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Hollywood's Gun-Ho Spirit on Display in Fairfax, Firearms Museum Reaches into Movies' Holster
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 19, 2002; Page C01
It's just a rifle.
You can go to any gun shop and see a dozen like it. You can go to any gun show and see a hundred like it.
It's an old Winchester Model 92. Lever action, very state-of-the-art 19th century, when that clever mechanism, with its intricate
springs and cams and pins, represented the apex of American industrial design. But this one looks as if it's been dragged from
Yuma to Tombstone and back behind a pickup truck.
If you like guns, you wouldn't look twice at it.
If you hate guns, you wouldn't look once at it.
I looked at it three times, to chart its two distinguishing characteristics: Someone had shortened the barrel, which means that
someone wanted it to be handy; and someone had battered out the lever into a larger loop, to permit a man with a big paw to spin
the rifle under his arm as a cool way of cocking it, you know, like they do in the movies.
Do you get it yet?
That particular rifle was spun under the long arm and on the fulcrum of the bear-paw-size mitt of a young man named Marion
Michael Morrison, sometime in 1939, somewhere in Utah's Monument Valley. Cameras, under the fierce guidance of an Irish
drunk named John Ford, recorded the moment, for the young man was a professional actor, who performed under the macho
moniker John Wayne, and when he spun that rifle, he became an icon. And so did it.
And maybe that's why that old rifle still delivers such a charge to all who see it nestling in a case in the National Rifle Association's
National Firearms Museum in Fairfax.
There it is, a grail to a certain set of worshipers: the Duke's rifle. What tales it told, what tales it could tell. To see it is to feel a
quiver of something -- nostalgia possibly, melancholy certainly, sadness definitely. It is of the Duke and by the Duke. And there is
more Duke here, too: that salmon-color placket shirt he wore in a dozen or so movies, a cavalry hat stiff and stained with authentic
Waynesweat. It's all on display in what is certainly the best collection of movie prop guns ever assembled, which NRA is calling
"Real Guns of Reel Heroes."
...
I, of course, opted for the kid way. Excuse me, but I'll just go to the guns that beckon me from a life of moviegoing and TV
watching, and will enjoy the voltage they provide, as the history being re-created is subjective and personal rather than official and
chronological.
There, for example, is another '92 Winchester, but this one has been hacked down even farther than the Duke's. It hails from the
high days of the Western on TV, when one way of distinguishing this Chad from that Brad was to give him a completely
preposterous sidearm. So they gave this chopped rifle to a Steve and the lightning struck.
A picture of the young actor in the clumsily posed dramatic style of star photography hangs next to the "mare's leg," as the
shortened rifle is called, and he's a punk, with a baby face, smooth and hairless, knit up in an effort to appear intimidating but
appearing only silly. You want to smack him. So why do we remember the Steve and not the Brads and the Chads? The Steve's
last name was McQueen, as he starred in the TV series "Wanted: Dead or Alive," and he came to define movie cool in the '60s,
when that pinhead's mug had hardened into something sterner and more credible.
...
So what's the most famous gun in movie history?
Wouldn't it be: ". . . but being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean
off, you've got to ask yourself one question -- Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
The punk felt lucky, and it was a permanently bad career move, as Clint Eastwood nailed him with the giant Smith & Wesson.
Ka-boom! He did a black flip into a scummy SoCal pond, as his eyeballs eight-balled and he dropped his own piddly 9mm pistol on
the way down, maybe the most famous gun moment in movie history. How could that gun not be there? After all, it -- that is, one
of three such N-frame Smith revolvers purchased for the films "Dirty Harry" and "Magnum Force" -- was presented to
screenwriter John Milius, who is now on the NRA board of directors. So there it is in an Eastwood panel, where many of Clint's
guns reside.
But it is definitely the big mama, with its beefiness, its thick-necked density combined with the utter rightness of design, that
orchestration of ovals, tubes, slopes and cylinders that make it so weirdly authoritative. It overpowers even the Winchester .458
elephant buster Clint used briefly in "Dirty Harry," or the far more size-efficient SIG Sauer P228 he carried in "In the Line of Fire,"
which looks like a generic cartoon gun so featureless is it.
