See this fellow on the right? The mustachioed gentlemen wearing his shirt tucked in with no belt? He’s played by a football player turned stuntman, stunt coordinator, actor, and second unit director named Allan Graf. With that series of job descriptions you might expect him to have played a role in other fight scenes besides the one where Dalton disarms, or dislegs I suppose, a guy with a knife embedded in his boot. And you’d be right.
Graf is also Captain Joe Turner, bodyguard and enforcer for George Hearst, in Deadwood, another Western largely shot in bars about people jockeying for control of a small town overrun by a rich asshole. As such he is one half of the best fight scene ever filmed: the street fight against Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), the Captain’s opposite number in local pseudo-respectable crime boss Al Swearengen’s outfit. I’ll never forget the first time I watched this scene because after it was over I had a splitting headache. Was it sympathy pain, I wondered, until I realized I’d been holding my breath for probably a minute and a half before the tide, as it were, turned in the favor of my favored combatant. I was so on edge I literally stopped breathing.
As much as I think the fight scenes in Road House are fantastically choreographed, acted, and shot, nothing in the film rises to that level. But that’s fine, as few fight scenes ever have. And for what it’s worth, the eventual mano a mano between Dalton and Jimmy is legit one of the most exciting and technically fantastic fights I’ve ever seen in a movie. But without the pathos generated by David Milch’s town full of grasping ravenous brutes and people who get so angry at the resultant shit through which they’re forced to wade that they start to cry, it’s simply playing a different sport than the one for which Mr. Allan Graf got down in the mud as one half of the greatest game ever played.
Tags: allan graf, captain turner, Deadwood, fight scenes, goons, road house, the double deuce