Winchester '73

Winchester '73

Independence Day 1876, the nation's Centennial, is the setting for a groundbreaking Western film that would take the genre in a new direction on screen.

The film's poster makes it look like a standard western.

By the end of the 1940s Director Anthony Mann was looking to break out from the Film Noir crime thrillers he'd been making. As luck would have it, Jimmy Stewart was looking for a change in his career after a decade of playing aw-shucks nice guys. So in 1950 the two teamed up to make Winchester '73, a film that breathed new life into the Western genre. Mann brought the dark atmospheric Film Noir sensibilities to the Western (how many Westerns had scenes at night before this?), and Stewart was cast against type as an anti-hero; still an everyman, but one out for revenge. The result was gold, and led to a series of Western collaborations between the two.

Winchester '73's uniqueness doesn't end there, though. The script was a complete novelty for the time. Though Stewart's Lin McAdam is the star, the real protagonist of the story is the titular rifle, the rare, "one in a thousand" perfect Winchester repeating rifle. It was rumored that the Sioux's use of repeating rifles contributed to their victory over Custer at the Battle of Little Big Horn, and the news was spreading. The Winchester 1873 model was the Cadillac of rifles at the time, and so the gun is like a character, and the narrative follows the gun, which frequently crosses paths with McAdam, but follows its own storyline. Thus we actually see different characters come and go as the rifle changes hands. This technique is quite common today, especially in television dramas that follow multiple characters over a long period of time, but for Hollywood of the 1950s, used to a single narrative arc, at most maybe cutting away for parallel action, it was a bold new direction.

If you only see one Jimmy Stewart Western, this is the one to see.