Poll- Clint or Elmer

Who made the .44 Magnum great? Elmer Keith is the only correct answer.
Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry did do an excellent job of showing it off and increasing it's popularity but he didn't make it what is it.
Fun poll though! I'll have to check results again in a day or two!

Elmer... the whole Dirty Harry thing is just fiction, just like Rambo one-handing the M-60. Welcome to Fantasy Disco, right?

What made the .44 great for me was I found that it did everything the writers and video personalities said it did:

Versatile with both mag and spl ammo.
Powerful enough for anything I would ever hunt.
Easy as pie to reload, cartridges and bullets are easy to handle and cases have a good rim, aren't thin, tiny, or bottlenecked.
The cases, bullets, primers and powder are easy to find, data is everywhere, and most loads are more accurate than I am.
Recoil is stout with full power loads, but not in the wicked and punishing .454/.460/.475/.500 realm.
The guns are varied, and run the gamut from single shot to SA or DA revolvers to autos... plus it can be found in lever, bolt, single shot and semi auto rifles

Having a champion with the credibility of Keith in print or the persona of Eastwood on video is great, but some cartridges just have so much going on they speak for themselves. I think that even without Elmer or Lieutenant Callahan the .44 Rem Mag was going to be a winner .

Stay safe!

My buying a .44 had nothing to do with either.

That’s like asking who made the Trans Am great, GM or Burt Reynolds. GM made the TA 6.6 what it was, Burt just drove it and made it look good. Even that cast of Burt, Cletus Snow and Sally Field couldn’t have made a Cavalier as cool as the TA. Same goes for Clint Eastwood, he just made the gun look good after Elmer MADE it good.

ColtPythonElite said:

My buying a .44 had nothing to do with either.

Click to expand...

When I was a kid, they came out with the first AutoMag. Always wanted a .44 Magnum auto-loader, since. Got a DE44.
Then I got a 1894 Marlin in, you guessed it, .44. Wound up liking the caliber, so a 629 was almost a logical progression,
IMO. Now it's my favorite. But as great as both Elmer and Keith are, they had nothing to do with it.

I'm sure I knew what a 44 Magnum was before "Dirty Harry" but I had never wanted one. I knew about it because I read what Elmer and others wrote about it, but it wasn't until "Dirty Harry" that I ever imagined owning one. Even then it would be twenty years or so before I would buy one..

Elmer Keith developed and promoted the .44 mag but apparently by 1971 the niche market for .44 Mag revolvers was sated: everyone who wanted/needed a .44 mag had one, used copies were available, and they were out of production.
Fun facts from Internet Movie Fiirearms Database. IMFDb on the Clint Eastwood/John Milius movie "Dirty Harry". When they started the movie, the script called for a S&W Model 29 with 4 inch barrel in .44Mag. The Model 29 was no longer in production at S&W. There are a lot of arguments in the IMFDb talk page and edit history as to whether they used Model 57 in 41mag as a stand-in, or an S&W in .45 Colt as a stand-in to allow use the Hollywood 5-in-1 blanks (used in .38-40, .44-40, .45 Colt revolvers and .38-40, .44-40 rifles).
The final IMFDb version is that Fred Miller at S&W found the parts to assemble two Model 29s for the film: one with 8 3/8" barrel and one with 6 1/2" barrel, both of which used (or only the 6 1/2"). The prop master made .44 Mag blanks for the movie.
Whatever version works out to be historic about the film, after the movie "Dirty Harry" demand for the S&W Model 29 in .44 Magnum skyrocketed.

I’m a huge 44-o-phile, and I came to be so from watching and using the 44mag, not from hearing legend or watching fantasy.

My dad taught me firearm safety by teaching first “firearm danger.” I was 5, we had a sick cow in a barn stall, she had tried to break through the sucker-rod window, and she was hanging - dad took the opportunity to show me what the 44mag from his Marlin 1894 could do. “If it does that to a cow, think about what bad it would do to a person...” Lesson learned, loud and clear...

The Marlin 1894 44mag is somewhat a tradition for my family, so I wanted mine immediately as a kid. I borrowed my dad’s Marlin until I borrowed an uncle’s 629, replacing the 627 I had been shooting. I ended up getting a Super Blackhawk before my Marlin, long before I could legally drive. I learned about Elmer Keith as a kid by researching the 44mag, and I became a Keith fan because I was already a 44mag fan.

I’m not sure I’ve ever actually watched an entire Dirty Harry movie. Watched all of his old westerns, but not the cop dramas. What American hasn’t seen the scene or heard the movie line (or reference in some other movie or show)?

But... there’s no option in the poll for “I’m a fan of the 44mag because of the 44mag, but I’ve heard the legends too...”

Elmer was the Director of Development. He had associates though, The .44 Associates.

Clint was the Director of Marketing.

In the movie, Dirty Harry says something like "This is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world and it will blow your head clean off." At the time, a statement like that projected an already good cartridge into super-stardom. They both are responsible for it's popularity....IMHO

I will bet Clint sold more Model 29s than anyone else has managed to IMHO.

MaxP said:

I will bet Clint sold more Model 29s than anyone else has managed to IMHO.

