Word: shootist
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...SHOOTIST...
John Wayne, moving slow and seeming winded, appears here as one John Bernard Books, last of a breed. Books is a fast-draw artist, a gunslinger or, as the movie's title phrases it, a shootist. He has dispatched some 30 men over the course of a long career that is coming to a painful close just as The Shootist begins. J.B. Books comes riding into Carson City, gets examined by his friend Dr. Hostetler (James Stewart), and hears what he feared: he has cancer, and a few days to live...
There is a little shooting in The Shootist, to be sure, including the sort of climactic saloon gundown that is not only predictable but practically required by law. The movie is stately, even funereal, as it details the last week of J.B.'s life. Director Don Siegel excels at turning out saw-toothed melodramas (Dirty Harry), and likes to play along the grim edge where sullen threat turns to quick, obliterating violence. Not even in The Beguiled-a harrowingly beautiful gothic tale-has Siegel gone so far away from what is familiar...
...since the invention of the musket. Colt revolvers were fast and reliable. In superior hands they could regularly hit a five-inch circle at 50 yards. At 100 yards, the Peacemaker could drive a bullet more than three inches into a pine plank. With such a weapon a skilled "shootist" became the most deadly single engine of extermination that the U.S. had seen until then...