Snakes on Film

Canadian brewery Steelback markets a beer called “Copperhead” in the Bohemian pilsener style, though Copperheads (Agkistrodon contortrix) are native neither to Bohemia nor to small Canadian breweries. They did manage to get a real, live Copperhead to appear in their ad for the beer (QuickTime, 2.5 MB), which is something. Do pit vipers work for scale?

Only one brief scene with a live snake in the second Indiana Jones movie (ignoring the dinner scene’s “Snake Surprise,” which was filled, like a hovercraft, with eels). About 33 minutes in, Willie Scott tosses away a snake dangling over her shoulder, thinking it’s an elephant’s trunk, while Indy recoils in fear. The appropriate snake for this purpose would be an Indian Python (Python molurus molurus) or light-phase Burmese Python (Python molurus bivittatus), and by God that’s just what they used. (Even so, they had to fly a pair of snakes into Sri Lanka, where the film was being shot; seats were reserved for Mr. and Mrs. Longfellow.) Another snake scene was planned, but cancelled before it was shot, to the considerable relief of the ophidiophobic Kate Capshaw.

Now, if this blog was called Crocs on Film, I might point out that using American Alligators in the suspension bridge scene instead of an indigenously Indian crocodilian species kind of ruins the verisimilitude, but it isn’t, so I won’t.

In a movie duology where all the main characters have codenames based on snakes,¹ an actual snake makes only a brief appearance: Elle Driver plants a Black Mamba (Dendroaspis polylepis) in Budd’s suitcase of money. Some the wider shots (left) used a harmless stand-in, understandably — my guess is that that is a Western Racer (Coluber constrictor mormon) — but I’m pleasantly surprised to see that Tarantino took the trouble to get closeup shots (centre) of a real Black Mamba. Very brief, though, and almost certainly filmed off-set — which is sensible! The final shot (right) looks like a mamba too.

¹ Elle Driver is a wuss: her codename, “California Mountain Snake,” probably refers to the California Mountain Kingsnake (Lampropeltis zonata), which is a dainty, harmless little thing.