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Winchester ’73 — 4k

by Glenn Erickson Jan 14, 2025

What at first seems a plain-wrap generic western is actually anything but; Borden Chase’s circular storyline pulls in a bit of every theme the genre had going before 1950. This first James Stewart – Anthony Mann collaboration is one of their toughest; something violent or despicable happens in every reel. Mann gets to adapt Shakespearean ideas to the sagebrush; Stewart roughs up his ‘aw shucks’ nice guy image. Terrific input comes from a big supporting cast: Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally, Millard Mitchell, Charles Drake, John McIntire, Will Geer, Jay C. Flippen, Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis. 4K Ultra HD restores William Daniels’ moody B&W cinematography.


Winchester ’73
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray
The Criterion Collection 1248
1950 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date January 28, 2025 / 39.95
Starring: James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea, Stephen McNally, Millard Mitchell, Charles Drake, John McIntire, Will Geer, Jay C. Flippen, Rock Hudson, Steve Brodie, James Millican, Abner Biberman, Tony Curtis, James Best, Robert Anderson, John Doucette, Gregg Martell, Chuck Roberson, Guy Wilkerson, Steve Darrell.
Cinematography: William Daniels
Art Directors: Nathan Juran, Bernard Herzbrun
Film Editor: Edward Curtiss
Costume Design: Yvonne Wood
Music director: Joseph Gershenson
Screenplay by Robert L. Richards, Borden Chase story by Stuart N. Lake
Produced by Aaron Rosenberg
Directed by
Anthony Mann

Back in the early 1970s UCLA’s student paper Daily Bruin had a terrific entertainment section; excellent coverage of new movies would show up there. I remember the Westwood Theater making a lobby poster of Janey Place’s review of Billy Wilder’s  Avanti!  when it played.

I also remember a less positive article protesting Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73, cataloguing numerous social and cultural PC crimes. According to the author, the film’s treatment of women and Native Americans was evidence of Hollywood’s commitment to sexist and racist ideology. The author’s point was that the director’s work was therefore invalid, something to be shunned … but he or she seemed unaware that Mann in the same year directed  Devil’s Doorway, one of Hollywood’s most powerful movies about the raw deal handed Native Americans.

We readily admit that Winchester ’73 does not play as if written by Che Guevara. But it’s important to point out that the wishy-washy liberalism of  High Noon was a drop in the bucket compared to the overwhelming preponderance of westerns that sought to formalize a grand and glorious ‘origin story’ for the winning of the West. Some students of film history were a little more tolerant of the prevailing values of earlier eras … values that of course prevailed in 1973 as well.

High Noon took the credit for initiating the ‘adult psychological Western’ of the 1950s but this ambitious Universal film is the real trend-setter.  Winchester ’73 codified much of the template for the mainstream view of 30 year of history in the American West.

James Stewart re-wrote Hollywood law when he signed up as a major profit participant for this show, starting a trend that broke studio autonomy in favor of top talent agents. Produced as an afterthought to Harvey, ’73 was a much bigger boxoffice smash, cementing Stewart’s post-war star recovery, and making a hot property out of director Anthony Mann.

 

Spoilers:   In Dodge City, Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) holds a centennial shooting match. Winner Lin McAdam (James Stewart) wins the prize of a perfect Winchester repeating rifle, only to have it stolen by the villianous Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally). Dutch then loses it in a card game with the crooked gambler Lamont (John McIntire), who in turn loses both it and his scalp to Indian chief Young Bull (Rock Hudson). Then the rifle passes over to the cowardly Steve Miller (Charles Drake), whose new woman Lola Manners (Shelley Winters) sees his shame and is drawn to Lin. Miller refuses to give up the gun to outlaw Waco Johnnie Dean (Dan Duryea), a doublecrosser who also has eyes for Lola. Waco seizes the gun anyway, only to have it yanked back from him by Dutch Henry, with whom Waco attempts to rob a bank. This brings Lin back into the picture, for an ultimate showdown with the treacherous Dutch Henry Brown … his own brother.

