Hell in a Handbasket

The person using the gun says that it is a "Bergmann 1911", a prototype that he was able to acquire because he owned stock in the Austrian arms company that produced the gun. He goes on to show that the pistol is fed via a magazine in the butt.

Notice that magazine. It is long and slim, obviously designed to hold the cartridges in a single stack pattern. If it was a double stack magazine then it would be pretty fat because the cartridges are held a little bit offset from each other, zig-zagging inside of the box.

Don't know what I mean? Here is a picture that I found at A Human Right which graphically shows the difference.

Anyway, back to the movie.

The gun used in the film was certainly a working firearm. The next screen capture shows the gas emerging from the muzzle, and we can see the puff of vapor that emerged from the ejection port. Somewhere in that dark and cluttered picture is the blurred image of a spent cartridge as it pinwheels across the set.

Just as an aside, notice how the blond working girl on the right is showing off the feature that made her the top earner in that little corner of the West. But I digress.

This would be a neat homage to a little known chapter of handgun history if but for one thing. You see, there never was a Bergmann 1911.

Theodor Bergmann was an industrialist who hired others to design the guns which bears his name. His most advanced design is the most famous, the Bergmann-Bayard 1910/21.

(I found some of these excellent pictures from this website.)

Obviously heavily influenced by my own favorite handgun, the Mauser C96, the Bergmann was a magazine fed autoloader that was chambered for the potent 9x23mm cartridge. This round, now most commonly known as the 9mm Largo, is an extremely powerful handgun load that approaches the .357 Magnum in power levels. One could consider it a 9mm Magnum, and it was first offered before the First World War.

The handgun feeds from a six round magazine, although ten round magazines were offered as an after-market accessory. In the Old West, with the preponderance of revolvers, it would have parity of firepower for the first few moments. The ability to quickly reload by simply inserting a fresh magazine, however, would mean that the Bergmann would be superior in any extended fight.

Speaking of the magazine, though, please note that the Bergmann uses a fat double-stack job, instead of the slim single-stack shown in the screen capture above.

Besides the magazine, the gun shown in the movie doesn't resemble the historical Bergmann very closely at all. The movie gun has an 8 round magazine, the real gun used either a 6 round or 10 round magazine. The movie gun seats the magazine in the butt, while a real Bergmann is designed with the magazine forward of the trigger guard.

So it's not a Bergmann, no matter what the script says. So what is it?

I got a pretty good idea when I saw the silhouette of the gun in this screen capture.

Hey, that's a Walther P38! (And a really good example of unsafe gun handling. "Watch it, kid, you'll shoot your groin out!") One of the models with wooden grip panels, instead of black plastic grips that most of them are equipped with. Compare the color and shape of the grip with the picture below.

The P-38 uses an 8 round magazine, just like the gun in the movie. The magazine is also a single stack affair, just like the one featured in the film.

Instead of using a valuable antique and collector's item, it looks like the prop artists just attached some metal plates to a standard P-38. These guns were pretty common back in the 1960's and 1970's, and you can even acquire one for a reasonable price today through the surplus gun market. Just the thing if you want to have an exotic handgun in your Western without actually using an exotic handgun.

As far as Steven den Beste, I'm sorry to have to break it to him that the fancy gun he has been admiring for the past 37 years is a sham. But at least it was an actual gun with a costume bolted to it, instead of some Toys-R-Us special.