Big Jake

I caught a John Wayne movie I had never heard of or seen.   Big Jake

1971 movie.  A movie era where the Westerns all seem to have some sort of wonder for the new finagled contraptions coming in the 20th Century.  You see the trend in this movie, in The Shootist, The Wild Bunch.   Others.  It's the hippies and Post Modernist all coming up and thinking that they were ushering a new age, and discarding ALL the out-moded ways of the past.  Starting with a clean slate.  A cultural revolution and a great leap forward.  Age or Aquarius and whatnot.  Fortunately the rest of the 70s put paid to that idea.

Anyhoo, the new fangled item that the old outmoded John Wayne didn't see any use for was the semi-auto carried by his son.  He called it a Bergman 1911, and Big Jake McCandles noted it was only 1909.  The pistol was gonna be big and widely issued in 1911, according to the boy.  He then went to demonstrate the pistol and it shot all over like a machine gun.   You know, like all semi-automatics do even today. 

Now the pistol in the movie wasn't a real Bergman.  In 1971 Bergmans were rarish and it was easier to get a Walther to stand in as a prop gun.

"Early in the movie, Michael McCandles (Chris Mitchum) shows up sporting a revolutionary for the time period, Bergman automatic pistol, but proves to be dangerously inept in its handling. Thereafter, the weapon is carried by the more handgun adept James McCandles (Patrick Wayne). Bergman was indeed one of the earliest commercial manufacturers of aut copies are rare and quite valuable. Consequentially, the weapon shown in the movie is actually a circa 1940s Walther P-38 modified by prop-masters to resemblomatic pistols but they were produced in relatively small numbers so survivinge the much earlier Bergman pistol. This same prop weapon is seen again in the 1973 film, Black Caesar."