Howdy Again
You have to realize that a great many of the firearms used in movies in the old days were rented. Stembridge was probably the major supplier of firearms to the moves for many years. Starting around 1913 James Stembridge landed a job working for Cecil B. DeMille helping train actors to look and behave like soldiers. Stembridge realized there would be a need for firearms in the movies and began buying up old guns. Thousands of them. Most of what he bought were old and obsolete and not much value was placed on them at the time.
The old oatburners and war movies were made fast and dirty on tight budgets. Time was money. The reason we saw so many Winchester Model 1892 rifles and Colt Single Action Army revolvers in the old Westerns is because Stembridge had so many of them. If an Army needed to be equipped with dozens of rifles, Stembridge supplied what they had in abundance, even if it was not historically correct for the era the movie portrayed. Nobody cared very much at the time about being historically accurate, so that's why a '92 with its fore stock removed could pass for a Henry rifle. I have seen several of them, in the Scalphunters, and Winchester '73. For pirate movies, Trap Door rifles would be cut down and made to look like flint lock pistols. Why? Because no director would stand around waiting while muzzle loading firearms were loaded. It was so much easier and quicker to slip a blank cartridge into a chamber.
But that was a real antique Henry in the hands of Aline McMahon in Man from Laramie. 1955 was much too early for it to have been an Italian replica. And I'm pretty sure Jeff Corey was holding a real Henry in True Grit in 1969.
Times changed. By the 1980s Stembridge had about 10,000 guns in their armory. But control of the company had passed out of the hands of the Stembridge family, and around 2000 the owners sold off most of the collection, cashing in one time on how much the collection had increased in value.
No longer could a director call up Stembridge and order up a movie full of old guns. You will also notice that since that time not many movies are made any more with dozens of guns in them. Most firearms in movies today, particularly in Westerns, are Italian replicas. Uberti started producing replicas of Civil War revolvers in the late 1950s, as the centennial of the Civil War approached. As the variety of what Uberti produced increased so did the variety of what started appearing in movies increased.
Then there were the unusual movies made with an eye to history. The 1876 Winchester that Tom Selleck used in Crossfire Trail was cobbled together from two originals. The Sharps rifle Selleck used in Quigley Down Under was a Shiloh, and there was a second rifle with an aluminum barrel for the scenes where it was thrown to the ground.
But there were no phony guns in the old oatburners. I still cringe when somebody kicks a 1st Gen Colt across the floor or drops one to the ground in an old movie. But heck, they were not worth much then.
Interesting note: when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941, the commander of Fort Macarthur in Los Angeles felt he might not have enough weapons at the base. He called up Stembridge, and they sent over several hundred rifles and more than 50 Tommy guns.
So next time you are complaining about the guns you see in the movies, think a little bit about the history of movie making, and just where all those guns came from in the first place.
