Jim Stewart commentary

[Hatchett]

I saw the DVD for Winchester '73 in the movie store the other day and picked it up. When I got home and finished watching it, I flicked over to special features and saw that it's only special feature was an interview with James Stewart. The interview actually turned out to be a full-length commentary by Stewart himself and an interviewer who was a bit of an idiot.

The commentary was pretty interesting. Stewart was great, as always. They talked about the shooting scenes in the movie three times. The first was about how long Jimmy practiced with his own Winhcester trying to make it seem real in the movie. The second was about the shooting competition where they were shooting at coins thrown into the air, and, according to Jimmy, they were made by having a sharpshooter stand off camera, fire at the coin at the same time as them, and they actually hit the coin. It seemed a little strange to imagine.

Anyway, the last was about the final gunfight on the clifftop, and Jimmy was saying how they were actually shooting projectiles at each other that were just white chalk so when they hit the walls they splattered and looked like bullets cutting into the rock. Is that really how they used to do it? They actually fired at one another with fake bullets instead of blanks and squibs? I wish Jimmy had gone into more depth about it, but the interviewer was, as I said, a bit of a wimp.

 

[Mike Irwin]

There were times when they actually had real live BULLETS being fired near the stars.

James Cagney, in one of his movies (about a prison riot, IIRC), ended up with a face full of concrete chips when he caught back splatter.

 

[MrAcheson]

Cagney is one of the reasons they don't shoot real bullets anymore. In one of his gangster movies he is standing in front of a window firing a tommy gun at the cops below. The cops are firing back and blowing the window to bits around him (glass wood and everything). In the olden days this was done by having trained sharpshooters actually fire bullets through the window around the star. Cagney would have none of it and so the special effects guys dreamed up another way to do it using squibs embedded in the set.