Movie Flintlocks

Movie Conversions: The Flintlock Trapdoor Springfield
Forgotten Weapons

A problem I had never considered.

"The movie industry has always had special requirements for firearms. Flintlocks, for example, can be rather finicky guns for folks to use without practice and care, and that does not work well in a filming environment where a whole scene's setup would be wasted if a flintlock fails to fire properly on demand. Today, courtesy of Mike Carrick from Arms Heritage magazine, we have an example of an old solution to this problem: use a thoroughly reliable cartridge-firing Trapdoor Springfield and just make it look more or less like a flintlock. Guns like this one were used in a variety of movies, including specifically the 1953 picture "The Man From the Alamo" and John Wayne's 1960 film "Alamo" (in Wayne's film, the same system was also used to make mock Kentucky rifles)."