Guns in the Movies - like this S&W Model 29

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I mean I'm here today at the Rock Island auction house and taking a look at some of the guns that they're going to be selling in their upcoming February of 2017 regional auction and today we are taking a look at the most powerful handgun in the world and it will blow your head clean off sort of actually I would say on those two accounts it isn't anymore although it was at the time and no it probably won't this is a Smith & Wesson Model 29 and it is famous for being the 44 magnum revolver carried by the fictional Harry Callahan as played by Clint Eastwood in the series of Dirty Harry movies now the gun itself is actually pretty darn interesting but what's almost equally interesting is how much of its popularity actually came from the movies whether that's a good thing or not so this revolver actually goes back to the 1950s and a guy named Elmer Keith who was a compulsive hand loader I think you would be a fair description he was an experimenter handgun well beyond handgun enthusiast and an author for a lot of the large gun publications of the time and of course this being well pre-internet gun magazines were really the state of the industry that's how people communicated how ideas got around and elmer keith was a very influential guy he started off his career handloading 45 colt to just wildly high pressures always looking for more power in handguns and he ended up focusing a lot of his experimentation on the 44 special cartridge and eventually basically just browbeat remington into developing the 44 Magnum he had wildly overloaded the 44 special convinced remington to actually put this new cartridge into production they lengthened it a little bit so that unassuming other buyers wouldn't blow up old guns that were chambered for 44 special and they named it the 44 Magnum and they released it in the new endframe revolvers these rather large revolvers designed to be big enough to actually contain this whopping huge cartridge at the time what keith was putting out with a 240 grain bullet traveling at 1,400 feet per second and it's unfortunate that today if you look at the numbers on paper you'll end up with the conclusion that this is actually kind of a mild mid-range sort of cartridge and that's because thanks to elmer keith a lot of experimentation in this realm really took off and especially with the handguns silhouette target shooting of the 80s and 90s a lot of just really monstrous handgun cartridges were developed but they really all owe their existence to elmer keys and the 44 magnum so these pistols were first developed first produced right at the end of 1955 for practical purposes 1956 and i believe it was the third one off the production line went to elmer keys so that he'd finally stop pestering remington about remington and Smith & Wesson about this project remington did the ammo smith & wesson did the gun and at first there the question is who's in the market for a massively overpowered handgun and the answer was kind of twofold it did have some popularity with law enforcement especially rural law enforcement where having something that could step into the role of a rifle was not a bad thing to have sometimes certainly regardless of its practicality how much was actually be used a lot of people felt better having it so it did have some popularity there and probably more substantially popular amongst handgun hunters for the same reason if you can get a cartridge out of a handgun as close to the power of some rifles well why not that's going to be much more effective for handgun hunting the issue however was that this thing kicks like a mule and it's really quite unpleasant to shoot and if you're not really into large you know large bore very powerful revolvers this isn't exactly going to be a fun thing to shoot I didn't every time I'm skipping ahead here a little bit but every time a Dirty Harry movie came out there would be this massive surge sales of these and a few months later that would be followed by a surge of used sales with mostly full boxes of ammunition from people who had bought one of these thinking it was you know I'm gonna go play Dirty Harry and put three rounds through the gun and realized that this is really no fun at all and put the gun back up for sale so this certainly happened with some of the early law enforcement purchases guys or were big gung-ho about carrying a the new 44 magnum cartridge and what if you round through and decide well maybe we'll go back to a 44 special or 357 or something else entirely but it did it was very legitimately useful for handgun hunting and that was really the primary market for the gun for many years for a couple decades in fact it's interesting that when the Dirty Harry movie was being filmed in 1970 the script actually called for Harry Callahan to carry a four-inch nickel-plated or chrome plated Smith & Wesson Model 29 like this one well except chrome plated and shorter and the studio actually couldn't find one at this point the model 29 was not actually in production it was still catalog Smith & Wesson still had the guns to sell but the demand was low enough and the sales were low enough that they weren't putting they weren't making the guns full-time they had made a batch and that basswood batch would last quite a while before they had to make any more so for the filming unable to find the month the exact model that they've been looking for they were able to get their hands on a couple of six and a half inch blued model 29 and that's what went into the film so here's the thing this pistol isn't particularly practical for most people most of the reasons that someone would go out and need a handgun don't really apply to this thing it's way overpowered for most practical shooting it's too big to conceal carried by virtually anybody and it takes a lot of actual practice and skill and and determination to be able to shoot one of these well and effectively and it's not something that most people are going to end up doing for fun but this gun got the image of everything