Winchester '73 (Universal-International, 1950)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, March 27) my husband Charles and I watched a DVD of the 1950 film Winchester ‘73 (that’s the original spelling, with an apostrophe before the number instead of a decimal point), a quite good movie which I’ve previously described as “a film noir in Western drag.” Winchester ‘73 was a quite important film in American movie history for reasons unrelated to its quality as a movie. Universal had absorbed International Pictures in 1946 and was anxious to upgrade its productions to compete with the major studios that owned their own theatres: MGM, Warner Bros., Paramount, Fox and RKO. One way Universal’s owners wanted to do that was to hire major stars, but their depleted coffers couldn’t match the asking price for big-name talent. James Stewart demanded $200,000 per picture, and that was too much up-front money for Universal. So instead Stewart offered to make the film for a percentage of its profits, and the film was such a huge hit it was estimated that he would clear $1 million just on his profit share. The actual amount, according to an imdb.com “Trivia” post, was more like $600,000, but that was still a hefty sum for a single film in 1950. Winchester ‘73 began life as a short story by Stuart N. Lake (whose name was originally left off the credits and he sued the studio to get it listed) and was adapted into a screenplay by Robert L. Richards and Borden Chase. One of Chase’s own stories had just been filmed by director Howard Hawks as Red River (shot 1946, released 1948), so he knew something about not only Westerns but relatively deep, well motivated “psychological Westerns” in particular.

Winchester ‘73 was directed by Anthony Mann, who’d worked with Stewart in the 1930’s on stage but whose directorial career had mostly been making films noir for cheap studios like Republic and Eagle-Lion (the former PRC). The cinematographer was William Daniels, who’d been employed for years by MGM as a glamour cameraman (he was Greta Garbo’s favorite, he shot 17 of Garbo’s 24 films and in later years he said his one career regret was that Garbo never made a color film so he couldn’t show her beautiful blue eyes in color). Then he abruptly quit MGM and went over to Universal, where he explored the dark side both figuratively and literally, shooting noir classics like 1948’s The Naked City. For Winchester ‘73 he used red filters throughout almost the whole movie, giving a deep, contrasty Western “look” and achieving some of the claustrophobia of film noir even in a wide-open environment like the Old West. The plot of Winchester ‘73 is basically “boy meets gun, boy loses gun, boy gets gun back.” Lin McAdam (James Stewart, playing a dark, driven character quite different from the unambiguous heroes he’d been portraying most of his film career) arrives in Dodge City on July 4, 1876 to compete in a contest honoring the American Centennial. The prize is a new, rare Winchester ‘73 rifle, a gun so great it’s marketed as “One in a Thousand.” Unfortunately he has an especially determined opponent, Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally, Universal’s go-to guy for black-hearted villains then). The two end up neck and neck for the prize until Lin offers to shoot a hole through a postage stamp affixed to a charm from a Native American bracelet. He pulls it off and wins the rifle (according to imdb.com, the shot was actually executed by Herb Parsons, who was sent out by the Winchester company to train James Stewart in the proper handling of their gun), only Brown and two of his associates mug him for it and steal it.

Since they’re otherwise unarmed – Dodge City sheriff Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) and his deputy insisted that all the out-of-town gunslingers competing for the prize rifle check their own guns at the door and use only locally sourced rifles for the shooting contest – Brown and his gang have to give the precious Winchester to Joe Lamont (John McIntire) in exchange for $300 in gold pieces plus guns from Lamont’s stock of six-shooters. Then Lamont is ambushed by the Natives he was going to sell guns to, and their chief, Young Bull (Rock Hudson in a very early role that had my husband Charles laughing at his costuming and war paint to make him look Native; after that another later Big Name, Tony Curtis, turns up as a U.S. cavalry officer), turns down the old, worn-out guns Lamont wanted to palm off on him. Instead he demands the Winchester, and when Lamont refuses the Natives scalp him and take the gun anyway. Meanwhile, Wyatt Earp has chased local prostitute Lola Manners (Shelley Winters) out of town on a stagecoach in a sequence strikingly similar to Mae West’s treatment at the start of My Little Chickadee (1940), also a Universal film. Lola insisted she was there to meet her fiancé, Steve Miller (Charles Drake), who turns out to be an ineffectual coward who leaves her stranded when Natives attack their wagon. Ultimately Steve finds a cavalry detachment from the U.S. Army who are after the same Natives, and he and Lola end up in their camp despite facing near-certain annihilation from the Apaches. Lin McAdam and his sidekick “High-Spade” Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell) also show up at the camp, and Lin teaches the cavalry commander, Sgt. Wilkes (Jay C. Flippen), the most effective ways of fighting Natives, including waiting for their second charge because that’s when they’ll use their most impressive weapons, the large repeating rifles that won them the Battle of the Little Big Horn. (Word of George Armstrong Custer’s annihilation is just starting to figure down to the Kansas Territory where Winchester ‘73 takes place.)

