I know it's entertainment but . . .

P

Prof Young

New member
I've been watching The Musketeers on prime. It's fun to watch the recreation of the match lock guns, the flint locks and the others. But in every scene when someone is holding another at bay with a pistol . . . without fail the gun is not cocked. I'd think the production armorer would know better.

Life is good.
Prof Young
 
Prof Young said:
But in every scene when someone is holding another at bay with a pistol . . . without fail the gun is not cocked. I'd think the production armorer would know better.
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Fire up YouTube and watch the original Lone Ranger episodes. He does the same thing with his Colt six shooter in almost every episode.
 
I turned off the movie 310 to Yuma when I saw a guy fire a lever action twice in a row without working the lever.
 
And the countless times a 1911 is shown to fire when the hammer is clearly down
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I saw this just the other day. I just about stood up and yelled at the TV (but I didn't). But you can see it clearly, pointing the gun with the hammer down and it fires.

Can't remember which movie it was, but I also saw an old dueling pistol fired twice in a row, no need to cock it or reload it either!

I think we're all familiar with Hollywood's corner cutting that gives us ten-shot SAAs (recently Kevin Costner's in Open Range), lever actions that fire several times without working the lever for recocking and ejecting shells, and old Trapdoors that fire several in a row without reloading. I bet Custer would have appreciated some of those at the Greasy Grass!
 
I'd think the production armorer would know better.
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I'd think the armorer(s) DO know better, but they aren't the ones "calling the shots", that is the Director, and directors are notoriously bad at ignoring reality for "dramatic effect". Not all, these days, by any means, but enough either don't know or don't care...

Along with other things besides not cocking guns that need to be cocked in order to fire are the sound effects of an empty semi auto going click, click click as the trigger is pulled "proving" its empty. OR the sound of a hammer being cocked on a gun which has no hammer....(like a GLock :rolleyes:)

Now when it comes to "too many shots" or shots without you seeing the action being worked, there is a bit of an "out" (and of course its way overused)

Look at the offending scene, where a for example more than one shot is fired without the action being worked. IS it?? or is that just our perception.

ANY time the camera isn't constantly on the actor AND the gun in the same camera angle, then, arguably some time has passed and the action could have been worked or the gun reloaded "off camera", and even if what you see SEEMS to be continuous and unbroken steady progression of time, it may not be in the story line, and certainly isn't in the actual creation of the scene.

Example, hero is shoot a pistol, shoots to slide lock, you see (for a second) the slide locked back. Camera cuts to a shot of the bad guy(s) moving, or shooting, then back to the hero who now has a fully loaded gun and continues shooting. DID they make a mistake??
Maybe, or maybe they'll just say he reloaded when the camera was on the bad guys so you didn't see him do it....

Another irritating thing to me is the common use of a gun threatening people without being cocked (racked, etc) UNTIL the person being ordered around fails to comply, then the slide is racked or the hammer cocked to show the bad guy is actually "serious", etc..


Also note that with a few exceptions, sword fights in the movies and sword fights between people who are really trying to kill each other are quite different things.

One of the few places where there have been some improvements in recent times is movies set in pre-gunpowder days archery commands. Before firearms, the command to launch arrows (in English, anyway) was NOT "fire", it was "Loose" or "let fly".

I do commend the modern trend to show historical things as accurately as practical, but its still just a trend done by some filmmakers, and not nearly all of them.
 
This is a common grip but it doesn't look really ready.

But this steely eyed gunslinger deals with it with a double action.
 

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Prof Young said:
I'd think the production armorer would know better.
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I grew up in the 1950s and early 1960s -- the heyday of the television western genre. Even then, with us kids who should have been naive and impressionable for it not to have mattered, the number of shots that we saw being fired for a "six shooter" was staggering. It was, in fact, a standard joke: the fifty-shot six shooter.

It even gave rise to a movie theme. One of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies (maybe his first ever) was as a hero named (really!) "Handsome Stranger" in a movie starring Ann Margaret and Kirk Douglas. Arnold's gimmick was a 7-shot six shooter.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lD4FdqkS70
 
"It even gave rise to a movie theme. One of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first movies (maybe his first ever) was as a hero named (really!) "Handsome Stranger" in a movie starring Ann Margaret and Kirk Douglas. Arnold's gimmick was a 7-shot six shooter."

Yeah, The Villain." Stole their ideas from the roadrunner and the coyote. I have it in my DVD collection.

On some of those ten to fifteen shots from a sixgun, just poor and lazy work for effect on the film editors part, IMHO. When I was a kid I always wanted one to those Hollywood cowboy guns that fired 222 rounds of ammo before needing to be reloaded.
Paul B.
 
On the other hand, I DID see an episode of 'Remington Steele' where he was pretending to be an assassin, and given a gun (actually a rifle disguised as a shovel) he sighted the thing in.

Most shows, the hero can pick up any rifle and shoot it at any range and hit what they want.
 
Hollywood

I listened to a guy who was supposedly the armorer for "Hell On Wheels". He made several incorrect statements regards the firearms used on the production.

Watched an episode of the modern Sherlock " Elementary" where they discussed a smooth bored MP5, 3-shot burst when it was clearly full auto firing, and described the weapon as semiautomatic.

Watched a film clip entitled the "Modern Western", where they displayed a Rem New Model Army (1858) and called it a Colt.

Between armorers who seem not to have a clue, and script writers who clearly don't, I rarely expect Hollywood to get it right.
 
Another thing about movie/tv guns is the sound of the gunfire.

Not so much the fact that a gunshot cannot be faithfully captured on recording media or faithfully reproduced and so is created post production by the foley artists to simulate a gunshot, what bugs me is that it is incredibly rare for the actors to behave as they would if they were exposed to actual gunfire.

Been there, done that, endured gunfire inside an enclosed space without hearing protection. You are about freakin' DEAF or nearly so for quite a few minutes, and in some cases it can be hours to days before relatively "normal" hearing returns (IF it ever does...)

A gunfight in a building (or worse, a steel ship!) especially with ARs and AKs and such things is tremendous concussive noise, and unprotected people are not going to be able to have conversations at normal volume levels, let alone a whisper....yet we see such on TV every day, day in, day out...

many think that the handsignals used by tactical professionals are so the enemy doesn't hear them, and while that is true, its also true and more important that YOUR people can see the instructions when THEY can't hear them...
 
sound

Watched some film clip on US Civil War/War Between the States. As the infantry attack progressed, there was machine gun fire in the background.
 
Gatling gun?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatling_gun

The Gatling gun was first used in warfare during the American Civil War. Twelve of the guns were purchased personally by Union commanders and used in the trenches during the Siege of Petersburg, Virginia (June 1864—April 1865). Eight other Gatling guns were fitted on gunboats. The gun was not accepted by the American Army until 1866 when a sales representative of the manufacturing company demonstrated it in combat.
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gatling

Nah!!!!! Who ever made the flick just dubbed the sound of a full auto machine gun as a background track, likely used in a WWI movie prior.....hilarious.

But Gatlings are cool. Was it Roosevelt who heard "a peculiar drumming.....our Gatings!" ?
 
I prefer to think of movies and television shows as being set in alternate universes. In some universes Glocks have safeties. In others Glocks make hammer-cocking noises. In other universes break-open shotguns sound just like pump-actions.

It is this approach and attitude that keeps my wife from throwing things at me. :D
 
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