Winchester ’73: Under the Gun

<i>Winchester ’73:</i> Under the Gun

In 1873, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company released a new model of rifle it marketed as “The Gun That Won the West.” That same year, in California, the photographer Eadweard Muybridge first successfully captured a high-speed exposure of a galloping horse. His work influenced the French scientist Étienne-Jules Marey, who in 1882 unveiled a photographic “gun” that resembled a rifle and could take multiple high-speed pictures on the same frame—a key step on the road to motion pictures. The movie camera, faster than the fastest gun, is the machine that truly won the West. It produced mythic images that overrode reality—but, in some filmmakers’ hands, it could darken the shadows, sharpen the details, and shift the perspectives in those images. Anthony Mann, one of the greatest masters of the midcentury western, did all of those things in films where the landscapes of the West are not only territory to be conquered but also moral and psychological battlefields on which men hunt for revenge and are hunted by their pasts.

The first thing we see after the opening credits of Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950) is the eponymous rifle enshrined in a shopwindow, surrounded by a gaggle of boys and men who gaze at it in covetous awe. Object of desire and dispenser of death, it is also the last thing we see in the movie. When the gun is offered as first prize in a shooting contest, held in Dodge City, Kansas, in honor of the nation’s centennial, on the Fourth of July, 1876, Marshal Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) explains its special nature as one of the select rifles labeled “One of a Thousand.” It seems that “every so often, maybe one gun out of every ten or twenty thousand, well, it comes out just perfect. Naturally, it ain’t for sale.” This is fanciful: the designation was a marketing ploy reserved for the highest-quality weapons, which were embellished with finer detailing and retailed for a then-pricey one hundred dollars.

The prize Winchester is both a magical object and a cursed one, changing hands amid a series of ambushes, trades, battles, shoot-outs, holdups, and duels. Throughout the film, every man who sees it reacts in exactly the same way: instantly smitten, caressing the polished and inlaid stock, peering down the faultless sight lines, urgently gripped by the need to possess it. Almost every man who becomes its owner dies violently soon afterward. Presumably, this is because—aside from Lin McAdam (James Stewart), the winner of the contest—each of them obtains it in some underhanded way: by theft, cheating, or murder, or as an undeserved reward for valor. The chain of transactions recalls Arthur Schnitzler’s play La ronde, with death taking the place of sex. In this film, even the love token that passes between a man and a woman is a bullet.

Men feel naked without their artillery. The first time Lin and his old nemesis set eyes on each other, in a saloon, they simultaneously leap back, their hands clutching at the spots where their holsters should be. They have been temporarily disarmed by Wyatt Earp, who keeps the peace in Dodge City by—like some latter-day liberal bogeyman—taking people’s guns away. That mirrored reaction is the first hint that the villainous “Dutch” Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) is a doppelgänger for the protagonist; further evidence of their twinship comes when they show identical skill in the shooting contest. Good and evil leave the same pattern in the bull’s-eye.


Winchester ’73 was the first of eight collaborations between Stewart and Mann, five of which are westerns. It was a pivotal film for both of them, but one that neither sought out. Fritz Lang had originally committed to direct the movie from a story credited to Stuart N. Lake; after Lang dropped out, Mann agreed to take over only if he could bring in Borden Chase to rewrite Robert L. Richards’s screenplay. In Chase’s revision, the gun elegantly structures the story, but never distracts Lin from his dogged pursuit of Dutch, whom he has pledged to track down and kill.

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