The busy script distills several western themes starting with the reverence placed on a firearm. Despite the rampant lawlessness the movie is never nihilistic; progress depends on ‘superior’ men like Lin McAdam to assert their natural authority. The confrontations stress Mann’s skill with men at the edge of violence. Wyatt Earp has disarmed all of Dodge City, so when Lin McAdam and Dutch Henry Brown are suddenly face to face, each instinctively ‘slaps leather’ for guns that aren’t there.

 

The ‘binary hero’ — two sides of the same coin.

 

Winchester ’73 is a revenge tale with a circular La Ronde structure — that prize rifle gets passed from ‘owner’ to owner, precipitating violence in a cross-section of frontier characters. The story has a prime example of the ‘binary’ genre character. Brothers Lin McAdam and Dutch Henry Brown are moral opposites, a Cain and Abel opposition played out in western terms. Dad’s only contribution was to teach them both to shoot, which is why they score identically on a rifle range. It was an NRA dream family. This binary character idea works better here than in gangster stories where one brother would be a crook and another a priest or a cop, etc.. The construction is at the center of all of Sam Peckinpah’s westerns:  Steve Judd / Gil Westrum,  Amos Dundee / Benjamin Tyreen,  Pike Bishop / Deke Thornton ,  William Bonney / Pat Garrett.

 

The subsidiary characters are spin-offs that compliment or comment on the conflict between the binary heroes. Dan Duryea’s sneaky villain Waco Johnny Dean is smarter and funnier than McNally, but wisely knows he’s not as tough. Charles Drake’s Steve Miller (no blues band) suffers the genre’s intolerance for male sensitivity and emotionalism; he’s a pantywaist suitable only for humiliation, as when Waco makes him wear a woman’s apron. Will Geer, Millard Mitchell and even J.C. Flippen are various kinds of father figures (thank you, Phil Hardy). Out on the plains there’s the Army, well-intentioned but inexperienced Easterners that need guidance from a hep frontiersman like Lin McAdam. The hostile Indians relate to White men only through the perfidy of weasely traders like John McIntire’s Lamont. Rock Hudson’s idealized brave Young Bull knows 20 words in English, but can judge an excellent firearm just like the White Devils. Why didn’t you hide the thing away, Lamont?

In this revenge tale the avenging white warrior is a positive figure, not an outcast. Lin McAdam claims to be fixated on revenge against his brother, yet most of actions are in service to ‘good’ characters. Lin is a loyal buddy to Millard Mitchell, and he lends his knowledge of the Indians to Flippen’s grizzled Army sergeant. The saloon girl that wants children but is disgusted by her pwn man is of course immediately attracted to Lin. And Lin’s moral superiority to his murderous brother is what turns the end confrontation in his favor. Moral values determine who prevails.  If only real life were like this.

 

This isn’t the James Stewart that gets cute with a Guardian Angel.

 

Serios westerns of the 1940s were already trying to shake the genre’s ‘white hat black hat’ moral schematics. Where his brother is concerned Lin McAdam is also not adverse to using sadistic violence. He quickly decides that he’s tougher than Waco Johnnie Dean: when Dean tries to pull a fast one, Adam smashes his head on the bar.    The crazed look on Stewart’s face was something new for film fans that still associated the popular actor with family fare. Stewart must have chosen Mann to broaden the range of his performances.

The rough violence in Mann’s earlier noirs had indeed provoked charges of sadism. In the excellent Raw Deal, a fight between two men has a similiar moment: one tries to force the other’s face onto the antler points of a stuffed deer head, eyes first.

Those noirs at Eagle-Lion and MGM —  T-Men,  Raw Deal,  Border Incident — were what boosted Anthony Mann to A level work. Mann would make five Westerns with James Stewart in five years, at three different studios. The pictures share similar casts and Mann’s distinctive style. Mann had ambitions to greatness and in the early ’60s would graduate to epic filmmaking.

