Click on a picture to enlarge it
| Snakes in Movies | ||
| The Deadly Companions (1961) | ||
| Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film. |
||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
| This was Sam Peckinpah's first Western feature so it's pretty tame compared to his later films, but still controversial enough that he struggled to get it made. Dragging a coffin across the desert (5 years before Django did it) Yellowleg, an ex Union Army Colonel, and Kit, a red-headed dance hall girl, stop to rest at some adobe ruins. The horse is hungry so Yellowleg kicks a pile of straw towards it, not knowing that he's also kicking a Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnake that's inside the straw. The horse panics and breaks its leg. Yellowlegs shoots the snake with his rifle then he shoots the horse in a Western Cliche two-fer. Surprisingly, for a movie, it was a perfectly believable accident. Even though the snake didn't try to attack anybody, it just tried to get away, it's understandable that it scared the horse. |
||