associated with Dirty Harry and so when these movies came out the first one in 1971 there was just a massive surge in demand for these guns from people who didn't know what it was going to be like to shoot a lot of them probably didn't care but they wanted that visceral association with the character that Eastwood played and in fact it was good to the point that for literally two to three years after the movie came out it was almost impossible to find one of these a model a six and a half inch blues model 29 on the shelf at a gun store because as soon as they showed up they immediately sold and they sold for way more than the list price apparently it was not uncommon for for these things to command two to three times the list price which by the way in 71 list price on one of these was 194 dollars just not exactly a cheap gun in the first place but they'd sell for over five hundred because people had this demand whether the gun was practical or not they didn't it wasn't so much that people wanted this as a gun they wanted it kind of as a token of the movie now we see this effect in other places as well in fact it's kind of interesting to pay attention to how the entertainment industry can shape things like the firearms industry and I'm sure this happens with other products as well but I don't pay as much attention to those on a daily basis so I don't see them but you'll see things like when enemy at the gates came out most in the guns became more popular when Band of Brothers came out and one Garen's became more popular although the the really large budget blockbuster type movies when they're historically based or when they feature firearm in kind of a lead role they can do massive things to change the gun market and this is the best example but there are certainly others the Deathwish movies certainly are probably the main reason that automatic pistols were still in existence Dirty Harry is the reason that these guns a large part of the reason why these guns are even still produced now if hadn't been for those movies demand for these would have remained really low and they probably would have stayed mostly out of production by Smith & Wesson because they just didn't sell all that well so now kind of poo-pooed a lot of people's rationale for owning one of these it's also interesting to consider that while for example enemy at the gates made Muslims popular you don't really see a huge demand for most ngons and haven't seen them sold out everywhere these days if this gun hadn't been actually a pretty dang good gun would that movie popularity have really blasted you know would it have been anything more than just a flash in the pan so to speak because in reality cements and Wesson did a fantastic job making these pistols they were relative they had a relatively small market because simply because of the size and the scale but man the quality that went into manufacturing them was excellent and I think there are two sorts of people who became new model 29 owners after watching Dirty Harry movies you had some of the people like I described earlier who bought this thinking it would be cool put three rounds through it and decided this isn't fun and there were people who were able to fully appreciate and maybe became very interested in large for handgun shooting as a result of getting one of these and discovering just how fantastically nice of a revolver it really was now this particular one here is one of the earlier pattern guns it does have a pinned and recessed what's called pinned and recessed what that means is the barrel was actually threaded into the frame to the proper location and then pinned in place to hold it and keep it from moving this was a process that was replaced later on by Smith & Wesson in order to economize with instead of crushed fit barrel which well it works it doesn't have that bit of finesse and craftsmanship to it that a properly threaded and pinned barrel does and then of course the the recess chambers in the cylinder this is a thing that was a little more practically valuable in the early days of metallic cartridges when brass cases were more likely to fail and having the the change the cartridge fully recessed so the the case head was flat against the back of the cylinder meant that in the case of a ruptured cartridge you are less likely to have gas venting out the back towards you the shooter with modern cartridges like these you know it that's really not so much of a practical concern but the added quality is really nice and having it fully recessed means that the gap between the back of the cylinder and the back of the frame can be much narrower because it doesn't have to accommodate the whole thickness of the cartridge rim the trigger on these this this one in particular and the model 29 in general is just a fantastic it's got a nice smooth double action pole and the single action trigger on this thing is like the proverbial glass rod breaking it's really really nice I'm sure there were some very happy people who bought these after Dirty Harry and discovered holy cow you know I don't have to go buy a Colt Python in order to get a magnificent gun Smith and lessons still out there making really good guns so if you'd like to own this one it is coming up for sale here at Rock Island it as part of a lot of guns a batch all being sold together if you take a look in the description text below you can find a link to Rock Island catalog page on this this gun and the others in its lot you can take a look at the pictures of all of them the descriptions the price estimate at cetera and if you decide that you'd like to have it yourself can place a data right there through their website thanks for watching I gots to know

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 605,483

Rating: 4.9594703 out of 5

Keywords: m29, dirty harry, s&w, smith & wesson, movie, hollywood, film, clint eastwood, 44 magnum, magnum, revolver, history, forgotten, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, punk, movies, model 29

Id: pj1y-bx_p30

Length: 12min 43sec (763 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 10 2017