I feel sorry for any guys out there who’ve never known the deep pleasure of walking around with a serious, old-fashioned, heavy-leather gun belt, holster and Shane-style six-shooter.
I’m not talking about some cheap-ass, nickel-and-dime, half-plastic gun belt and six shooter cap pistol that you might’ve worn as a kid in the ’50s, ’60s or ’70s. (I don’t know when seven-year-old kids stopped pretending to be cowboys, but it was probably in the mid ’70s when Star Wars came along.) I’m talking about the kind of hand-crafted, real-deal rigs worn by Alan Ladd in Shane, Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, John Wayne in Stagecoach and Red River, Burt Lancaster in Vera Cruz, Ricky Nelson in Rio Bravo, Gary Cooper in High Noon, Marlon Brando in One-Eyed Jacks, etc.
I strapped on a serious western leather rig on a movie set back in the late ’70s or early ’80s (I forget the details) and I’ve never forgotten the glorious manly feeling…the smell of well-oiled leather, the weight of those iron guns, those thigh straps, those bullets tucked into the bullet holders…all of it.
“Red River D,” posted on 12.28.22:
There’s something hugely joyful about reuniting with my mail-order John Wayne Red River brass belt buckle. The fact that I’m happy to once again have it in my possession means, of course, that I’m just as much of a racist swine as Wayne was during his lifespan, and has nothing to do with my loving the 1948 Howard Hawks western (which, as the buckle points out, was actually shot in ‘46).