The exhibit encourages you to track the guns Hollywood has loved. A true Hollywood favorite has been the Colt .45 automatic,
beloved companion of GIs in two world wars -- "old slab-sides," someone has called it. Hollywood has fetishized it even more than
has its most acrimonious advocate, Jeff Cooper, and in the catalogue I count eight of them -- including Sam Elliott's from "We
Were Soldiers," John Travolta's (!) from "Pulp Fiction" and Steve McQueen's from "The Getaway" -- as well as a faux .45. This
would be the .45 that William Holden carried in "The Wild Bunch," that encomium to John M. Browning's genius at designing a
service pistol. But however brilliant the old Mormon was, he clearly didn't have the movies in mind, for the .45 proves devilishly
hard to make run on blanks. And that's why one of the most famous .45s in Hollywood gundom turns out not to be a .45 at all, but
a Star Model B 9mm, which is almost identical but, for technical reasons, easier to make function reliably with blanks.
And finally, of course, there's the ubiquitous "Peacemaker," the single-action Colt that's filled more movie holsters than any other
handgun. It is said that God made man, and Col. Colt made them equal. Whether that is true is open to speculation on the
eschatological plane, but certainly Hollywood took it to heart, as the 18 specimens in "Real Guns of Reel Heroes" make clear.
Some are gaudy (Roy Rogers's are gold-plated), some are grim and weathered (a rental from Stembridge Gun Rentals -- which
supplied Hollywood with its arsenal for years -- probably fired thousands of blanks), some phony (Sharon Stone's aluminum copy
for "The Quick and the Dead") and some completely preposterous (Marlon Brando's engraved Colt from "The Missouri Breaks" --
it matches his dress perfectly). There is something universal in the friendly heft and grace of this revolver, for many people
associate it with the pleasantness of the movies or watching the tube in the bosom of family. In all its manifestations, its simple
elegance remains obvious, and it speaks to the permanence of a classic line: the delicacy of the three curves of grip, grip frame and
cylinder mounted one-two-three atop each other; the near-delicacy of the grip itself, so thin like porcelain; the stacking of the
double tubes of barrel and ejector housing; the precision of the metalwork of the loading gate; the proud prong of that hammer. It's
a hymn in steel, dedicated to the old-time religion of might for right, and men willing to die or kill for what they believed in, the story
that the movies sold for a century.
"Real Guns of Reel Heroes" is just a footnote in that cavalcade, but it's a fascinating one.
Real Guns of Reel Heroes, at the National Firearms Museum, runs through Dec. 31. The museum is at 11250 Waples Mill
Rd., Fairfax. Call 800-423-6894 or visit www.nrafoundation.org.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
Hollywood's Gun-Ho Spirit on Display in Fairfax, Firearms Museum Reaches into Movies' Holster
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 19, 2002; Page C01
It's just a rifle.
You can go to any gun shop and see a dozen like it. You can go to any gun show and see a hundred like it.
It's an old Winchester Model 92. Lever action, very state-of-the-art 19th century, when that clever mechanism, with its intricate
springs and cams and pins, represented the apex of American industrial design. But this one looks as if it's been dragged from
Yuma to Tombstone and back behind a pickup truck.
If you like guns, you wouldn't look twice at it.
If you hate guns, you wouldn't look once at it.
I looked at it three times, to chart its two distinguishing characteristics: Someone had shortened the barrel, which means that
someone wanted it to be handy; and someone had battered out the lever into a larger loop, to permit a man with a big paw to spin
the rifle under his arm as a cool way of cocking it, you know, like they do in the movies.
Do you get it yet?
That particular rifle was spun under the long arm and on the fulcrum of the bear-paw-size mitt of a young man named Marion
Michael Morrison, sometime in 1939, somewhere in Utah's Monument Valley. Cameras, under the fierce guidance of an Irish
drunk named John Ford, recorded the moment, for the young man was a professional actor, who performed under the macho
moniker John Wayne, and when he spun that rifle, he became an icon. And so did it.
And maybe that's why that old rifle still delivers such a charge to all who see it nestling in a case in the National Rifle Association's
National Firearms Museum in Fairfax.
There it is, a grail to a certain set of worshipers: the Duke's rifle. What tales it told, what tales it could tell. To see it is to feel a
quiver of something -- nostalgia possibly, melancholy certainly, sadness definitely. It is of the Duke and by the Duke. And there is
more Duke here, too: that salmon-color placket shirt he wore in a dozen or so movies, a cavalry hat stiff and stained with authentic
Waynesweat. It's all on display in what is certainly the best collection of movie prop guns ever assembled, which NRA is calling
"Real Guns of Reel Heroes."
...
I, of course, opted for the kid way. Excuse me, but I'll just go to the guns that beckon me from a life of moviegoing and TV
watching, and will enjoy the voltage they provide, as the history being re-created is subjective and personal rather than official and
chronological.
