Film Convention #2: Badass Western Artifacts and Weaponry

Two vital components to any western film are aura and legend. Successful westerns need to convey an inherent primordial lawlessness and chaos that would allow the characters in them to exist and thrive. Everything contributes to this feeling: the horses, the guns, the outpost town and its saloons and hotels, the desert or mountain surroundings, even the dirt and grime that covers most of the people. All of these factors must be spot-on in order to create the western illusion and to allow us to suspend our disbelief.

Nothing in a western embodies aura and legend more than the heroes and villains in these films. Their exploits are often well known by the other characters in the town, who speak of them in reverent or frightful tones. Western heroes and villains often have either cool or menacing nicknames, immediately distinguishing them from the two-dimensional riff-raff that otherwise inhabits the town. These characters command authority, from the other characters, from the filmmakers, and ultimately, from the viewer.

A convention often used in western films to push these main characters over the top is to adorn them with an artifact or weapon that works to strengthen the character’s motives or to make them seem even more unstoppable. Today, we’ll take a look at a few examples. Some are items, but not weapons, that spell doom for an enemy when they make their appearance. Others are unique or formidable weapons, like guns or knives, that give them an advantage in their nomadic travels and chance encounters.

“El Indio” – played by Gian Maria Volonté – For A Few Dollars More (1965)

“El Indio” is the principal villain in the second film of the Man with No Name trilogy (following A Fistful of Dollars and preceding The Good, the Bad, And the Ugly). Indio is the most wanted fugitive of the outlaw west. He’s a seemingly bipolar killer who operates under the pretense of being a bandit and bank robber. Though much of the action in the film revolves around an Indio-orchestrated bank robbery, the man himself is insanely detached from his actions, and we only see glimpses of his genuine humanity when he tortures and kills his enemies and those unfortunate enough to run afoul of him.

To torture, he uses a musical pocketwatch. He obtained the pocketwatch, we learn, from a woman he raped years ago. The woman was so disgusted and shamed that she committed suicide in the middle of the crime, and Indio stole her pocketwatch as a keepsake of that demented moment. Indio challenges his opponents to duels in the film, using the chimes of the pocketwatch as an indicator of when the duel begins and when the participants can fire on one another. Only Indio knows the chimes of the watch and exactly when the music will end. Multiple scenes in For A Few Dollars More consist of Indio’s enemy rigid with fright, awaiting an inevitable death while they both wait for the chimes to complete. Indio couples this unfair advantage with his expert gunmanship, meaning that the chimes of the pocketwatch mean certain death for whoever hears them.

“Silence” – played by Jean-Louis Trintignant – The Great Silence (1968)

Sometimes these weapons and artifacts don’t have a long back story. Silence, the appropriately named hero of The Great Silence, eliminates evil bounty hunters with a simple but awesome rapid-fire pistol. No story is given as to its origin, but we can tell from the way that Silence shoots this pistol that he’s had it for a long time, and that it has ended the lives of many people. Whereas in some films, like the aforementioned For A Few Dollars More, the item adds to and builds on the character, in some cases the character adds to the item. The protagonists in The Great Silence are Silence, a mute, scarred gunfighter railing against frontier injustice, and the maniacal Loco (played by Klaus Kinski), a bounty-hunting killer indiscriminately and excessively ravaging the local populace. Their conflicting personalities drive the film, and in this case they lend weight and importance to their weapons, particularly whether Silence has enough firepower to overcome his nemesis.

“Harmonica” – played by Charles Bronson – Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)

The harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West serves a similar purpose to the pocketwatch in For A Few Dollars More (which makes sense, because Sergio Leone directed both films). The harmonica is meant to portend doom for those who hear it. Charles Bronson (he of Death Wish fame) plays “Harmonica”, who is actually unnamed in the film but gains this moniker because of his penchant for playing an eerie repeating tune on his namesake throughout the film.

Harmonica spends the film following Frank (Henry Fonda, in perhaps the best villainous performance in film history). You see, years before the events of the film, Frank tied a noose around Harmonica’s older brother’s neck, and forced Harmonica to support his brother and save him from hanging by standing underneath him for support. As Harmonica struggled, Frank stuffed an actual harmonica in his mouth, hence the gimmick and the name. The older brother died, but the harmonica became a calling card and provided a swan song to those that would soon be defeated in battle. Frank, too, is forced to hear that eerie song right before Harmonica gets his revenge.

“Django” – played by Franco Nero – Django (1966)

Django may have the greatest weapon of all western characters. A hero, he drags a coffin with him everywhere he goes. We don’t at first know what is in the coffin, but when Django is pressed into combat, we learn that it conceals a machine gun, which makes quick work of his pistol-carrying adversaries.

The Django character is an interesting case because the machine gun itself is so ridiculous and dwarfs the relatively puny weaponry of his foes, allowing Django to destroy large quantities of enemies at once. More interesting is the visual aesthetic of Django dragging his coffin, an image that has been recycled by a number of musicians and films (including countless copycat Django-themed westerns). The coffin gun provides both the character and the film an iconic weapon and an indelible image.

“Britt” – played by James Coburn – The Magnificent Seven (1960)

You may know James Coburn as the old commodore who didn’t cheat well enough at the final poker table in Maverick, but thirty-five years prior he was a switchblade-throwing hero in The Magnificent Seven. Coburn later became a western veteran, but here he was a fresh-faced newcomer to the genre, playing a character that is lightning-quick with a knife.

Knives aren’t often used as primary weapons in westerns because they aren’t as exciting as guns, but the film takes pains to show just how good Coburn is to establish him as a threat. When we’re introduced to him, we see him challenged to throw his knife faster than a bullet. He easily wins the contest, but the challenger demands that they duel, knife against bullet, for real. Coburn wins that battle, too, showing that western weaponry isn’t limited to enormous or otherwise crazy guns.

John Lacey