Across the Prairie With Blood and Bullets: Winchester ’73 (1950)

When Lil McAdam (James Stewart) arrives in Dodge with his trail pal High Spade Frankie Wilson (Millard Mitchell), the place is gearing up for a nice time. Saloon gals like Lola Manners (Shelley Winters) are invited to leave by locals. When McAdam intervenes, mistaking Marshal Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) for a simple ruffian, he earns Lola’s gratitude and Earp’s good humor. A shooting match is attracting a high class of people since the prize of a new Winchester 1973 rifle, the gun that won the West. Not just any old Winchester, this is one of their perfect weapons, and it is emblazoned with their One-in-a-Thousand seal. There’s even a plaque on the stock where the owner’s name will be writ.

In fact, McAdam and Wilson haven’t come to town for the contest alone. They’re on the trail of a man, and it turns out he’s in town too. When they encounter him in the saloon, both Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) and McAdam go for their guns … only to remember too late that they surrendered them to Virgil Earp (Guy Wilkerson) over at the Marshal’s office.

The shooting match has plenty of participants, but McAdam and Brown have them all outclassed. Both men fire with similar precision. They’ve shared teachers in the past, and Brown left their mentor dead—shot, McAdam explains, in the back. When McAdam wins the rifle, Brown wants to get out of town with his outlaw compadres. In fact, he’s waiting back at McAdam’s room to beat him down and take the prized rifle before lighting out, leaving all their other possessions (including guns!) behind.

What follows is a road film viewed from horse back. McAdam and Wilson doing their damnedest to catch up with Dutch Henry Brown, while Brown tries to rendezvous with some ne’er-do-wells like Waco Johnny Dean (Dan Duryea) for a shady job in Tascosa, Texas. Meanwhile, the rifle continues to change hands, sometimes in a shady but legal manner, as when Indian Trader Joe Lamont (John McIntire) gets it via a poker game, and sometimes through violence, as when the war party chief Little Bull (Rock Hudson) takes it by force.

The road to revenge is a twisted one, seeing McAdam and Wilson encountering U.S. Cavalry as well as Lola Manners and her cowardly beau Steve Miller (Charles Drake) in need of rescue from indigenous peoples on the war path. However, all roads lead to McAdam and Brown having a chance to face off and take shots at one another. Only one of them will be coming back from that final encounter, and by then both men are demon driven. Working from a script by Robert L. Richards & Borden Chase, director Anthony Mann crafts a peculiar, unexpectedly dark western that is ostensibly about revenge but is equally about the bloody adventures of a priceless weapon changing hands and crossing the prairie in Winchester ’73 (1950).

Anthony Mann and James Stewart worked together on eight films, five of them westerns that challenged conventions and broke stereotypes. At the time of this, their first collaboration, Stewart was box office poison, having been involved in a handful of box office flops following the war. His squeaky clean image did not mesh well with the mood of the nation, so he needed someone to take a chance on refashioning that image. That someone turned out to be Anthony Mann.

Here, we get an intense Stewart riding the high road as he seeks out a man who’s wronged him. The nature of that wrong is not revealed until the very end, but a close watch will provide all the clues necessary, either from bits of dialogue or props—there’s a photograph that shows up later on, which pretty much puts the whole story together even before High Spade Frankie Wilson reveals the facts through exposition during the denouement. However, what’s most interesting about the film is not necessarily the revenge story, but the effects revenge has. Stewart’s McAdam is not a bad sort, stubborn and intense. As the film goes along, his good friend and conscience asks if he’s starting to get more than a taste for hunting men, if he’s starting to like it. McAdam has no future plans. He’s putting all his passion in finding one man and putting him down. There’s a growing sadism to his efforts that matches Brown’s natural wickedness.

And then there is the story of the rifle, a beautifully crafted tool whose ultimate purpose is death. Repeaters such as this Winchester or the Henry rifles that tried to compete with it could be used to hunt animals, sure. However, they were designed to reload and dispense lead at speeds no hunter would require. When the cavalry is pinned down by the indigenous tribes, the enemy has the advantage because they have repeaters while the U.S. Soldiers (including an early role for Jamie Leigh Curtis’ dad Tony, here appearing as Anthony Curtis) are forced to use single shot weapons. The indigenous forces are clever, learning from the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho tribes that recently nailed Custer (well, recent in the narrative’s timeline), sending in a small wave to make the Cavalry expend their shots and then pushing in with a much stronger second wave to clean up while the soldiers are reloading.

The Winchester in this film, a mythic sounding one-in-a-thousand model that has achieved “perfection” due to no known reason and in spite of its human manufacturers, is an inert thing, but it sure sows harm when it brings out the greed of those who see it. McAdam couldn’t care less about the thing, really. Everyone else who encounters it prizes it, and their greed is often their undoing.

That seems to be a recurring theme in these five westerns. Human greed as the downfall of human beings is a subject touched upon in different ways in each of the films. They are also each about stubborn men who find their values challenged, who have to accept that lone wolfing it might get a mission or a job done but is no way to survive long term. I was often reminded of the African proverb, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” Mann’s films suggest that there are times when going fast is crucial, but ultimately we as a nation, a people, and a species need to go further than we have.

Cinematographer William H. Daniels may have made his mark on black and white cinema with the pictures he shot starring Greta Garbo, but he had a lengthy career otherwise, including dozens of terrific pictures. He was involved in numerous Mann and Stewart projects, including a majority of their collaborations. But he also had a hand in wide ranging fare such as Harvey (1950), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958), and Marlowe (1969). One of those workhorses who kept busy, his credits on IMDB include multiple pictures per year.

The attention to detail and mise-en-scène are quite thrilling. When McAdam and Brown first encounter one another and “go for their guns” their poses and expressions give us a real sense of their relationship before a single word is uttered. The former looks ready to wage war, while the latter gets a craven quality, backing up to the wall like an animal and hunkering, twisting his body. The camera captures these moments, yes, but the planning of them has that same meticulous quality that is evident in Kubrick’s frames. Still errors creep in, such as the obvious mannikins lying in the dirt during the lengthy shootout between the U.S. Cavalry and the indigenous peoples. Despite that one-in-a-thousand gag, ain’t nothing perfect on this earth.

Winchester ’73 is a stark, haunting film and one that put James Stewart back on the map as a bankable actor. While changing his friendly image into a somewhat darker one, it also added deeper psychological resonance to the western genre. The start of a famous, creatively rich collaboration, its themes and actors would resurface in each of the men’s collaborations and a few outside of it. A potent experience, it’s much more of a film with spaces of action than an out and out adventure picture.

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Winchester ’73 is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD editions.

Next, we will take a look at the second collaboration between Anthony Mann and James Stewart. Bend of the River finds a man with an outlaw past trying to lead a new life in the lovely farming regions in the shadow of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. However, a gold rush changes all that, turning boon companions into stark enemies. The picture is available in DVD, Blu-ray, and VOD editions.

Writing for “Across the Prairie With Blood and Bullets: Winchester ’73 (1950)” is copyright © 2023 by Daniel R. Robichaud.

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