In a previous post, I featured a video showing a guy restoring an old pepperbox pistol. Friend and commenter Spiny Norman recollected that John Wayne had mentioned a pepperbox in one movie, and a few of us had the same vague memory, but couldn't recall the precise circumstances.
Well, according to this table, that shows the firearms used by John Wayne in all of his movies, he apparently used an Allen & Thurber pepperbox in the 1975 film, Rooster Cogburn. That movie notably also featured a Gatling gun; remember the exchange between Rooster and bad guy Hawk, as the latter, standing at the top of a cliff shouts down to Rooster (who's floating down a raft on the river with the Gatling gun), chiding him, "You don't even know how to fire that thing!" Rooster opens up and blasts the cliff face, bad men scattering everywhere. "Ain't that how she works, Hawk?".
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Yep, that’s how she works!
ReplyDeleteLoved True Grit but never saw R Cogburn. I think that's some good tracking of the concept, and I have a claim to be a historian these days - I've published in a historical society journal don'cha know.
ReplyDeleteSomeone in Tucson is selling one for $500 on Armslist.com
ReplyDeleteI keep wanting to buy it but it's way too cheap to be in firing condition or for real. It's been for sale for a month or so, he keeps relisting it. If it were for real someone would have scarfed it up the first day.
I occasionally see something that's too good to be true so I assume it is and don't bother wasting my time.
My buddy tried to buy an old Brit elephant gun for around $1000 from a guy supposedly in Tucson. He asked me to go get it. I contacted the guy and all of a sudden he couldn't meet in Tucson. He worked near 4 corners, 5 hours away, and couldn't possibly meet me near Phoenix on the way.
I checked, it was a $10,000 gun. He wanted someone to send him $1000 and have a nice day.
Rooster Cogburn
ReplyDeleteOkay, so I was half-right. It was the True Grit sequel. Katherine Hepburn was his foil, his PITA, in RC. The banter between them was usually very funny.
bruce,
My mom, a life-long John Wayne fan, liked the sequal better than the first one. I have the new re-release disc of Wayne's TG, as well as the Jeff Bridges remake. I'm ordering RC.
(The remake was overall a better film, and much closer to the book, but as much as I like JB, it's just not the same without John Wayne. Not at all.)
Spiny: The remake is very good, I liked it (on the other hand, John Wayne did, indeed, make Rooster Cogburn his own).
ReplyDeleteV: You're probably right. Something not quite right, there.
Reading the "trivia" on IMBD, there's this note:
ReplyDeleteThe conversation that Rooster has with Wolf, about the small gun he loans him, is taken directly from an unused line of dialogue in the novel "True Grit".
So it WAS originally in True Grit, but cut.
(All this about a line in a movie I saw when I was 11 years old. Even though it got bad reviews from the critics, my mom HAD to see it when it came out, because John Wayne.)