:43:04
This shootout, it has to be said, does
resemble a traditional B-movie shootout.
:43:10
Two sides taking pot shots and no one
shooting each other, like a TV Western.
:43:15
What makes it distinctive is this
crosscutting between the cemetery
:43:19
and the stranger banging the barrels, and
there's syncopation between the sounds.
:43:25
He bangs the barrels once or twice,
a similar number of shots at the cemetery.
:43:29
He bangs it again,
you get a similar number of gunshots.
:43:33
So the sound is what links
these two simultaneous events together.
:43:41
Four bangs, four shots.
One, two, one, two.
:43:46
First example of Leone's fast crosscutting
that became distinctive of his cinema.
:43:51
The idea of two simultaneous things
that can't know about what they're doing,
:43:55
but there's an aural connection
or a visual connection between them.
:43:59
It's pure style, it's got nothing
to do with the real world.
:44:11
There's a lot more shooting than there
tended to be in Hollywood Westerns.
:44:17
One of the people in the dubbing room
remembers Leone saying:
:44:21
"I want more gunshots, more gunshots."
:44:23
So they got someone to go
to a canyon, or a quarry, near Rome,
:44:29
to film various sounds of guns.
:44:32
And in fact the rifle shots
were the ones that Leone used
:44:37
for the pistol shots
in the film, to heighten it.
:44:40
So the pistols sound like rifles,
the rifles like cannons,
:44:44
and cannons like a nuclear explosion.
:44:46
He wanted to heighten the sound
in any way that he could.
:44:49
There's a distinctive gunshot
in Italian Westerns,
:44:52
the result of putting a different sound,
a different calibre of gun, onto the pistol.