Maybe I'm nuts....but....at the end of the movie, Quigley gets into a showdown gunfight with Marsden & his 2 men. Now, I only counted 2 shots being fired, but I see 3 dead bodies. Did I miss something here..?
shareYes.
shareWell I watched this a couple of weeks ago but I am pretty certain there were 3 shots or I would have noticed something amiss. Go back and check it out, pretty sure there are 3.
Severus Snape my hero....
Like Ron Howard said in The Shootist, "he was just so damned fast". The first 2 shots were VERY close together.
shareI believe you're right, but I believe those are single-action only Colts, where you have to pull back the hammer each time, before pulling the trigger.
No way you could execute three shots without hearing each one quite distinctly. And I'm being generous here, allowing NO time to actually move the pistol and aim.
Anyone who doesn't believe this should go try it with a single-action pistol, which I shoot almost every weekend.
"No way you could execute three shots without hearing each one quite distinctly. And I'm being generous here, allowing NO time to actually move the pistol and aim."
Yes, it can be done. Look up videos of Bob Munden, for example. In this one he fires two shots at two balloons, hitting them both, and it only sounds like one shot was fired:
https://youtu.be/hujvVmuLuoM (skip to 0:53)
He's done the same thing with a derringer, which is also single-action, but is much smaller and more awkward to use than a Colt SAA:
https://youtu.be/VkmKJ-deFAY
Three shots, first two are really quick.
sharewho cares.This final scene is the most ridiculous thing i've ever seen.After having been dragged through the desert for a mile,Selelck should have been half-dead in the first place.Then the bad guy instead of just killing him gets him to stand and gives him a loaded gun so he can defend himesf because he thought Quigley didnt know how to use a sixshooter.yeah right,Quigley was a professional gunman, killer and sharpshooter,had already killed like a dozen people in two days but he wouldnt know how to shoot a revolver.What a load of crap.
sharewow, i didn't realize hollywood movies were suppose to reflect reality...
"ENGLISH, MUTHAFCKA!! DO-YOU-SPEAK-IT?!?!"
there are things one can accept no matter how improbable and unrealistic,like fighting a bunch of people and killing half a dozen of them,and there are things that are so stupid that just make for a BORING movie.
sharethat's a good point...for a movies that are boring...
"ENGLISH, MUTHAFCKA!! DO-YOU-SPEAK-IT?!?!"
This movie is so unrealistic they ought to put it in the "Fiction" section.
shareIt was pretty far out there but I enjoyed it. I didn't expect much from this movie and found it to be fun. Kind of silly fun but still fun. It's a popcorn western and it was no less ridiculous than many of the things that happened in Clint Eastwoods westerns prior to Unforgiven so why get bent out of shape over it or single it out for abuse. I suspect you didn't care for the whole thing and so the ending was, from your perspective "the final outrage" so to speak.
I thought the dragging was beyond belief as well. He would have been castrated after 100 feet, and he would have been reduced to bloody rags after 200 yards. INstead, his shirt wasn't even torn.
shareI absolutely see your point.
I also suggest you suspend your disbelief and enjoy the over-the-top Hollywood action/western and not worry about it. Trust me, the movies aren't going to get "more" realistic as you get older.
I've shot in Single Action Shooting Society matchs whey you literly cannot count the shots being fired on the line. I compeated against a guy, my modern double action revolver against his 1873 Colt Single Action Army. He emptied five shots from his cylnder, on target, before I got off two shots. It can be done.
"First God created idiots. That was for practice. Then he created school boards." Mark Twain
I've shot in Single Action Shooting Society matchs whey you literly cannot count the shots being fired on the line. I compeated against a guy, my modern double action revolver against his 1873 Colt Single Action Army. He emptied five shots from his cylnder, on target, before I got off two shots.
Had he just been dragged for a mile?
Jimakros:
"..Then the bad guy instead of just killing him gets him to stand and gives him a loaded gun so he can defend himself because he thought Quigley didnt know how to use a sixshooter..."
Sorry, you weren't paying attention. In an early scene Quigley says of pistols"(I paraphrase) "I don't have much use for them myself, this (the Sharps) will do me fine" - or words to that effect.
The Alan Rickman character misunderstands this to mean that Quigley is not particularly fast or accurate using them, leading him to believe that a shootout with them will favor him (Rickman), especially since he wears a Western rig and thinks that he is a Shootist.
Don't touch that!
Why Not?
It does very bad things...
While I tend to agree with the dragging sequence over hard rocky ground doing him no physical harm, I suppose it's no more unbelievable than that a guy has gotten the crap beat out of him in a fistfight, but at the end comes back and wallops the hell out of the people he's fighting with... that happens all the time, and usually the next day he acts like nothing even happened.
