Revolver Movies: The Border... Or How Good Times Just Fall Into Place

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Footcheese

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Well I had one hell of a day. I woke up around 5, drove my old lady to her friend's house (she was catching a ride with her friend to MD's eastern shore to see another friend), and immediately kicked into GSD mode. When I got back to my little apartment I scoured Comcast on demand for something to watch because I knew Netflix wasn't gettin' here until 10 or so. I settled for the latest Rambo flick. It was OK. Didn't really hit my mark. I wasn't really expecting it to, I'm not much for bow hunting and knife forging.

So I get up off the ole sofa after that was said and done, make myself a sandwich, determine if I want to open carry while trying to go down to Comcast and swap cable boxes (my HDTV is all screwed up) since I was planning on going to NRA HQ to test my hand at CCI Blazer's .44 spc JHP stuff. Ultimately it was good I decided not to because Comcast was closed (banker's hours) and I was ticked. So then I got myself some Wendy's, picked up some Jameson, checked the mail and found my Netflix much to my delight.

I planned tonight as a sort of homage-to-Texas night (never been there but I hear it's a dry heat). I ordered the 1997 documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement and The Border. I wanted to rip into that Jameson and fire up Waco... after all today was a celebration of man liberty, no? But NRA HQ was beckoning and tanked target practice with a .44 Mag isn't exactly something their likes smile upon. So straight up Wendy's and Waco it is. Great show by the way.

After Waco, I was feeling all down and ticked off about how the last 20 years have been quite the sh*t show for an American's personal rights, so plinking (I'm thinking we should change the name for paper target plinking to phhhting) sounded good. Those CCI Blazer's are alright. Pretty clean, hollow point, FUN. NRA sold me some Magtech Cowboy Action specials though that put just the right amount of gook in my business to really make Mr. Redhawk unhappy though. It was a combination of that and the heat swelling from the Winchester 240 gr Magnums that ticked him off. So I quit somewhere around 50 minutes in.

When I get home it's after 7, so it's acceptable convention to drink now, right? I put in The Border and assemble a nice-n-tall Jameson on the rocks and get back on the old sofa (this all happened some time after I cleaned all that Magtech crud out of my number). I'm greeted by some pretty poignant John Hiatt over the opening credits that I'd normally get a little queasy about but THIS worked.

It starts out and Jack Nicholson is an INS type working in So Cal. We get to see his little home life, living out of a trailer with his wife, living it simple like (I did notice that he had some kind of stainless 1911 in this scene), when all of a sudden his wife start probing him about how she thinks they should move to El Paso and buy a duplex next to her little buddy. Jack's all leery of it but ultimately goes along with it (after all, who owns the poon in this relationship?).

The duplex is a weird little ranch style thing and the wife's little buddy next door is like her carbon copy with a wig (literally) and married to Harvey Keitel. Harvey gets Jack a job and Jack struggles through out the rest of the film with a sort of spiritual fulfillment type of thing while Harvey's role is a sort of materialism yin to Jack's yang type of thing. I won't ruin it for anyone reading all of this Jameson fueled blibber blabber, but I will say that the El Paso border patrol had some nice looking S&W revos that may have been some kind of model 27 with a 4" barrel. They also had some pretty sweet cartridge belts too that I wouldn't mind having.

I thought it was kind of cool how Jack went from a stainless 1911 to a model 27 though. Anyways, if you haven't seen The Border, check it out.
 
It probably was a 4" Model 28 Highway Patrolman. I believe that the Border Patrol carried that model in the seventies and early eighties.

I liked the shootout between Jack and the corrupt officers near the end of the movie. Nice revolver action.

Other revolver movies

Dead Bang

Payback

LA Conidential

48 Hours

Do I need to mention the Dirty Harry movies?
 
"The Border" is one of my favorite movies too. I noticed he carried two different revolvers in the movie, one was a 4" M19 and the other was a 3 1/2" M27 w a Patridge front sight, which one can see real well when he sneaks up on Warren Oates and Jeff Morris while they're drinking whiskey and talking money.
Anyway, I don't think it was intentional that he carried two different models, probably a prop guy mess up.
Movies about the border are great.
 
Was that a 3.5" M27? Boy my memory is getting rusty. The only other movie I can recall where a 3.5" M27 was used was the Robert Mitchum movie: The Friends of Eddie Coyle.
 
