If you’re going to get into a fight, why not combine it with some drinking? It will certainly make the idea of fighting seem more rational than if you were sober. Which brings us to ‘fight week’. On Monday we watched a fight in a diner (which more than likely doubled as the town bar) in ‘Bad Day At Black Rock’. Yesterday we watched a fight in what could only be a serious drinkers bar–and a big, nasty multi-roomed one with an ominous staircase leading to suggestive upstairs activities–in ‘Shane’. Today we’re in yet another bar for this superb fight scene from ‘The Treasure Of Sierra Madre’ directed by John Huston. The scene is beautifully, expressively shot and oddly realistic as we see the two men attempting–not very gracefully–to pull down one larger and very determined man. The staging and camera placement is particularly bold in its use of the long shot to witness a large portion of the fight.

I mentioned yesterday that ‘Shane’s’ director George Stevens was notoriously slow and painstaking and certainly was responsible for every frame and edit of that film’s epic bar fight. But I’m not entirely confident I can say the same about Huston and this fight scene. Huston had no problem designating tasks that he wasn’t all that interested in to DPs and Second Unit directors. Much as he loved fighting in real life (usually when he was drunk), he may well have only been interested in working out the action with the stunt coordinator and left the storyboarding and shooting to others–not that unusual a practice in the studio era of the day. In spite of his rugged nature and macho bullshit, Huston was much more interested in writing and acting than in action sequences and one can see in his lesser films the flimsiness of the connection to the ‘intimate’ scenes with the big exterior action pieces. I had the opportunity to see him in person in 1981 at a Q&A. He was asked about how he staged an elaborate action sequence in a film that I no longer remember the title of. The person asking the question was clearly in awe of the sequence but after a few moments Huston raised his hand majestically and said proudly: ‘That was all second unit!’ Of course he was much older (and sicker) than he was when ‘Sierra Madre’ was made…so perhaps I should keep my mouth shut and simply admire the job done by the great director on this particularly strong fight scene. By the way, Huston bought me my first drink–a Vodka Tonic. (We did not fight). But that’s a tale for another time…