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.
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ksf-222 May 2018
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rmax30482314 June 2008It's odd to see such a time-bound short in these oh-so-modern days. It must have taken a couple of hours to shoot this. It does have Morris Ankrum as a performer, though he has no lines.
It's a straightforward warning that the guns brought home from the war by discharged GIs were more than merely souvenirs. They were weapons that were completely indifferent to their owners, as the gun's first-person narration points out, and were designed to do only one thing -- puncture the human body.
And so we trace a Mauser pistol from Germany, through an ordinary post-war family (where the gun is used to accidentally kill the family dog), through a varied series of owners, until it winds up in the hands of Morris Ankrum, an armed robber, and is involved in a shooting in which three men die.
Whether it was intended to be so or not, it's virtually an argument in favor of restrictive laws governing the ownership of handguns. The way the pistol's story is presented, of course, says no such thing. It might have been endorsed by the NRA as a plea for responsible gun management. But over the sixty years since this was shot, the cultural context seems to have developed in such a way that the message it carries is now quite different. We don't really need to worry about post-war souvenirs anymore. We need to be concerned about weapons, whatever their origins. The souvenir that was lethal and indifferent then has become the plain old ugly gun that is lethal and indifferent today. -
bkoganbing19 February 2016The title Souvenirs Of Death refers to a German Luger pistol which with the voice of John Nesbitt in this Passing Parade short narrates its life since it left the cold dead hands of a German officer on the field of battle in Europe. Two war souvenirs were extremely popular post World War II among GIs returning home, Japanese Samurai swords and Luger pistols from the Germans.
If the man who took the pistol off the dead German had really wanted to make the weapon safe then it seems that one would remove a firing pin. His young son finds the weapon, finds the ammunition for same (why in the world would you keep that) and the first tragedy of that weapon in civilian life occurs.
Nesbitt narrates how the weapon passes through several owners and even goes across country before it ends up in a final resting place so to speak. We even get J. Edgar Hoover warning about how these souvenirs are becoming popular in the underworld.
I can tell you the National Rifle Association will not approve of this short subject. -
Michael_Elliott26 February 2008Souvenirs of Death (1948)
*** 1/2 (out of 4)
Extremely interesting short about how automatic weapons used by Germans during WW2 made their way back to America and into the hands of the underworld. Apparently this was a big problem back in the day and this documentary short, narration from the gun's point of view, does a great job at showing the issues of gun control decades before it became a real issue. *Directed by Crane Wilbur who would go on to director It! The Terror From Beyond Space.
*The IMDb lists another director but the credits have Wilbur listed. -
"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"). -
antimusick13 February 2019There was Souvenirs of Death , the story of the life of a gun.
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rusty1325229 April 2019This was just a propaganda piece that our government is famous for to manipulate public opinion.
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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.
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xr-1756327 January 2018Anyone who collects World War Two military equipment (especially German) knows that our GIs were avid trophy hunters. Even today, some 70 plus years later, veteran "bring backs" turn up at gun shows and estate sales across the country. I saw this short film several years ago and I recall the pistol in question was a 1914 Mauser. But at the film's end there is an FBI message about the dangers of all war trophy guns and they showed an MP-40 sub machinegun.
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PoliticallyIncorrectone10 July 2019This 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.
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boblipton12 October 2023This episode of John Nesbitt's THE PASSING PARADE, his long-running series of shorts for MGM -- and elsewhere, a radio and a television feature -- tells the story of a Mauser automatic pistol, picked up from the corpse of a dead German officer and taken home as a souvenir by a passing American soldier.
After it shot the family dog, it starts to make its way hither and yon until it falls into the hands of a bleak-eyed Morris Ankrum, a criminal who uses it for its intended purpose -- to make holes in people. Meanwhile, Nesbitt tells the story from the gun's viewpoint, precise, prissy, and totally uncaring about the havoc its owner wreaks. It all ends with a message from J. Edgar Hoover. While stirring music plays, the audience is told that these guns are bad things. The gun has already made it clear that it bears no responsibility for these matters. I agree with its logic. -
jmlcop10 March 2024Story is about souvenir war trophies brought backs by our G. I.'s. It's rather silly how the writers made a story about the "H & K pistol 4 supposedly brought home, since the firearm was produced in mid 60's. The lead actor Jack Lord was anti firearms allegedly. I see this episode as a clumsy attempt to shock audiences and provide an anti gun debate. This is where fantasy shows try to put political agendas into action. Love the old show and really appreciate Jack Lord as a actor but it was terrible episode. This was the trend during those turbulent war years. Lots of fumbled writing for t.v. Shows.