Clint Eastwood and a few miles more...

So it’s 8pm, a little too early to go to bed. is there a decent new film on the tv to watch? i thought to myself. the answer was no. the only film that had any interest for me was an old sergio Leone spaghetti western, For a Few Dollars More, with Clint eastwood and Lee van Cleef. i’d seen it before several times, but not for a while, so i decided to watch it again and settled back into my armchair. Just to refresh your memory on the plot, eastwood and van Cleef are bounty hunters who form an alliance to bring in a gang of 14 criminals, dead or alive. eastwood takes up the task of infiltrating the gang by springing its leader’s brother from jail. the gang’s plan is to rob the bank at el Paso. to do that, they need to create a diversion to get the sheriff and his posse out of town. they hold up the man who sends out the telegraphs and force him to send a message to el Paso, saying the bank at santa Cruz is being robbed. in the next scene, about 20 men jump on their horses and high tail it out of el Paso as the sheriff shouts: ‘they’ve robbed the bank at santa Cruz — follow me!’ at this point, i wonder how many miles a cowboy could ride during a day, assuming he was looking after his horse. i thought around 40 was probably about right, given the undulating terrain. i looked up how far santa Cruz is from el Paso; Google says 1,146 miles. so it would take them around 28 days to get there. Wouldn’t they have been a little late? i tried to contact sergio Leone but couldn’t wake him up. Clint was out of town.

Ian Smethurst, St Peter Port, Guernsey.