Thursday, August 6, 2009

No holster for Eli.

From: THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND ME In My Anecdotage by Eli Wallach
One of the first things that Leone explained to me was that for the part of Tuco, the Mexican bandit, he didn't want me to wear a holster.
"So where do I put my gun?" I asked.
"You have a rope around your neck with the gun on the end of it," he told me.
"So the gun dangles between my legs?" I asked.
"Oui," Leone said. "You twist your shoulders hard, I cut to your hand, and there's the gun."
I asked him to show me how to do it. He grabbed a gun on a rope from his desk and placed it over his head. He twisted his shoulders quickly. The gun jerked up, but it missed his hand and hit him in the groin. He groaned and caught his breath. "Just keep it in your pocket," he said.
I was glad to be able to skip the holster bit. Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, and most of the leading Western stars took lessons and became very skillful at spinning their guns and popping them into their holsters without looking. But I hadn't taken lessons, and whenever I had appeared in Westerns, I always had to look down to find the damn holster.

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