On Jeopardy last night there was a question about a duel with cannons. That instantly brought to mind a vague memory of a scene from a movie involving a cannon duel.
The scene is played for laughs, because the principals in the duel (knights or nobles, perhaps) were cool and confident and not at all phased by the mortal danger they were in. But the seconds (who usually are just witnesses in a duel, not in danger themselves) are freaking out because they realize they could just as easily meet their demise by an errant artillery shell.
I say cannons, but they may actually have been mortars. Like those old mortars that look like really short cannons. The tension in the scene came from the very imprecise nature of the weapon, and how each participant had to try and dial in the correct trajectory through trial and error before their opponent.
The duel took place on a mountainside, one combatant high and the other low.
Once the duel was over, the winner trotted off to his next engagement of the day, as if this was just one among several appointments he had to get through, and the outcome was never in doubt. I seem to remember that he hopped over a fallen tree as he left the scene.
I can’t recall if this was a scene from a comedy, or just a comic relief scene in an otherwise serious movie. I don’t think it was anything like Monty Python but it kind of had that vibe.
And I could be wrong about it being from a movie at all, it could have been a TV show or something.
