Winchester '73

WINCHESTER ’73              A-                   

USA  (92 mi)  1950  d:  Anthony Mann 

From films like T-MEN (1947) and RAW DEAL (1948), Anthony Mann brought his textbook film noir stylization to the American western, bringing along Frank Capra’s American everyman Jimmy Stewart to boot, the first of five westerns they would make together, giving him a piece of the take in lieu of a salary that he could not afford to pay, turning the lovable Stewart into a man with a tortured past, obsessed, angry and bitter at having spent the last few years of his life chasing after his nemesis, the man who shot his father in the back.  Along with a more hard-edged, psychological view, Mann also preferred to shoot on location, which adds an element of realism and authenticity to the look of the film, while still carrying over insulting American stereotypes about Indians, where none other than Rock Hudson makes an early appearance as an Indian chief, uttering that stupifying “Injun” lingo to add insult to injury, not to mention that exact same portrayal of Indians in battle that John Ford initiated in STAGECOACH (1939), sending wave after wave of Indians on horseback senselessly to meet their deaths while few if any whites get shot, actions that by any standards would be considered sheer idiocy.  Nonetheless, this film helped bring about a new wave of westerns that once again took another stab at re-inventing the West, this time at least making an attempt at being more truthful.  

A unique twist in this film is introducing the actual weapon, a Winchester 1873 repeating rifle, that the opening title credits indicate “won the West,” as Indians were never able to match weapons with a repeating rifle that did not need to be reloaded after a single shot, their ultimate undoing, and then turning one such rifle into a character in the film, as the story seems to follow whoever’s carrying the gun.  Set on the 4th of July in Dodge City, Kansas in 1876, Marshal Wyatt Earp (Will Geer) holds a shooting contest where the winner is awarded a rare "One of One Thousand" edition of the rifle, a valued weapon that draws together Stewart as Lin McAdams, along with his loyal sidekick High Spade Frankie Wilson, the always low key Millard Mitchell, and the volatile Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), the man McAdams has been trailing.  When they spot each other, their reaction says it all.  But they can’t kill each other, as the law disarms everyone entering town in order to keep the peace, so they go through the motions of simply hating one another.  The shooting contest is interesting, as it goes into what’s ironically called sudden death overtime to determine the winner, McAdams—was there ever a doubt?  But within minutes, Brown and his gang have bushwacked McAdams and stolen his gun.  A pursuit follows, where the gun is at the heart of plenty of action, which takes them to a legendary card game between Brown and an Indian trader, John McIntire, full of swagger and especially creepy at outsmarting others, a gun deal gone wrong between the trader and Young Bull (Hudson), an eventful buggy ride between saloon girl Lola Manners, one of Shelley Winters best roles, sensuous and tough at the same time, never seen with a speck of dirt on her, her hair never out of place, seen earlier being unsolicitously thrown out of town by the Marshal in order to give the town an appearance of being clean and orderly for the festivities, and her fiancé (Charles Drake) just as they are attacked by Indians.  This buggy chase is memorable when the guy confoundingly halts the buggy and bolts away on a horse leaving Winters to fend for herself, a stupifyingly cowardly act, only to discover a small group of Cavalry around the bend, so he returns and brings her to temporary shelter, though as they soon discover, they are surrounded by Indians.   

One clever sound device is listening to the singing of the Indians, who make eerie, highly distinctive animal calls in the night, while also getting the sound of the rifles right.  McAdams and his partner join this little party as well, telling war stories about the Civil War, where incredulously, McAdams is not only aware of the Custer defeat while riding out on the range, which happened in late June of the same year, but he’s also well informed on the Indian’s military strategy on how to attack repeating rifles, which one would have to conclude would be impossible since there were no witnesses.  Again, this is typical of American mythmaking in westerns, which continues through John Wayne’s portrayal in John Ford’s legendary THE SEARCHERS (1956), considered by many to be the best western ever made, where the lead whites (Wayne and Stewart) are not only the most skilled marksmen, but they’re also the wisest military tacticians on the planet, offering a mythologically superior view of whites contrasted against Indians who can’t hit the broad side of a barn.  This exact same scenario has played out in dime store novels, comic books, newspapers, books, as well as movies, always the same, where Indians are just plain dumb, where westerns established the seeds of historic racism that may never be rectified.  Since this is one of the iconic westerns, and seen as a turning point towards more realism, this is painfully hard to swallow.  Nonetheless, the whites are attacked at first light (perpetuating another myth that Indians never attack at night) and wave after wave of Indians are slaughtered before our eyes, including Young Bull and his infamous rifle.  Discovered on the battlefield, the rifle is ironically turned over to Drake for his courage under fire, but he soon loses it as well. 

