3. You Can Be A Crack Shot In The Old West
Here to de-mythologise one of cinema's most successful genres is... this article! We've all sat down and watched those rootin', tootin' cowboys eye each other up in saloons and take to the streets for an old-fashioned showdown. After a long, drawn-out moment of tension, one of these gunslingers will whip out their revolver and shoot the other guy dead from twenty yards - all with the precision of a hawk. Although sequences like this are often always mesmerising and hugely cinematic, they're missing one important ingredient: a grasp on reality. Because back in the Old West, revolvers were just about the most unreliable thing you could ever put in your hand if you wanted to keep it attached to the rest of your body. They'd frequently misfire or malfunction, and were extremely difficult to aim with. If you fired a revolver and the clunky metal thing actually sent a bullet out into the world, chances were that you'd miss anyway because of its bad design. Which means that all those John Wayne and Clint Eastwood characters the world is bent on immortalising would never have been able to pull off such skilled trick shots. Hurrah for factual information!