MovieChat Forums > Tall Tale (1995) Discussion > What exactly was that hammer competition...

What exactly was that hammer competition with John Henry?

posted 9 years ago by a_rarden
1 reply | jump to latest

Even as a kid, I've always understood that it was a sales pitch to show off the fancy new machine, but what was the machine for? Was it just to hammer in a single "nail", or to break the rock?

I always thought that it couldn't just be a race to hammer in a "nail", because they never show the machine operators changing nails, and yet Henry and Daniel have to hammer in multiple nails. That's not fair.

So then I thought, maybe the challenge is to break the rock apart. But it doesn't show the machine's rock cracking... it just shows the nail is in all the way. If breaking the rock apart was the goal, shouldn't they have emphasized the machine's victory a bit more, the way they showed John Henry's rock spring after his final smack of fury?

[–] ebomke 9 years ago

This scene has always made me so mad about this movie. The contest was that the machine could do a mans job and that you wouldn't need men to build a railroad any more, but John Henry drives more and bigger stakes than the machine easily. I understand that they were trying to show how all of the Tall Tale members had reached a point in their tale where they weren't relevant anymore. But they could have at least had the machine do 3 just like John Henry in a faster time.