belt pulling
was Ben Johnson getting the blood flow back into his head or helping him breathe? anyone know? Thanks.
"Get up, you son-of-a-bitch...because Mickey loves ya'..."
I think the bizarre move was "cowboy mouth-to-mouth in a pre-Brokeback Mountain era."
In other words, he was lifting Jed's belt in order to lift his diaphragm and get his breathing started again.
Mouth-to-mouth would have been more direct but can you imagine he-men doing that in a 1960s western?
Still, it looked pretty homoerotic to me, with the guy sitting on him and the way Clint gasps as he comes to (heavens!).
That's funny...
"One of these days...one of these days...POW!! RIGHT IN THE KISSER!!"
One reason to avoid mouth to mouth resuscitation in a movie set in the 19th is that the technique, as we know it, hadn't been popularized yet. Even the Silvester Method, which involved raising the arms over the head, was new stuff then.
Movies get odd details completely right and goof on obvious ones. The belt
resuscitation may have been an authentic period technique. Otherwise I would have expeced Johnson to do some variant of the Silvester.
I think you're right about mouth-to-mouth. It would have been an anachronism for the period.
It occurred to me after I wrote my explanation above. But it's not as much fun!
This movie contains so many botches that it is strange to see this touch of authenticity which shows that somebody did their homework—probably the writers.
The producer is probably at fault for the many bloopers in the movie. I still think the sudden, half-baked ending was the producer(s) just saying, "Let's wrap it and save some dough."
When I played football in grade school and high school back in the 1960's and 1970's, this was an oft-used technique when a player was lying stunned on the ground, either knocked silly or out of breath.
I saw it done to other players, and I think I remember it being used on me once.
It is used when a player gets the wind knocked out of him.
Since blood flow to the brain is the central issue in rescuing a hanging man the proper thing to do would be to elevate the legs significantly in a trendeleberg position(yes I'm a nurse) to get blood to flow away from the extremities to the brain and vital organs.
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