Re Marsden and the gunfight. Marsden was (IMO) a bully, a coward and a wannabe gunfighter, but he wasn't personally a murderer, and if he'd just shot Quigley he would have been a murderer. Besides that his ego got in the way. Remember his words just before the fight: "Some people were born in the wrong era (age, time? can't remember his exact word here.) I was born on the wrong continent." He was willing to shoot Quigley in a "fair fight" (in his eyes, though he did arrange backup.) Quigley knew he was a weak man so he went for the other men first.
I can shoot pretty good at targets, but I don't know how I'd react if someone was shooting back. I think Marsden was amazed when Quigley shot the other men so fast that his mind couldn't react to the situation and Quigley got him next.
@Indy
Did you forget the scene earlier in the film where Marsden shot the two English deserters? The impression I got was that he seemed to do that sort of thing all the time.
In the initial sit down scene in Marston's dinig room Quigley tells Marston, who thinks of himself as a gun fighter, that he (Quigley) never had much use for a six-gun. Marston mistakenly took this to mean that Quigley was unfamiliar with one. Just before the final showdown Marston says, I seem to remember you'e not being familiar with one.
During the last gun fight, did you notice first the sun is high over head, then it's near the horizon; back and forth, back and forth. Watch the shadows. This seems a common problem is films.
shareThere were three shots on the DVD version. Maybe you were watching the Hallmark Channel version, where they edited one shot out to reduce the amount of violence in the movie.
shareI did not know that...thanks.
share After the gunfight toward the end....The Great abo appears and he and his people rejoice...makes me sick.The Irish Catholics,Palestinians and 40 million Russians murdered and more had it alot tougher.The American blacks who are ruining the USA were property and cared for so they skated.
The Caucasian and Oriental are the Kings!
I think the gun fight scene at the end of the movie was as good as the gun fight scene at the end of Shane, which, up until this movie, I had considered to be the best gun fight in any movie. Now there are two that I consider to be better than all the rest.
shareHey Flett--
Just watched Quigley Down Under this morning for the first time since the late 90s and noticed how well it has weathered the years. Looks brand new and not a bit dated!
Completely agree with you on that score about the final battle. I too was reminded of the last shoot-out in Shane. Hard, sharp, and fast, and very realistic because of that. Also, I think the fact that the characters of Shane and Quigley were so immensely likable, who risked everything to defend the defenseless, and were viciously stomped by the bad guy(s) at least once, strongly invested the audience in seeing Shane and Quigley get back up on their feet and thoroughly crush an evil-soaked villain, and move on to presumably live and fight another day. The audience is pulling (that's "barracking" for the lads in Collingwood--Go Magpies!) for the hero with the same gripping intensity in both films. Directors George Stevens (Shane) and Simon Wincer (Quigley) simply did their job and delivered genuine Western heroic stories for the ages.
I learned recently Stevens finished shooting Shane in 1951 and edited and added and took away and otherwise fine-tuned it for nearly two years before finally giving it to Paramount for release in 1953. So maybe he had loads more time than most to get it exactly how he wanted. Still, that's just part of how he made it. Whether Wincer got all the time he wanted in post-production (or a whopping two years like Stevens) is actually irrelevant. What matters is what gets on the screen and how the audience feels about it when the lights go up. Quigley broke even on first release (not a good thing), while Shane made $30 million on a $3.1 million budget, and those are 1953 dollars. Therefore, this comparison of final gunbattles has to bring Quigley up to Shane level. That is a pretty tall platform. Shane is on many top 100 Best Movies Ever lists and even some of the really stuck-up film cognoscenti in New York City who I would wager have never been west of New Jersey call it Stevens' masterpiece which can stand up to any film, Western or not. Wow. Of course they are correct, but...if you only knew how U.S. Eastern Coast-centered those people are about everything, it's stunning to hear such praise for a Western. As a recovering Quigley says before downing a live worm given him by his insistent Aboriginal nurse,"Thank you, ma'am, much obliged."
But Quigley Down Under (the film) now has a very high reputation compared to the break-even box office of it's first run 25 years ago. In another 25 years, 2040, it may be on an even higher level. You and I think it's already classic, but could it be widely recognised classic status, by then, maybe? Stranger things have happened.
In any case Quigley Down Under and Shane are classics today, one minor, one major, which only get better as they age, because their stories and characters are very strongly defined, well acted, and enlist the audience to barrack (MAGPIES!) for the heroic final outcome.