Souvenirs of Death

This short film shows a bunch of boys playing with a real, loaded pistol when playing war. One of the boys even deliberately inserts a full magazine into the pistol before playing with it. I was a kid in the 1960s. One of my favorite shows was "Combat". I and everyone I played with knew the difference between a real gun and a toy. Some of us had real guns in our homes. Most of us had bb and or pellet guns. We also had real hunting and bowie knives. When we played "Combat" we didn't use real guns or real knives, even though the TV show "Combat" had lots of scenes where knives and daggers were used to kill. A toddler might not know what a gun can do, but it's far fetched to show boys who are about 10 or 11 loading a full magazine into a pistol and running around playing war with it. On a technical level, I noticed that though the magazine was inserted by one of the boys, he didn't rack the slide to chamber a round. Therefore, the gun wouldn't have gone off when the trigger was pulled. If you want to use a pistol for self defense, you should carry it with a round chambered and if it has a safety, train yourself to thumb the safety off before shooting. Your other hand may not be available to rack the slide if you haven't already chambered a round.

I first saw this short film in the mid-1960s on WPIX-Channel 11 in New York, and it had a profound effect on me. I was always respectful of guns, to the degree that I had any contact with them (which was not at all), but this movie really woke me up as a kid to the dangers of irresponsible gun ownership. Seeing it again in the twenty-first century, it still packs a wallop, although obviously the issues have changed as gun ownership -- far beyond the ranks of nostalgia-laden veterans -- has exploded in most parts of the United States.

"Souvenirs of Death" is a very strange film in that the narrator of the film is a gun! John Nesbitt provides the voice for a German Mauser handgun and it follows the gun's path from a souvenir picked up by an American G.I. serving in the war. He brings it home and the gun ends up killing an innocent dog! Where it goes from there, you'll just have to see for yourself.

The style of the film is unique. The plot, however, is a bit familiar. "Winchester 73" has a lot of similarity as does the old "Hawaii Five-O" episode "Diary of a Gun" (1975). However, despite familiarity, the story is well written and a convincing argument that folks need to be much, much, much more careful if they're going to own a gun. Keep that thing locked up...with no chance anyone else will be able to get to it!

By the way, Barbara Billingsley is in a small role in the film--long before she starred on "Leave it to Beaver" or learned to speak Jive ("Airplane").

Pretty dry story of a handgun that comes back from Europe after WW II. The narrator tells the story of how the guns come back to the US, and end up in the hands of the children, playing outside. And there's Barbara Billingsly, mom Cleaver in "Leave it to Beaver", as the dis-approving mom. It's all pretty droll. with a message from J. Edgar at the very end, warning of the perils of bringing these wartime weapons back to the U.S. It's a filler between films on Turner Classic Movies. Skip this one... about as interesting as belly button lint. Directed by Ed Cahn.

There was Souvenirs of Death , the story of the life of a gun.