The .44 Magnum and Dirty Harry

The movie, Dirty Harry starring Clint Eastwood, is a good picture as far as gun enthusiasts are concerned.  It has real guns- not the exotic fantasies of the James Bond series- and they are, for the most part, used in a realistic way.

This is not accidental.  Before the first scene was shot, Clint Eastwood contacted Bob Sauer, then a representative for Smith & Wesson, to get the kind of handgun he wanted- in this case, a Smith & Wesson Model 29, the long-barreled .44 Magnum.  These were not in production at the time, but a little string-pulling was done and Fred Miller at the plant had a couple assembled from parts.

After the guns arrived, Clint Eastwood spent many hours on the range with Bob Sauer instructing him in the use of "The World's Most Powerful Handgun" with full factory loads.  Bulleted ammo was not used in the filming, of course, but this practice did give the star a feeling of how the gun reacts under full recoil.  When blanks were used, he did an admirable job of duplicating the recoil.  The blanks, by the way, were specially made, since the famous Hollywood 5-in-1 blanks would not fit the .44 chamber.

The power of what one man, armed with the .44 Magnum, could do is graphically demonstrated in the scene where Harry wipes out an automobile and four suspects while eating his lunch.  The films also shows Harry counting the rounds expended during a gun fight- something seldom shown in other shoot-em-ups.  Dramatically, Harry holds the big Magnum on a bank robber and challenges him with "I lost count.  I don't know if there's another round in my gun- want to take a chance?"

But all is not technically correct, unfortunately.  Shown in the film is a high-powered rifle with a silencer- later described as a .30-06 through some confusing comments by Harry about lands, grooves, and rifling, and a lot of other things as he holds a spent case left at the scene of the shooting.  I would have thought that the movie experts would have known by now that you can't silence a high-powered rifle.  There is also the selection of a Winchester Model 70 elephant gun in .458 caliber.  The ammo used was not described in detail, but I have horrible visions of a .458 solid clattering around a dozen offices before stopping.

One reviewer, a shooter no doubt, stated:  "Harry's marksmanship, cinema variety, is second only to his choice of targets.  Shooting a fleeing suspect (the first time) in the leg dramatizes pinpoint marksmanship.  Later, the hero nips a deranged individual in the shoulder, causing the slayer-rapist to abandon his human shield."

Is Dirty Harry pro or anti-gun?  It depends on how flexible you are in your feelings.  I did not care for the classification of a silenced sniper rifle as a "deer rifle", nor did I take to kindly when, after the sniper attack, every "rifle nut", whatever that means, has to be checked out.  As one pro-gun critic stated:  "Responsible gun ownership took it on the chin, even if subliminally, in this film."

A good cop, even if he does bend the rules somewhat, Harry at least brings to the screen some semblance of authenticity; six-shot revolvers instead of the never empty variety; powerful guns that actually recoil instead of the never wavering cap pistols of old.  Now, if he could have just missed his targets a bit more and left out the association of a psychotic killer with gun ownership.  -Walter Rickell

Original text appeared in Guns Magazine, Sep. 1972