Artifact Spotlight: Hollywood prop guns

What’s a Mob movie without guns? Prop guns have been a part of this movie genre since the first silent gangster film in 1906, The Black Hand. In the prop master’s armory, you’ll find everything from real guns and blank-fire guns to toy guns and hard rubber casts.

The Mob Museum has preserved some of these prop guns in its collections.

The Sopranos blank-fire prop pistol

In the final episode of Season 2 of The Sopranos, Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero (Vincent Pastore) joins his boss, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), and fellow mafiosi “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri (Tony Sirico) and Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) on a trip out to sea to “test drive a yacht.” While at sea, the crew tells Big Pussy they know he’s been wearing a wire. He then receives the same fate as many other mobsters who flip: a belly full of lead.

The gun that Van Zandt uses in this scene is a Smith & Wesson blank-fire prop pistol. A blank is a bullet-free cartridge loaded with extra gunpowder to emit a dramatic muzzle flash fit for the silver screen.

Blanks are often fired from real guns, typically modified for safety. This prop pistol has permanent alterations to ensure that live rounds are never accidentally used on set. The barrel is plugged, making it impossible for the gun to fire projectiles, and the takedown lever is welded in place to prevent anyone from switching out the barrel. Although this gun can only fire blanks, it’s treated like any other gun when it comes to state and federal laws.

These prop gun safety measures are crucial, because accidents on set have happened and sometimes have resulted in death. During the filming of The Crow in 1993, Brandon Lee was fatally shot when a blank unintentionally fired a dummy bullet lodged in the barrel.

More recently, in 2021, during a rehearsal of the film Rust, Alec Baldwin fired a prop revolver, mistakenly loaded with a live round. Cinematographer Halyna Hutchins was killed and the director, Joel Souza, was injured. This month a jury found the set armorer, Hannah Gutierrez-Reed, guilty of unintentional manslaughter.

The Godfather: Part II prop revolver

Flashbacks showing the rise of Vito Corleone (Robert De Niro) in the 1910s and ’20s are a major part of The Godfather: Part II. Vito’s community of Italian immigrants in New York City is plagued by Don Fanucci, a cruel Black Hand extortionist. When Fanucci refuses a compromise with Vito, the future godfather finds a more permanent solution. Vito stalks the extortionist from up on the rooftops during a festival, ambushes him in his apartment and shoots him with a revolver wrapped in a makeshift towel silencer (which catches on fire in an iconic moment). While he escapes, he breaks the gun into pieces to destroy the evidence.

In these scenes, De Niro uses a Webley MK VI prop revolver. This is a dense black rubber cast meant to emulate the look of a real Webley revolver but without any of the moving parts. To give it extra heft, the grip is loaded with heavy sand-like grains, because a hard rubber gun is, of course, much lighter than a real gun.

This prop revolver was part of the inventory of a major prop supplier, Stembridge Gun Rentals. Other films and television shows used this same prop during production. According to Stembridge, it was most notably used by Harrison Ford in the 1989 film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Other productions that used this prop included the subsequent television spinoff The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (also known as The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones) and the pilot episode of The A-Team.

The Untouchables prop Tommy gun

In the 1987 film The Untouchables, the titular squad travels to a bridge on the Canadian border to intercept a shipment of illegal liquor, thwarting Al Capone (Robert De Niro). Treasury Agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and Chicago cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) arrive on horseback brandishing a shotgun and a Thompson submachine gun, respectively. Pincered by the Canadian Mounties and the U.S. agents, the mobsters are quickly vanquished. Like most of the scenes in the movie, this event is just as fake as the guns.

Sean Connery uses a plastic and rubber prop Tommy gun in this scene made by the Modelgun Corporation, the oldest “modelgun” manufacturer in Japan. With Japan’s strict gun control laws following World War II, modelguns have no firing capabilities, even with modifications, making them perfect for movie props. The Modelgun Corporation initially sold imported toy guns (from companies such as Mattel) that they modified to look more realistic. They also created airsoft replicas with new mechanisms, such as an internal gas tank and blowback function.

Many movies with prop Tommy guns use them in unrealistic ways. The real Thompson is a heavy and awkward-to-handle gun. The intense muzzle climb requires a firm two-handed grip to maintain control while firing. A gangster could not hang out of a car window and shoot one-handed, commonly depicted in Hollywood, let alone upon a galloping horse.