Guns for classic movie fans

Went to the gun show this weekend and fell in love with a beautiful nickel plated Colt Detective Special. Didn't buy it, though -- I could cross two or three items off my wish list for what it would have cost. Maybe next time.

Anyone who has watched a dozen or so classic cops & robbers movies will know what the Detective Special is and may even want one of his own. (Women might want one too, but the movie femme fatales seemed to prefer another model, stay tuned.)

So I was talking about it with an old friend, and he had already formed a mental list of guns that gun collectors who were old movie fans would want to have in their collections. And as luck would have it the popular Internet Movie Database has a fan inspired sub-site about guns in movies which turns out to be a pretty good resource.

Back to my friend's list of top guns for classic movie fans. The Detective Special is one of them. This was the good guy gun. Movie detectives used them of course, and another movie mystery staple used them too, the P.I. Occasionally one would fall into the hands of a bad guy, but that was inevitable and shouldn't mar its reputation as the good guy gun. There were three or four versions of the Detective Special made by Colt between 1927 and 1995, and the old ones can be costly today.

Another movie regular was the Colt 1911, a sturdy semi-automatic that could be used by both good guy and bad buy, although in my opinion an ordinary bad guy was more likely to use one than a good guy.

We need to distinguish the ordinary bad guy from the very bad guy, and here we must remember that during a certain period of American movie history some really evil movie characters came from abroad. So foreign made handguns might be more to their liking, and the German Luger was popular in that regard. Any good Nazi would have one, Neo-Nazis, too. But they were also enjoyed by some American bad guys.

Now if the bad guy is really, really bad he might use a Mauser C-96, sometimes known as the "Broomhandle." For example, if an evil villain were to dispatch an evil underling to kill Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal Rising, the henchman might be expected to use a Broomhandle. An assassination attempt on James Bond might involve one, too.

Many classic movie women needed guns, too. Maybe she was a good girl who got caught up in a bad situation. Maybe she was a bad guy's girlfriend, or she may have been an entrepreneurial bad girl in her own right. In any event, the Colt 1903 hammerless semi-automatic fit nicely in her purse, ready to be drawn if the deal went sour.

There were good guy guns, bad guy guns and lady's guns. And after watching a few old movies a fan could probably predict what kind of weapon a character might pull. Those guns are collectibles now, and one can imagine a "Maltese Falcon" type movie in which that valuable object of desire is a gun from that old movie.

Thanks to Jimmie McD for the input. I'm still a fan of the old movie guns but not yet a collector.

Finally, a nod to the western movies, but just a nod. There were a variety of guns used in the westerns, but two stand out: the single action Colt Army revolver, AKA the Peacemaker, and the Winchester lever action rifle. There were two rifle versions which look very much alike, the Winchester Models 1892 or 1894. But to most movie viewers they were indistinguishable.

Have fun at the movies, keep your head down, and save up for that collectible when it pops up at the gun show.

Comments

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CLASSIC movie fans: What are some of the most memorable music themes you have heard?
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Hi great article!!!I congratulate them on this compilation of the use of Guns in the movies is very interesting The term "gun" has also taken on a more generic meaning, by which it has come to refer to any one of a number of trigger-initiated, hand-held, and hand-directed implements, especially with an extending bore, which thereby resemble the class of weapon in either form or concept. Examples of this usage include staple gun, nail gun, glue gun, grease gun. Occasionally, this tendency is ironically reversed, such as the case of the American M3 submachine gun which carries the nickname "Grease Gun"

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