HAHAHA!! I'd forgot about "The Friends of Eddie Coyle. A good movie!
Yep, I'm pretty sure it is a 3 1/2" 27. What drew my eye to it was the large square "Patridge"type front sight and gigantic frame, while Jack's in the house, in the hallway, where the camera is at the 7-o'clock position just off Jack's left shoulder. Later when he has the shoot-out in shanty town where he climbs on top of the roof and shoots Jeff Morris high up in the back of the leg, resulting in Morris getting tangled in barbwire and ND'ing his 12ga into his own head, Jack has a 4" M19......Yeah I'm a "revolvers in movies/ Border Patrol movie" nerd......
By the way, you're revolver movie list is great! Check out "Flashpoint" & "The Professionals" also good DA wheelgun flicks
 
I think I got the idea it was a 27 specifically from the scene you mentioned, strangelittleman. The gigantic frame is what gave me that impression. A Highway Patrolman would make sense though.

So what sort of revolver did Morris have? It almost looked like some kind of Colt M1892 (I had to look that up, don't think for one minute I knew what the US Army service revolver before 1911 was).
 
I think Morris's revolver was a 4" Colt Official Police or Police Positive .38spl.
Hmm, Jameson, a belly full of chow and watching "The Border"....yep, it sounds like a good day to me!
 
Ah Yes! The Colt Border Patrol, I'm a real big fan of the Trooper, Lawman, Colt .357 and Border Patrol revolvers, they are all on my wish list.
To be honest, I don't know much about the Official Police and Police Positive other than the OP is a bigger frame than the PP, perhaps someone can chime in and educate us on them.
 
Well I'm not a Colt expert, but I believe the OP was the old 41 frame. The PP was a slightly bigger version of the Pcoket Positive.

That's as far as I'm willing to go though.

Oh and another movie with some great wheel gun action is Black Rain (1989). Micheal Douglas carries a 2.5" Colt Python as his primary and a 2nd generation Colt DS as his BUG. His partner played by Andy Garcia carries a 2.5" S&W Model 66.

There are a couple action sequences where Douglas takes on Yakuza thugs with subguns and wins. Even with his "obsolete" revolver.

Another great Robert Mitchum movie (with revolvers and 1911's) is 1975's The Yakuza.
 
Burt Reynolds in "Sharky's Machine" carrying Diamondbacks
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In the shootout on the bus at the start of the movie, he carries an M1911. After he shoots the gunman, somebody asks Burt, "Is he dead?" Burt replies, "Shake him and see if he comes around."
 
Don't forget "Rudy" from the original version of "The Getaway" and his 6" Python.

Also Nick Nolte's 4" Model 29 at the beginning of "48 Hours". I bought my own 4" 29 because of that movie. Until the collector's market went insane in the past couple of years, you could always get a 4" 29 for next to nothing. Somebody'd see "Dirty Harry" and want a Model 29. They couldn't find a 6/6.5" and would settle for a 4". They'd buy the gun and a box of the hottest ammunition they could find. The next week, the same gun would be back in the display case at the gunstore. I'll bet several people probably bought the same guns and brought them back within weeks of each other, probably timed to coincide with "Dirty Harry" being on TV.
 
Just finished watching To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Even though the movie is from the mid-eighties all the Secret Service agents use revolvers. William Petersons character carries a 2.5" Model 19. It's interesting for another reason as well. Everyone smokes in that movie. I forgot that the big anti-smoking push really didn't get rolling until the late eighties.

It was like watching a forties flick with everyone wearing cool eighties threads and big hair. Very strange.
 
Just finished watching To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). Even though the movie is from the mid-eighties all the Secret Service agents use revolvers. William Petersons character carries a 2.5" Model 19. It's interesting for another reason as well. Everyone smokes in that movie. I forgot that the big anti-smoking push really didn't get rolling until the late eighties.
Click to expand...
It's also a VERY strange movie
<spoilers>































1. The "hero" and his partner rob and murder another Federal agent.
2. The "hero" dies.
3. The villain dies.
4. The villain's girl gets the villain's other girl.
5. The "hero's" buddy gets the "hero's" girl, against her will.

The only thing keeping it from being a typical David Cronenberg movie is the lack of monsters.
 
Revolver Movies

You also need to check out Rolling Thunder with William Devane, and Tommy Lee Jones.
 
To Live and Die in L.A. was directed by William Friedkin. He directed The French Connection and The Excorcist as well.

It is an odd movie. It seemed very freaky when I saw it in 1986. Now it just seems like it was trying to hard to be edgy. Nevertheless it does have some nice revolver use in it.
 
Rolling Thunder is a great gritty, bleak 70's flick. A young Tommy Lee Jones was in that movie and was pretty good. Pretty good revolver action.

Another 70's flick with some revolver action is Sugarland Express. An early Spielberg movie with Goldie Hawn of all people, but it's interesting.
 
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