had them all counted. There were 17 attackers in the movie. As the settlers shot at the Indians, one by one they were picking them off and you’d see another Apache fall to his death. The problem was it was the same three Indians that were dying over and over again. I guess the native Americans were tougher back in the day. Then the dialogue started getting to me. “We’ll never get out of this alive! There must be a thousand Indians out there!” one settler exclaimed. “Nope, only 17″ I thought. “We’re down to one box of cartridges per settler” another exclaimed. “Only a miracle will save us!” I chuckled as I thought “Evidently 20 settlers and the wagon train master each with a box of 25 cartridges, which would be 525 shots total, is not enough to stave of 17 attackers? Somebody wasn’t taught how to shoot then!” The rest of the movie went downhill from there with me remarking to everything said and finding humor in what was supposed to be a drama. After the movie ended at 11:30 last night, I found myself questioning the movie and myself. Were we that easy to entertain in the 1950′s and 1960′s? Was this movie, which would have had me on the edge of my seat as a child, that poorly made or was it the fact that I am an adult now making it seem so? How many other people figured out that there were only 17 attackers including 3 who were either really tough to kill or had multiple lives? Would I ever have that innocence again to watch a movie like this and not look for the flaws? If I watched another old western would I see the same flaws? As I turned off the TV and made my way to bed last night, I chuckled one last time at what I had discovered and then turned a little blue because I think that the days of childlike naivety are probably forever lost.
I noticed something similair in saving private ryan, the scene when they are going thru the dog tags as the troops walk by, alot of repeat walkers
If you look hard enough...all large scale motion pictures have these problems. Sent from my Samsung Galaxy s4
That's funny. Saving money on stunt men. Watching smokey and the bandit and slowing down the crash scenes and noticing they substituted old cars painted new for the crashes and not the newer cars in the movies. Even wizard of OZ in HD looks really chintzy now days.
