Clint Eastwood’s Most Famous Gun: Dirty Harry’s S&W Model 29

How Eastwood Helped Make The Model 29 Famous

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Clint Eastwood has been making movies for nearly seven decades. For any kind of career, that’s impressive, but even more so in Hollywood. And while he has stepped behind the camera plenty of times to make some great films, he spent most of his career front and center, usually wielding a grimace and a gun. Of all those roles he stepped into, one character resonates more than others — Dirty Harry and his famous Model 29 revolver in .44 Magnum.

Eastwood’s career began with a humble bit part as a lab assistant in 1955’s Revenge of the Creature. By 1959, he’d landed the role of Rowdy Yates on the hit TV Western, Rawhide, which he played for 217 episodes. It was all uphill from there. 

Folks who are old enough to remember Rawhide probably remember Clint best as poncho’d gunslinger in The Man With No Name franchise of spaghetti Westerns, beginning with A Fistful of Dollars in 1964. Back then, he wielded the typical fare for cowboy movies — lots of Colt SAA revolvers along with Winchester and Sharps rifles.

For people born in the early 1980s and late 1970s, Clint was the seasoned old film veteran who gave us Unforgiven (1992). But, above all else, he was “Dirty” Harry Callahan with his hand-cannon Smith & Wesson Model 29 revolver chambered in, of course, .44 Magnum. 

Clint Eastwood helped make the Model 29, and the cartridge it fired, famous. And it wasn’t the fleeting kind of internet fame we’re familiar with today. That speech about the .44 Magnum, and that entire scene that introduced the world to Harry Callahan in the original Dirty Harry (1971) was better than any ad S&W could have created for what was largely an unpopular revolver at the time. The term “.44 Magnum” entered the pop culture ecosphere and it would dwell there for a long time. 

“I know what you’re thinking. “Did he fire six shots or only five?” Well to tell you the truth in all this excitement I kinda lost track myself. But being this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and would blow your head clean off, you’ve gotta ask yourself one question: “Do I feel lucky?” Well, do ya, punk?” — Harry Callahan

S&W Model 29 & .44 Mag History

The .44 Special cartridge had been around since the early 1900s, but when Elmer Keith came around and made it his mission in life to push the cartridge to its limits, he created a new round that would be the most powerful production handgun cartridge for decades to come.

The .44 Magnum, which Keith created in conjunction with Smith & Wesson, was introduced in 1956. He intended for it to be a powerful round that would allow handgun hunters to take on dangerous game — and by the same token, serve as a defensive firearm for hunters against bears and anything else that might want to eat them. 

Of course, S&W released a new, large, N-frame revolver to go with the powerful new cartridge. It got the designation of “Model 29” in 1957 and it was, as Clint says as Harry, the most powerful production handgun in the world. It was later eclipsed by several cartridges and handguns, first by the .45 Winchester Magnum in 1979. But the .44 Mag still held that title in 1971 when Harry gave his speech to the world — but it wasn’t exactly popular. 

For years, not too many people cared about the cartridge or the Model 29 except for select hunters, serious handgunners, and some members of law enforcement, though most considered the .44 Magnum too much to handle or shoot accurately, especially in a shorter-barreled revolver. 

In fact, S&W had halted production of the Model 29 when production for Dirty Harry ramped up. The script called for a revolver with a 4-inch barrel, but none were to be had. Instead, the filmmakers had to assemble enough working guns for the movie from parts sent by S&W. That’s why you’ll see the barrel of Harry’s gun change from 8 3/8-inch to 6 1/2-inch model in some scenes. In later movies, he uses the 6 1/2-inch model exclusively.

The Smith & Wesson Model 29 was released as a six-shot, double-action revolver with a number of options for barrel length: 3, 4, 5, 6, 6 1/2, 8 3/8, and 10 5/8 inches. Custom barrel lengths were also available via special order. Originally available with a high-polish bluing or nickel finish and wood grips, the gun can chamber and fire .44 Special and .44 Russian, in addition to .44 Mag rounds.

The Model 29 Hits the Big Screen

After the movie came out, the controversy over its subject matter and its general awesomeness made it a huge hit. So huge that four sequels were made over the next 17 years, which were mostly good: Magnum Force (1973), The Enforcer (1976), Sudden Impact (1983), and The Dead Pool (1988).

Demand for the Model 29 — Dirty Harry’s gun — went through the roof. S&W put the gun back into production, and it sold like crazy for the next couple of decades. Everyone wanted “the most powerful handgun in the world.”

In Sudden Impact (1983), 12 years after the first film debuted, Eastwood delivered the most memorable and quoted line from the entire franchise from behind his intimidating Model 29, its barrel pointed at the camera and looking like a train tunnel. He encourages the last remaining bad guy who tried to rob his favorite diner to make a move by calmly growling, “Go ahead. Make my day.” Epic. Precious few lines of dialog have been repeated and parodied as often as that one.

Unfortunately, S&W again discontinued the Model 29 in the late 1990s, but these days, the gunmaker does a run almost every year and you can find one on Guns.com for a little over $1,300.

Dirty Harry’s Other Guns

The AMC Auto Mag

While Harry Callahan carries a Model 29 in every film, he used a different overpowered sidearm for the final act of Sudden Impact. That movie was also the first in the series that didn’t entirely take place in San Francisco.

When Harry’s trusty revolver is kicked off a dock into the bay by the movie’s lead villain, Harry switches to a gun he practiced with earlier in the film, the AMC Auto Mag — a niche semi-auto handgun chambered for .44 AMP, a proprietary round that was essentially a rimless .44 Magnum. 

At the time, the gun was already a decade old and AMC went out of business the year before the movie came out. While it was around, the Auto Mag was plagued with issues, and AMC was plagued by financial woes, mostly because the gun was so expensive to produce that the company lost money on every one it sold. But it sure looked cool.

The Auto Mag name and trademark were sold to AutoMag Ltd. Corp. in 2015. These days, you can get a new Auto Mag pistol if you want, but they sell for about $4,000, so make sure you really want it. 

Dirty Harry’s Rifle

Harry Callahan doesn’t really truck with long guns, he only utilized a weapon that isn’t a handgun a few times in the five Dirty Harry movies. He uses some kind of giant air-powered spear gun thing from a movie set in The Dead Pool and he takes out the last bad guy in The Enforcer with an M72 LAW rocket launcher, but the original film is the only time Harry uses a rifle. 

When camping out on a rooftop, trying to spotlight the Scorpio killer, Harry is armed with a Winchester Model 70 bolt-action rifle chambered in the beastly .458 Winchester Magnum. It is, admittedly, not a great choice for a counter-sniper rifle. The .458 was designed as a dangerous game round that could get through the skin of a rhino. Sounds like the kind of rifle Harry would choose. 

Dirty Harry Was Almost Played by Frank Sinatra Carrying a Shotgun

According to Hollywood legend, an earlier version of the first Dirty Harry movie had the San Francisco police inspector carrying a sawed-off shotgun in a case as his go-to weapon instead of the Model 29 when things got hairy. And the role was all lined up for none other than Frank Sinatra. 

As the story goes, Frank backed out of the film after he broke his wrist filming The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as he didn’t want to be firing a gun for a whole production, let alone a shorty shotgun. The script kicked around for years trying to find a star — John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, and others were considered — until it landed on Eastwood. The rest, as they say, is history.