Cult of Criterion: Winchester '73

In Cult Of Criterion, The A.V. Club highlights a new release from The Criterion Collection each month, examining the films entering an increasingly accessible film canon.

Winchester ’73, the 1950 Western that helped hone Jimmy Stewart’s post-war edge, can be summed up by a quote from its female lead, Shelley Winters. “Here you’ve got all these men…running around to get their hands on this goddamn rifle instead of going after a beautiful blonde like me,” Winters said. “What does that tell you about the values of that picture? If I hadn’t been in it, would anybody have noticed?”

While Winters is charming enough as a piano hall dancer whose cowardly lover is emasculated then gunned down, she’s right: Winchester ’73 isn’t about men’s love of women, but men’s love of firepower. Winchester ’73 includes the same amount of one-of-a-kind rifles as it does speaking roles for women. These are the values of the picture, and the values of the nation its frontier stands in for. It’s just refreshingly frank about it. 

Director Anthony Mann—who would go on to make a handful of hardened Westerns with Stewart after this—brought in screenwriter Borden Chase to give the script another pass after Fritz Lang dropped out of the project. Chase’s version makes “The Gun That Won The West” a holy relic, both dealer and harbinger of death. Influenced by film noir’s smirking cynicism, snappy dialogue, and grim fatalism, and haunted by its shadows and inhospitable settings, Mann’s Western boiled down its masculine psychology to its essentials.

Though its opening and closing close-ups are of the same quasi-cursed rifle, Winchester ’73 is at its best when it paints a larger human picture of the West. Stewart rides into town as sharpshooter Lin McAdam, immediately disarmed by Will Geer’s Wyatt Earp in a crowded Dodge City. A devoted and blacklisted Communist who wrote songs with Woody Guthrie, Geer gives Earp a wry nonviolent power. In contrast, the rest of the cowpokes saunter through the saloon awkwardly, like recently declawed cats. When McAdam spies Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) at a poker table, the pair leap into action, reaching for their absent holsters in an effective burst of muscle memory. Emasculated American instinct becomes a pantomime gunfight. This weaponless animosity then takes on new forms, the first being a petty order of milk at a bar that Babygirl would be proud of. The second is a contest, a shooting contest, for the gorgeous gun of the title, its stock ready to be engraved with the winner’s name. Eventually it culminates in a hardboiled fistfight, where Dutch Henry jumps McAdam and steals his prize.

This gun exchanges hands eight times throughout the film. It’s burgled, sold, looted, and reclaimed. The only owner who doesn’t wind up dead is its rightful wielder, contest winner McAdam. It’s a fitting artifact for what reveals itself as a Cain and Abel tale, a mythic object, a Norse relic with a modern sheen. Worshipped by children and grown men alike—seriously, the first time any given character sees the gun, they stop, grab it, and admire its craftsmanship—the “one of a thousand” Winchester is entwined with Americana. 

Townsfolk murmur that the priceless, exquisitely decorated firearm is the same rare model owned by President Ulysses S. Grant, the military savior of the Union. The contest for which it is a prize is being held in honor of the United States’ Centennial. Though McAdam and his incredibly named pal High-Spade Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell) play ex-Confederates, Winchester ’73 presents a unified national front, one that’s remembered to turn its bloody gaze back to the Native Americans of the frontier.

That’s Western 101, and Winchester ‘73 revels in this tradition. While its Native American chief (played by Rock Hudson of all people) gets a relatively dignified speech about how white people are constantly cheating and/or murdering the Indigenous population, he and his fighters are gunned down by savvy cowboys and noble soldiers (including a too-pretty Tony Curtis). In the corpse-strewn aftermath, Mann’s camera briefly takes in the carnage before McAdam reminds the victorious soldiers that the dead carried repeater rifles. These were the guns desired by Hudson’s character because they allowed the Native Americans to go toe-to-toe with those waging war upon them; Custer and Little Bighorn loom large over the proceedings, the Colonel’s hubris and stupidity downplayed in favor of a focus on firearms.

Winchester ’73 makes plain the subtext of both noir and Westerns, that violence is a necessity to carve a path forward in this world—a damning stain in noir, a heroic feat in the West, and, when the two collide, a wearying burden upon a troubled yet moral figure. Stewart makes the most of this figure here. His McAdam, even driven by revenge, doles out country-wise quips, protects women, and stands straight and proud. It helps matters that he’s juxtaposed against craven cowboys, shameless murderers, and the legendary Dan Duryea, a slimeball expert working his magic. But even in this company, Stewart is haggard and tough, grim and feral. He bends Duryea’s arm to the breaking point with a rabid fury, his face filling one of the film’s most shocking frames. Stewart is the film’s driving force, and he served that role behind the scenes as well—and he was compensated accordingly. This film helped pioneer what would become standard industry practice: his agent Lew Wasserman got Stewart a percentage of Winchester ’73’s profits (later known as “points”).

But even a stellar Stewart can’t steal the spotlight away from Winchester ’73’s guns. When he finally rides back to civilization after a tense, exciting shootout—peppered with immersive, careening bullet sounds and the detailed chipping of his craggy cliffside cover—McAdam hugs his woman and gives a long look to his best pal. But Mann’s camera knows what matters: The rifle, still unengraved and nameless, is back where we know it belongs. As the film zooms into the blank nameplate, it emphasizes how little that matters compared to the virtuous trail of dead left by its hero—in this noirish Western, fitting in with its historical moment, proof of ownership is a matter of righteous violence.