There, for example, is another '92 Winchester, but this one has been hacked down even farther than the Duke's. It hails from the
high days of the Western on TV, when one way of distinguishing this Chad from that Brad was to give him a completely
preposterous sidearm. So they gave this chopped rifle to a Steve and the lightning struck.
A picture of the young actor in the clumsily posed dramatic style of star photography hangs next to the "mare's leg," as the
shortened rifle is called, and he's a punk, with a baby face, smooth and hairless, knit up in an effort to appear intimidating but
appearing only silly. You want to smack him. So why do we remember the Steve and not the Brads and the Chads? The Steve's
last name was McQueen, as he starred in the TV series "Wanted: Dead or Alive," and he came to define movie cool in the '60s,
when that pinhead's mug had hardened into something sterner and more credible.
...
So what's the most famous gun in movie history?
Wouldn't it be: ". . . but being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean
off, you've got to ask yourself one question -- Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?"
The punk felt lucky, and it was a permanently bad career move, as Clint Eastwood nailed him with the giant Smith & Wesson.
Ka-boom! He did a black flip into a scummy SoCal pond, as his eyeballs eight-balled and he dropped his own piddly 9mm pistol on
the way down, maybe the most famous gun moment in movie history. How could that gun not be there? After all, it -- that is, one
of three such N-frame Smith revolvers purchased for the films "Dirty Harry" and "Magnum Force" -- was presented to
screenwriter John Milius, who is now on the NRA board of directors. So there it is in an Eastwood panel, where many of Clint's
guns reside.
But it is definitely the big mama, with its beefiness, its thick-necked density combined with the utter rightness of design, that
orchestration of ovals, tubes, slopes and cylinders that make it so weirdly authoritative. It overpowers even the Winchester .458
elephant buster Clint used briefly in "Dirty Harry," or the far more size-efficient SIG Sauer P228 he carried in "In the Line of Fire,"
which looks like a generic cartoon gun so featureless is it.
The exhibit encourages you to track the guns Hollywood has loved. A true Hollywood favorite has been the Colt .45 automatic,
beloved companion of GIs in two world wars -- "old slab-sides," someone has called it. Hollywood has fetishized it even more than
has its most acrimonious advocate, Jeff Cooper, and in the catalogue I count eight of them -- including Sam Elliott's from "We
Were Soldiers," John Travolta's (!) from "Pulp Fiction" and Steve McQueen's from "The Getaway" -- as well as a faux .45. This
would be the .45 that William Holden carried in "The Wild Bunch," that encomium to John M. Browning's genius at designing a
service pistol. But however brilliant the old Mormon was, he clearly didn't have the movies in mind, for the .45 proves devilishly
hard to make run on blanks. And that's why one of the most famous .45s in Hollywood gundom turns out not to be a .45 at all, but
a Star Model B 9mm, which is almost identical but, for technical reasons, easier to make function reliably with blanks.
And finally, of course, there's the ubiquitous "Peacemaker," the single-action Colt that's filled more movie holsters than any other
handgun. It is said that God made man, and Col. Colt made them equal. Whether that is true is open to speculation on the
eschatological plane, but certainly Hollywood took it to heart, as the 18 specimens in "Real Guns of Reel Heroes" make clear.
Some are gaudy (Roy Rogers's are gold-plated), some are grim and weathered (a rental from Stembridge Gun Rentals -- which
supplied Hollywood with its arsenal for years -- probably fired thousands of blanks), some phony (Sharon Stone's aluminum copy
for "The Quick and the Dead") and some completely preposterous (Marlon Brando's engraved Colt from "The Missouri Breaks" --
it matches his dress perfectly). There is something universal in the friendly heft and grace of this revolver, for many people
associate it with the pleasantness of the movies or watching the tube in the bosom of family. In all its manifestations, its simple
elegance remains obvious, and it speaks to the permanence of a classic line: the delicacy of the three curves of grip, grip frame and
cylinder mounted one-two-three atop each other; the near-delicacy of the grip itself, so thin like porcelain; the stacking of the
double tubes of barrel and ejector housing; the precision of the metalwork of the loading gate; the proud prong of that hammer. It's
a hymn in steel, dedicated to the old-time religion of might for right, and men willing to die or kill for what they believed in, the story
that the movies sold for a century.
"Real Guns of Reel Heroes" is just a footnote in that cavalcade, but it's a fascinating one.
Real Guns of Reel Heroes, at the National Firearms Museum, runs through Dec. 31. The museum is at 11250 Waples Mill
Rd., Fairfax. Call 800-423-6894 or visit www.nrafoundation.org.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company