Ultimately the whites win the battle (darnit!) and Young Bull drops the precious Winchester as he falls. But Lin McAdam doesn’t recover the rifle because he misses it completely – we can tell which one it is because it’s got a silver plate screwed to its stock which was supposed to be engraved with Lin’s name, only it was stolen from him before that could happen – and Steve picks it up from the battlefield. He and Lola ride to the Jameson place, owned by his family which they’re going to pass down to him and Lola, only he’s really a crook in league with Henry Brown and outlaw Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea in one of his best psycho performances; he takes charge of the screen in every scene he’s in). Dean is determined to kill Steve and kidnap Lola for himself, and to that end he stages a home-invasion robbery of the Jameson place and, when that doesn’t flush her out, he loads a wagon with incendiaries and sets the house on fire. Steve gets killed and Waco grabs Lola, but his partner-in-crime Dutch Henry Brown (ya remember him?) insists the Winchester is his and demands it. The misbegotten gang attempts a robbery at a town called Tascosa in Texas, but it goes about as well as all the other crimes in the film: Lin ambushes Waco and kills him (reportedly 1950 audiences gasped at the sight of James Stewart calmly and methodically gunning down Dan Duryea because none of his previous movies had prepared them for the sight of James Stewart, Action Hero), then stages a gun battle with Dutch Henry Brown. Lin’s sidekick Wilson tells Lola and us that Dutch Henry Brown is really Matthew McAdam, Lin’s brother, giving an air of Cain and Abel to their final confrontation, which takes place on some rocky ledges.

At first Dutch t/n Matthew has the advantage because he’s higher up, but Lin manages to sneak behind enough rocks to get above him and take him down (represented by one of the least convincing dummy shots ever in a major film), and ultimately Lin recovers the gun from his brother’s corpse. He did not end up with Lola as per traditional Hollywood conventions, and Shelley Winters was withering in her scorn for this film in later interviews. “Here you've got all these men … running around to get their hands on this goddamned rifle, instead of going after a beautiful blonde like me,” she said. “What does that tell you about the values of that picture? If I hadn't been in it, would anybody have noticed?” But she did praise James Stewart for yielding on the issue of how their faces should be photographed during their scenes together. Both thought their left sides were their best sides, but Stewart agreed to be filmed from the right side in scenes with Winters so she could show her best side to the camera. Winchester ‘73 today holds up surprisingly well even though it wasn’t even the first film noir Western (that honor goes to Blood on the Moon, made two years earlier at RKO by director Jacques Tourneur and echt noir star Robert Mitchum, though well before the noir era John Ford’s tragically underrated 1926 silent film Three Bad Men had had surprisingly noir-ish elements that anticipated the so-called “psychological Westerns” that were all the rage in the early 1950’s, largely on the strength of Winchester ‘73’s huge commercial success as well as that of High Noon, two years later). It’s a film that holds up surprisingly well even though Broken Arrow comes off as more politically progressive in its treatment of Native Americans, but Broken Arrow isn’t as good a movie overall and it’s handicapped by being in color, which plays against the darkness of its material while the black-and-white Winchester ‘73 ironically seems more true to life and faithful to the mythos of the West.