You cleverly and non-spoiler-ily elided how the double burial occurs and yet our protagonist is still standing. How does it happen? (In other words, please spoil the ending!)
The film elides it at first: we see George and Harold circling one another in the street like a holmgang, formally exchanging names—George for the first and last time in his gunslinger's life gives his as Kelby—before the quick-draw blast of shots heard by the townsfolk waiting inside the church, from which we cut directly to the posse riding in to discover the funeral. Their leader observes that in order to have taken down Vinnie Harold, "This fellow George Kelby must have been plenty fast," and hears in reply the reverent epitaph, "He was the fastest man alive." The line about wanting it that way is the answer to the obvious question of why, if he was so fast on the draw, his fellow citizens seem to have just finished burying him. It satisfies the posse, who will take the story with them to the next town much as the news of the death of Clint Fallon arrived originally in Cross Creek; it leaves the audience briefly unsure whether George really let himself be killed as some kind of atonement in a duel he was qualified to win; and then as the crowd thins out and we catch sight of his bare-headed familiar figure in his sheepskin jacket, we understand that he just faked his own death with the help of the entire town. It's a natural conclusion of the earlier scene in the church where one by one, his neighbors swore never to divulge the secret of the fast gun living among them—a generous gesture of community folklorically undone by the oversight of one child playing outside at the time, not knowing to take part in the promise and therefore fearlessly, fatefully contradicting Vinnie Harold as to the identity of the fastest gun alive. It's even more convincing this way, with a headstone to point to should anyone ever come looking for George Kelby and no reason to suspect George Temple of being anything other than the quiet-living storekeep he honestly is. He did outdraw the other man; he did kill him; he was just as split-second deadly as his father trained him to be. He never has to do anything like that again. It's not who he is and, having been just once that other person, he can finally make his peace with the fact. His father's gun was starting to behave like a cursed object, anyway.
This and your previous Patreon review are really giving me food for thought regarding just how deeply gun worship is embedded in US culture. I knew it was there but I just had no idea how deeply it was there.
It's bone-deep and I find it really weird. I don't want to fall headfirst into Westerns, but they do seem to be a genre where the issue keeps particularly churning up.
no subject
The film elides it at first: we see George and Harold circling one another in the street like a holmgang, formally exchanging names—George for the first and last time in his gunslinger's life gives his as Kelby—before the quick-draw blast of shots heard by the townsfolk waiting inside the church, from which we cut directly to the posse riding in to discover the funeral. Their leader observes that in order to have taken down Vinnie Harold, "This fellow George Kelby must have been plenty fast," and hears in reply the reverent epitaph, "He was the fastest man alive." The line about wanting it that way is the answer to the obvious question of why, if he was so fast on the draw, his fellow citizens seem to have just finished burying him. It satisfies the posse, who will take the story with them to the next town much as the news of the death of Clint Fallon arrived originally in Cross Creek; it leaves the audience briefly unsure whether George really let himself be killed as some kind of atonement in a duel he was qualified to win; and then as the crowd thins out and we catch sight of his bare-headed familiar figure in his sheepskin jacket, we understand that he just faked his own death with the help of the entire town. It's a natural conclusion of the earlier scene in the church where one by one, his neighbors swore never to divulge the secret of the fast gun living among them—a generous gesture of community folklorically undone by the oversight of one child playing outside at the time, not knowing to take part in the promise and therefore fearlessly, fatefully contradicting Vinnie Harold as to the identity of the fastest gun alive. It's even more convincing this way, with a headstone to point to should anyone ever come looking for George Kelby and no reason to suspect George Temple of being anything other than the quiet-living storekeep he honestly is. He did outdraw the other man; he did kill him; he was just as split-second deadly as his father trained him to be. He never has to do anything like that again. It's not who he is and, having been just once that other person, he can finally make his peace with the fact. His father's gun was starting to behave like a cursed object, anyway.
This and your previous Patreon review are really giving me food for thought regarding just how deeply gun worship is embedded in US culture. I knew it was there but I just had no idea how deeply it was there.
It's bone-deep and I find it really weird. I don't want to fall headfirst into Westerns, but they do seem to be a genre where the issue keeps particularly churning up.