Was Alan ladd gun shy

Answer 1

If one looks very closely at Alan Ladd as he fires his gun in "Shane" and at both of the scenes that he used it in, he screwed his eyes up tight and hardly what you would expect from a hardened gunfighter who would in his own interests be more than concerned whether or not he was hitting what he was aiming at and "Jack Wilson " in particular who would only have needed Shane to miss just once and the film would have had a different ending !

The other notable thing, though slightly irrelevant, is that a Colt 54 was only good at "arms length" so as to speak where the weapon didn't so much as launch a bullet as it lobbed a lump of lead in the general direction of whatever or whoever it was meant to hit and was so unreliable that gunfights took place almost face to face and both parties emptied there guns in the general direction of their antagonist until Iether one was hit, or both ran out of bullets - or just plain simply got bored with the idea.

The West was full of colourfull charcters but very short on gunfighters that could could knock the eye out of a crow at a hundred yards, from the hip, and on the turn - but in order to put bums on seats, Hollywood made sure they could !