Winchester '73-Jimmy Stewart and Anthony Mann-One of the truly great Westerns, directed and acted with flawless skill in the old style

The sense of steely geometry -- a line from Dodge City to Tascosa, but really a circle -- was inherited from Lang, though the ruthless scraping of the Western’s heroic veneer is Anthony Mann’s own stroke of genius. The eponymous "gun that won the West" is introduced in sacramental close-up and put up as top prize at the shooting competition. A wry Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) presides over Fourth of July’s festive bulletfests, looking "undressed" without his tin star. The James Stewart who rides into town is a shadow version of the actor’s prewar dawdling sopranos, wrapped in gunslinger leather and with brutal neuroses ready to flare; he and Stephen McNally have unfinished business , eventually they’re revealed as Abel and Cain in the sagebrush. "That’s too much gun for one man..." Stewart wins the prized rifle, which is then seized by McNally, then by a gunrunner (John McIntire), a Sioux chief (Rock Hudson in war paint), a reformed outlaw (Charles Drake) and an unreformed one (Dan Duryea). If Ford is evoked (vide Shelley Winters’ entrance à la Stagecoach), it’s as a point of departure -- the genre’s old gallantry turns obsolete in a West as astringent as Mann’s, his cowboys are modern brooders negotiating the impending collapse of terrain, body, and mind. Mann bends horizons with tight yet volatile spatial arrangements: A trio of bushwackers and a wily trader crowding a poker table, framed against a mountain of rusty artillery. A tiny, scalped figure seen from atop a canyon. The battered desert floor in the wake of Little Big Horn, with Cavalry soldiers waiting out the hours before a morning skirmish. A husband getting himself shot while trying to atone for an act of cowardice. Above all, the giant cacti and jagged boulders in the fraternal showdown, where bullets ricochet inches away from the actors’ faces. The Winchester is given the last close-up, just an instrument at the end of a trail of bodies. With Millard Mitchell, Jay C. Flippen, John Alexander, Steve Brodie, James Millican, Abner Biberman, and Tony Curtis. In black and white.



James Stewart's first Western with director Anthony Mann introduced the disturbed Stewart/Mann Western hero and became a hit, helping to re-ignite the genre. Departing from Stewart's nice-guy persona, his Lin McAdam already seems slightly off during the opening Dodge City shooting competition for the title rifle. As the Winchester passes from Stewart to nemesis Stephen McNally and psychotic Dan Duryea, Mann touches on such Western archetypes as Wyatt Earp, the cavalry, Indians (including Rock Hudson), and gold-hearted women, before moving on to the elemental conflict between Stewart and McNally. In this era of genre revision, Stewart's rage against McNally becomes the film's central subject; the final shootout on a treacherous mountainside reveals the insanity masked by civilization. Though the film was not quite as influenced by film noir as Mann's first Western (Devil's Doorway (1950)), the sharp, rugged, black-and-white terrain matches Stewart's inner tumult as he avenges a death in the least honorable way. Winchester '73's popular success resulted in four more Stewart/Mann Westerns, including The Naked Spur (1953), and re-energized the genre; Stewart's unprecedented deal for a profit percentage instead of salary also forever altered the business of stardom.