"The Twilight Zone" Mystery Rifle
 

There's a Twilight Zone marathon on this weekend on cable's SyFy channel...and the always popular & classic episode "Two" was just on...

Twilight Zone "Two" (TV episode 1961)
Directed by Montgomery Pittman. With Elizabeth Montgomery, Charles Bronson.
www.imdb.com/title/tt0734686/

(BTW: Montgomery looks really hot in this episode!)

Two survivors of an apocalyptic battle, a man and a woman from each opposing sides, approach each other suspiciously.

What is Bronson's rifle??? This is not a quiz; I don't know...

Excuse the quality of the screen grab...

(I actually watched this episode when it first aired...in 1961...) :D

Let's narrow down the field. It's not a Garand or M-1 Carbine nor is it an AK-47. It dosen't look heavy enough to be a BAR. That help any?

Peter

I just watched the episode online (yeah I'm bored)...I think both rifles are just Hollywood mockups. Bronson's looks like some kind of pump-action with a pistol grip and a MP40 style folding stock. Liz Montgomery's (sigh, I had a crush on her when I was about 8!) looks like a cross between a Garand and a French MAS with a side mounted Pedersen device kinda magazine.

Possible but Bronson's rifle looks familiar...especially the pistol grip & forearm...It has no visible magazine, which I think was purposely left out...Montgomery's rifle wasn't visible long enough for me to grab a screenshot...If I'd thought of it, I'd have saved the whole episode and broken it down in VirtualDub...Maybe if they rerun it later today...I'll check... ;)

There was another episode that had two opposing soldiers surviving a battle/war...and at the end, the English-speaking soldier was Russian, and the mute soldier [female] was American...I thought it was this episode, but this one just had them walking away together, no national affiliation...

You can watch the whole episode at www.videosurf.com and pause at your leisure...ain't the intenet grand :evilgrin:

That rifle is a classic that I have longed for all my life. It is a 30-30 guage magnum semi automatic, lever action, pump gun. It has a revolver grip. It takes a 53 round pineapple clip and you can hook your knife to the front. Very, very rare.:evilgrin:

You're into organic gardening, aren't you, Vinnie??? :evilgrin:

This may be :_otopic: , but Rod Serling was a Paratrooper in WW II. Does anyone have any more info about his service record?

Yes, Served in the Pacific with the Paratroops and had, it seems, a chequered service record...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Serling

There used to be a french made semi auto pistol that came with a "rifle" upper that was swap-able with the pistol upper... It was .22 caliber.

I am thinking it was made by MAB... but the cobwebs in this old memory are sometimes hard to sweep out. I remember they were in the Shooter's Bibles of the late 1960's and early 1970's... If anyone has one of those Bibles, you may be able to find the gun in question.

Rod Serling was one of my professors at Ithaca College. Any actual class time was full of stories, about just about any topic you might imagine. Mostly, though, they focused on TV and movies (He had a great one about Louis B. Mayer, a bit crude, but hilarious...) One summer a small class on writing for television spent its days on the back deck of Rod's new Cayuga lake home, a property adjoining the family's ancestral cottage. We were treated to Genny Cream Ale, and, of course more stories.
The only comment Rod ever made related at all to the service was his opinion of vets who would buttonhole people at parties and regale them with self-aggrandizing stories of their WWII experiences. He hated this, and said of those vets that they were "...suckling from the breast of Man's Greatest Inhumanity to Man."
The year before I graduated, Serling went in for quadruple bypass heart surgery, and died on the table. A candle that represented human kindness and wisdom, with the great talent to express these most reasonable views, was snuffed. And we miss him.

Genesee Cream Ale...Green Death!!! :D

In the late 70's, the brewery would send a converted milk tanker down to Watkins Glen for the Can-Am/F1/Trans Am/F5000 races...The driver would park, take out gallon plastic milk bottles [empty] and fill them from the tanker...I forget how much a gallon cost, but it was the sweetest freshest cream ale you could get... :evilgrin:

(And at the Oct F1 race, also the coldest...) :p

Best guess that I've seen for Bronson's rifle is in this thread. Scroll down to the picture of the air pistol clamped to a rifle barrel.

My first thought on seeing the photo was the same. The pistol grip assembly of a Crosman airgun. I still have one here and they appear almost identical.

That's a better pic...although putting colors on it obscures it somewhat...

You are thinking of Unique modèle 'L'. It's a terrific little combo. This one is mine. It's too bad that the concept of a spare rifle upper for a latched barrel handgun fell into disuse. I'd love to get an HK P9S or a Desert Eagle set up this way.

Yes Michael, that IS the one I was thinking of... at least I got the French made part right! Handome little .22 pistol as well...

How is the slide pulled back on the rifle configuration?

Some people would insist that Manufacture d'armes des Pyrénées françaises was a Basque gunmaker, much like its counterpart on the other side of the mountains, STAR, Bonifacio Echeverría, S.A.

The slide is operated by depressing the sprung rod running through the forearm, as shown in the video that I linked above.

It must have been one of the highlights of your formal education to know and sit under one of the all time greats!

Sieger