Winchester ’73 keeps the Aesop’s Fables moralizing to a minimum, unlike some of their westerns that followed.  The Naked Spur and  The Far Country pause to question the morality of Stewart’s character, but Stewart preferred the unequivocal, family friendly messages of  Bend of the River and  The Man from Laramie.

European critics looking to critique the American character saw that this new ‘adult’ western template still granted the hero a sense of absolute righteousness. McAdam’s high morals don’t interfere with his belief that he has thel moral right to kill his no-good brother. This less-than-democratic sentiment is what makes westerns a cultural myth, one that many Americans take as a kind of substitute religion.

The Anthony Mann style is unmistakable. A tension is maintained at all times, expressed at times when the hero is affected by a neurotic jitter. Mann judges his characters strictly by their actions. The males fall into a row on the masculine superiority scale – Earp over McAdam, Dutch Henry over Waco, Waco over Steve. There’s a pecking order to everything. By the time we get down to the third-string baddies, they’re just fools. The scummy outlaw Latigo Means (Abner Biberman) will rush out into a hail of posse bullets, just on Waco’s snide say-so.

 

Finally, there’s Anthony Mann’s abiity to make the landscape itself seem violent. The brothers go out of their way to conclude their rifle duel among craggy rocks, a favorite Mann location exploited most strongly in  The Naked Spur. Mann goes in for sadistic detail, such as Dutch Henry’s use of ricochet-ing bullets to trap McAdam between two rocks, like a victim in a torture device.    Treacherous and unforgiving, the vertical outcroppings contrast with the stability of the horizontal desert, where clear sightlines make for fair contests and simple moral decision-making. Up in the rocks is where the troubled & wounded hide.

The revisionists dissed Shelley Winters’ Lola character as a collection of frontier woman clichés, from her instant attraction to kids to the ‘saving the last bullet for yourself’ bit. But they didn’t pick up on the best dirty joke in a 1950 film, when a posse traps Waco’s gang in a farmhouse. Waco’s is praising his two underlings’ sick sense of humor when he exclaims,  ‘What a pair!’  But Mann then has Waco turn around and cast his eyes on Shelley for the first time, and give a big doubletake-leer in reaction to seeing her figure. The framing is perfect, and I can’t believe that most males in the audience didn’t get the joke. Lola must be a real innocent — she doesn’t give Waco an acknowledging return look.

 

Winchester ’73 is loaded with great movie faces. Besides the rather embarrassing screen opportunity for Rock Hudson to pay his dues in feathers, body paint and a fake nose, we also get the studio’s budding pretty boy, Tony Curtis. The future big star has only a couple of lines to say, after two years playing tiny bit parts in scores of Universal-International pictures.

This show and the film noir  A Double Life may have been breakthrough pictures for Shelley Winters. Soon-to-be-blacklisted Will Geer is a great Wyatt Earp. Other supporting actors would contribute excellent work when they returned in later Stewart / Mann oaterss — Steve Brodie, John McIntire, Chuck Roberson and Jay C. Flippen. I always smile at the pairing of Abner Biberman’s Mexican outlaw with the inimitable John Doucette. Forever a scowling Western baddie, Doucette’s deep voice makes him sound like an irate woodchuck.  *

Winchester ’73 wraps up as an exceedingly efficient, effective drama with a bit of everything, connected by that throughline of the fancy rifle being passed from character to character. Sure it’s conventional — this was James Stewart’s bid to conquer the movie industry, and he needed it to please everybody. Stewart’s agent Lew Wasserman negotiated the first salary plus points deal for a movie star, making the actor a de facto producer of everything he was in. Power in the industry shifted from studio moguls to the big stars and big agents who became packagers of big movie deals. Business-wise, it was one of the biggest success stories of the decade …. James Stewart became more prosperous than Universal itself, and Wasserman ended up owning MCA.

 


 

The Criterion Collection’s 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray of Winchester ’73 is a beauty. We have no idea why this classic hasn’t shown up even on Blu-ray before now; maybe Criterion made the deal ages ago and just sat on it?  Could the license have been tangled up with the precedent of an ancient Laserdisc contract?

