Tomb

The hero crouches behind cover, panting and wiping the sweat from his brow. Somewhere out in the darkness are several armed men waiting to kill him. He mentally calculates his chances, tightens his grip on his gun and wonders: How many bullets do I have left?

Actually, that's something the audience would like to know, too. How many bullets does he have left?

The scenario comes up time and time again in movies and there are a number of ways to let the audience know how many rounds are left in the hero's gun. The lazy and overused method is to simply not tell the audience at all. This is a fantasy world and bullets are unlimited unless the plot demands otherwise. Nobody ever reloads; they just shoot, shoot, shoot.

In some films, particularly ones aiming for more “realism,” that solution won't do. Guns must “run dry” and when it happens, the audience will know it. We might hear the click of a hammer landing on an empty chamber or see the useless gun tossed aside. But how do you convey to an audience that a firearm only has a few rounds left?

In Aliens (1986), the futuristic machine guns used by the heroes actually have red digital readouts indicating how many rounds are left in the magazine. That's a tremendously handy visual device for the audience. We all speak the visual language of “red digital countdown” because of all the time bombs we've seen in movies over the years. Of course, this trick only applies to science fiction films, because real guns don't have digital ammo counters yet.

Westerns have it easy. Everybody uses six-shooters. If the audience can count to six, they know how many bullets the hero has left. (This can get tricky if many people are shooting at once.) Double-barreled shotguns are even easier to keep track of; you only have to count to two.

Sometimes the easiest solution is to just have a character say how many bullets he or she has left. This works if the character is whispering to a colleague, but seems a little strange if the character is alone or among enemies. (“Yoo hoo! Mr. Nazi soldier! I'm hiding behind the desk and I'm down to my last two bullets!”)

Film is a powerful visual medium and there are plenty of ways to show a character's ammo supply that are largely unused. We could be treated to a sudden cutaway view of the inside of the gun, for example, or zoom in through a CGI model of the gun, or get a flashing X-ray shot of the magazine. I don't know why more movies don't do this, but perhaps they will in the future. Video games are less coy with their visual information; they simply show a bullet count right up there on the screen alongside the action. In film, I've only seen this technique once; in the rollicking Hong Kong horror-action-comedy film Bio-Zombie (1998).

Innovations do come along, though. I was particularly impressed with a scene in the recent John Dillinger biopic Public Enemies (2009). In the Little Bohemia raid scene, Dillinger (Johnny Depp) is surprised by a nighttime assault by federal agents and escapes into the dark woods, shooting his Tommy gun as he goes. Many, many bullets are fired; so many that at one point, Dillinger exhausts his weapon's 50-round drum. (That's the big round part of the Tommy gun that looks like a film canister.) Carrying around a second 50-round drum would be cumbersome (not to mention excessive), but Dillinger does have a smaller “stick” magazine to reload with, giving him an additional 20 to 30 rounds. As Dillinger finds himself separated from his gang and hunted by lawmen, his second magazine runs dry. Now what? Dillinger discards the stick magazine and replaces it with... something tiny. Small enough to be concealed inside a clenched fist.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened. Dillinger had loaded his Tommy gun, one last time, with a pistol magazine.

Is this even possible? Perhaps it is. The Thompson submachine gun and the pistol that Dillinger is carrying both use the same .45 caliber rounds. Even if a pistol magazine wouldn't normally fit in a larger weapon, the real Dillinger had a tendency to customize his weapons to fit his own needs. (One of the very first fully automatic “machine pistols” was custom-made for Dillinger.)

That tiny little pistol clip holds only seven rounds, maximum. A Tommy gun is famous for firing bullets very, very quickly. (In fact, a later model of the gun “improved” the design by slowing down the rate of fire!) Those seven rounds will be fired all at once the second that Dillinger touches the trigger.

Why didn't Dillinger just switch to his pistol? Perhaps he wanted to stick with the familiarity of the weapon that he started the gunfight with. More likely, he knew that once the cops heard single pistol shots, they'd clue in to his predicament. In any case, I found myself transfixed, on the edge of my seat, wondering exactly where that last, quick spray of bullets was going to go.