Click to expand...

Certainly so - I’d add to that, however, a good hype man has to have a product which ACTUALLY delivers for its market if they want to enjoy that level of success. If the first hundred thousand buyers of 44mags, following the film release, had reported back poorly, there wouldn’t have been the next million.

Anything can catch fire if the spark is hot enough, but the wood can’t be wet if you need it to keep burning...

In my opinion, Elmer Kieth developed the 44 Magnum and got S&W and Remington to start producing guns. Harry Calihan as portrayed by Clint Eastwood made the cartridge popular.

Neither influenced my decision to buy a 44 Magnum.

I had no need for a 44 Magnum for 30 some years, still don't, but the Model 69 piqued my interest. I now have two Model 69's and a Model 629. None of them have yet to see a full power 44 Magnum round. But the capability is there if I need it.

WestKentucky said:

Even that cast of Burt, Cletus Snow and Sally Field couldn’t have made a Cavalier as cool as the TA.

Click to expand...

...but Cletus Snow made that W900 look good..!

Oddly enough, I don't have... most likely won't ever have... a .44Mag. I do have a .44SPC, an odd purchase that I probably would not have otherwise made, but I've never really been that interested in the .44. The allure of the .44SPC is directly because of Elmer Keith, and probably the only reason I bought one.

Need to give credit where it is due. Elmer Keith did not create the .44Magnum. He simply wanted the industry to adopt his heavy 1200fps .44Spl load (26,000psi). It was the engineers at S&W and Remington to gave us the 40,000CUP, 1450fps .44Magnum.

My love affair with both the .44Spl and .44Mag has more to do with John Taffin, Skeeter Skelton and Elmer Keith than Dirty Harry. I was always more a fan of Clint's westerns than anything else he did.

Charlie98 said:

the whole Dirty Harry thing is just fiction, just like Rambo one-handing the M-60.

Click to expand...

I had to try it once when I was expending excess ammo at a 60 qual. range. It can be done, not accurate, of course, but a fun way to spend Uncle Sugar's dime......

As for the question, the answer is both of them. Keith made it happen, Dirty Harry made it a hit.

It was interesting that in one of Clint's "Dirty Harry" sequels, he explained his preference for the S&W .44 Mag, but he loaded it with .44 Spl ammo to gain more control. Seemed to negate his earlier on screen image of only wanting the biggest & baddest gun! Of course when Callehan had stake-out duty to snipe across roof tops he chose the .458 Win...LOL

Don't you just love the movies...LOL

pert near said:

Of course when Callehan had stake-out duty to snipe across roof tops he chose the .458 Win...LOL

Click to expand...

I was watching/listening to Dirty Harry the other night when I was loading... I always thought that was an odd choice.

entropy said:

I had to try it once when I was expending excess ammo at a 60 qual. range. It can be done, not accurate, of course, but a fun way to spend Uncle Sugar's dime......

Click to expand...

I did too... burning up some blanks so we didn't have to take them back. Once I started firing it, I had to grip it so tight I couldn't let off the trigger, and I blew off about 50 rounds before I got both hands back on it. LT came down the hill to yell at me about it, but I was just a dumb PVT at the time and wasn't expected to know any better.

Elmer of course gets full credit but I watched Dirty Harry before I ever bought my first gun. Clint gets full credit for my entire love of revolvers, but especially 44 magnum ones.

I remember the very first time I fired a 44 and dropped my hammer on the 7th chamber and thought "man in all this excitement it kinda is easy to lose track".

It's a lot easier to count to six when you're in an armchair watching TV!

As to my own experience, it was Keith's writings about the .44 Special that got me interested in long range shooting and potent revolver cartridges. I was building a custom .44 Special when I got wind of the .44 Magnum, but because of economics, finished up the .44 Special and shot it until I could get a .44 Magnum. My first .44 Magnum came in the guise of a Ruger Super Blackhawk vintage 1971. It was not for a long time I even considered a Smith & Wesson Magnum. So Clint Eastwood never played any part in my decision to go with the .44 Magnum. More like Charles Askins, Jim Harvey and those of that ilk.


Bob Wright

I work in R&D, and if there's one thing I've learned it doesn't matter how hard you work of how innovative you are, the Marketing Department is the one that's going to get 100% of the credit for the success of a project you dedicated 2 years of your life to.

In this instance, Keith is the unsung hero, and only .44mag enthusiasts know who he is. But just about everybody knows who Dirty Harry is, and even if they couldn't pick a .44 mag cartridge out of a line-up they still know it's one bad-@$$ round.

While Keith did all the development and the round couldn't have been successful without him, it would still be an obscure round and we'd only have one or two gun options that fired that round had it not been for Clint Eastwood driving it's popularity.

Yer jokin' ...Right?

I'm going to be an iconoclast and say neither. I've never owned a .44 Magnum, and always preferred a .45 Colt -- which in a Ruger Blackhawk will duplicate the .44 Mag.

I've often wondered what would have happened if, instead of having his Number 5 made on a Colt SA platform in .44 Special, Keith had simply hot-rodded a Colt New Service or Shooting Master.