The disc is being plugged as a new 4K digital restoration, by Universal Pictures with the help of The Film Foundation. As is Criterion’s norm the feature is on both a 4K UHD disc and a Blu-ray, that also carries the video extras.

Even at UCLA in 1972, all Universal had to loan us was a 16mm print, so we’ve never seen William Daniels’ precise cinematography look this good. Daniels’ crew climbed into high rocks to get Anthony Mann’s camera angles, and often filmed from low angles, showing the rustic ceilings. Slightly wide-angle lenses make scenes feel more intimate and less like standard Universal coverage; Mann’s unexpected camera moves help as well. Coordinating all those ricochet bullet effects up in those rocks had to be a real ordeal … hopefully neither Stewart nor McNally got anything in their eyes.

The show is in fine-grain B&W but we don’t see anything particularly Norish to its look, as Criterion’s cover text suggests. We do see special attention given to distinguish times of the day and night … the pre-dawn look, if faked, is excellent. The camera at all times bears down on actors under stress.

The movie has no original music score, but appears to have been assembled from the studio’s library. Existing cues would be revised and re-recorded, however.

Disc producer Kate Elmore uses mostly new material for extras, but smartly includes a 1989 commentary first heard on a laserdisc. Interviewer Paul Lindenschmidt caught James Stewart on a good day and didn’t let the opportunity get away without asking questions about the star’s broader career. Stewart starts by explaining that the western was ‘tacked on’ to a deal for Stewart’s comedy Harvey, the movie Universal thought would be the bigger hit. Stewart begins on topic but is soon off on tangents about Alfred Hitchcock and other subjects. The commentary form allows us to hear what he’s like beyond his usual short & prepared speeches, and he comes off as a pleasant fellow. He became a significant shareholder of MCA, but talks mostly about film art and not about the many savvy business decisions in his long film career.

A career piece on Anthony Mann puts a 47-minute Daniel Griffith Ballyhoo featurette on a Criterion disc. Alan K Rode and C. Courtney Joyner talk us through Mann’s years at Universal, with an abundance of film clips. Also contributing are Michael Schlesinger, Rob Wood and Mann crewperson Michael Preece.

Adam Piron presides over what at first seems like PC spin for Native American dignity, and turns out to be a well-researched and persuasive speech about the perception of ‘American Indians’ as codified by wild west shows and eventually the movies. Piron explains how so many diverse tribes were ‘thrown into the same bucket’ and called Indians. Piron then offers a more accurate vision of what an American ‘Indian’ ought to be. It’s a thoughtful and instructive piece, about 17 minutes in duration.

A radio adaptation is also included. We like a lot the insert folder essay by Imogen Sara Smith, which gives us a strong overview of Winchester ’73 pitched to illuminate Anthony Mann’s strengths as a movie director.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


Winchester ’73
4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with James Stewart and Paul Lindenschmidt
Film programmer Adam Piron on the portrayal of Native Americans in westerns
Featurette Forces of Nature: Anthony Mann at Universal
Lux Radio Theatre adaptation from 1951
Trailer
Insert folder with essay by Imogen Sara Smith.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed:
January 11, 2024
(7258winc)

*  Our favorite John Doucette scene is when he’s cast totally against type (on purpose) as a Philistine architect brought on to dumb-down Gary Cooper’s designs in  The Fountainhead. When Cooper explains that his artistic vision shouldn’t be subjected to the second-guessing of lesser talents, Doucette objects in his best frontier-moron voice: “Why not? We wanna express our creativity too!” Cast in almost 150 movies, Doucette is easily remembered as the General that George C. Scott bullies on Sicily in  Patton.CINESAVANT

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Text © Copyright 2025 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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Trevor

The DVD was really heavy on grain, that’s probably the reason for no Blu-ray. I don’t mind grain but it was bad. I believe I streamed it in HD a while ago, they must have found better prints (or used some very clever processing) because the grain was acceptable. Enjoy!

Robin

Will Geer a “great Wyatt Earp?” A comically inappropriate one in my opinion.

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