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Snakes in Movies   The Winning of Barbara Worth (1926)   Spoiler Alert ! Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.   Occasionally I like to watch a silent movie, especially if there's a rattlesnake in it. Some of the silents are more original than contemporary movies. This is a color tinted silent western/adventure/romance set at the time in southeast California when engineers dug a canal from the Colorado River to irrigate the desert but then the river level rose so much from heavy rain and snowmelt that it overwhelmed the canal and flooded into the below-sea level Imperial Valley for two years, forming the Salton Sea. That happened in 1905, only about 20 years before this movie was made, and I was hoping to see some shots of the Salton Sea area, but apart from a few scenes shot in the Algodones Dunes and the Imperial Valley, most of it was shot in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada (now home to the Burning Man festival every Summer.) They stuck a couple of fake saguaro cacti on the dry lake and called it the Colorado Desert. Vilma Banky plays Barbara, and a very young Gary Cooper is also in it, but none of that has anything to do with the rattlesnake scene. It's a comic scene that happens at the beginning of the movie at a spring in the desert when two men have an argument and start wrestling. When the big guy bends the legs of the small guy, Tex, behind his head, Tex looks between his legs and sees a rattlesnake in the distance. He unholsters his gun and shoots the snake, firing between his legs and between the other guy's legs, too. The other guy faints when he hears the gun, thinking he was shot. The snake scene does nothing to advance the plot, really, it justs provides a laugh and lets us know that we're in the desert where there are dangerous rattlesnakes. Even in silent movies, all snakes had to die. That's a rule of the west in movies with or without sound. The snake they used is a Great Basin Rattlesnake, the rattlesnake found in the Nevada Black Rock Desert. At first we see a live snake, then a coiled dead snake is either shot or blown up by a small explosive charge. The snakes look the same, so they probably killed the live snake, then coiled it up for the killing scene.