10 Movie Scenes Shot For Real

It's not much of a secret that Spaghetti westerns played pretty fast and loose with health and safety laws back in the day - especially in those films directed by the great Sergio Leone.

While shooting his indelible masterpiece The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, this resulted in three separate incidents where Tuco actor Eli Wallach was very nearly killed, one of which left Wallach mere seconds away from fatal disaster.

For the scene where Tuco escapes captivity and uses an incoming train to cut his chain, you might've figured that the train was rear-projected into the shot or there was a clever stuntman switch.

But in fact, Leone opted not to use either tried-and-tested technique, instead insisting that Wallach perform it himself, and further guaranteeing him that it was entirely safe to do so.

Yet neither Leone nor any of his crew had accounted for the train's heavy iron steps which protruded out of all of the box cars. And so, it was nothing more than dumb luck that an oblivious Wallach stood up at the right time, or he would unquestionably have been killed by the steps.

That's not to ignore the sheer riskiness of placing an actor that close to a train track, with the very real possibility of debris being catapulted into their path.

Needless to say, no major movie production would get away with going practical on a stunt like this nowadays, especially in the wake of 2015's fatal Midnight Rider accident.