Enter Waco Johnny Dean, Dan Duryea as a preening lunatic playing his part in the physically exaggerated style of Brando, where his theatricality seems amusing even to Lola whom he abducts and abhors everything that he stands for, but she’s caught by his unorthodox, near caricature of a psychotic outlaw.  He joins up with Dutch Henry Brown, as outlaws always seem to do, and the rest is history.  McAdams stands down Waco Johnny in a manic scene of pure madness, where Stewart had never been seen before savagely fuming with such venom, before he and Brown hightail it out of town for the inevitable final showdown.  We soon discover in a Cain and Abel story that Brown is the bad seed brother to McAdams, whose been tracking him down ever since he shot their father in the back.  They end up in a shootout just between the two of them in a rocky canyon with bullets flying off the rocks, a delirious gunfight that is all about family honor and personal vengeance.  In the end, despite a nicely crafted edginess to a movie that delivers the goods with plenty of action, taut editing, crisp dialogue, some interesting characterizations, and exquisite location photography by cinematographer William Daniels, especially the silhouettes on horseback riding at the top of the hills, copied by none other than Ingmar Bergman for the finale to THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957), the resolution comes all too quickly as the moral lines are drawn hard and fast in this movie.

Postscript:
Largely a response to the extensive comments left below by Andrea Ostrov Letania who has her own website here:  ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA

I'm afraid this response may not do justice to your stated concerns, as differing views may be just that, but it's an attempt to clarify possible misconceptions.  Racial depictions are prevalent in Westerns, along with societal inequities and historical injustices, so they need to be evaluated along with the film.

“John Ford initiated in STAGECOACH (1939), sending wave after wave of Indians on horseback senselessly to meet their deaths while few if any whites get shot, actions that by any standards would be considered sheer idiocy.”

To clarify, the idiocy isn't what happened, that Indians (or Chinese Boxers in one of your examples) were shot down in droves, but the way this was portrayed onscreen, where the whites not only shoot the Indians, but also their horses out from under them - - all in a single shot.  This is utter lunacy, yet it is the key to understanding John Ford's mythical creation of a continually escalating visceral thrill onscreen, where the camera is placed low to the ground looking up at the Indian on the horse as they both die, falling simultaneously to the ground, all from a single bullet.  This happens repeatedly, as the fast-paced movement actually creates tension and drives the action.  Why few critics have questioned this outrageously racist depiction is beyond me, as whites are always depicted as not only militarily, but morally and intellectually superior, as if this is a known and undisputed fact, continually portraying Indians as savages and never as the culturally developed people that they were, who did not ravage and destroy the earth, understanding they were dependent upon it to survive.  These images degrade the viewer's understanding and appreciation for Indians and their place in American history, as they were more often the victim of genocide and untold atrocities by the U.S. Cavalry and Defense Department that attempted to wipe them off the face of the earth in order to make way for the white settlers.  It is this fictitious and mythical view of supposed white superiority, as projected in the movies, that continues to plague this nation, reflected by the equally hostile and racist attitudes of many misinformed American soldiers when they are sent to foreign lands.    

I'm not suggesting the Indians (or the Boxers) were stupid, only the invented version of Indians as savages as created by whites in movies, which shows no understanding whatsoever of Indians or Indian culture, something altogether missing in these films.  My point here is to clarify how Mann at least attempted to add a look of realism, including psychological depth and complexity to the Western, but continued to project the same racist "Indian as savages" viewpoint depicted by Ford.  Both added to the common misconceptions, yet both are revered for their supposed authenticity and historic attention to detail in their depiction of the West.  Someone needs to point out how racist and degrading their supposed portrait of authenticity really is.  They allowed white characters to be psychologically complex, but never Indians.

When looking at John Ford, he is a man whose cinematic visualizations are renowned, but his hatchet job of American history is equally legendary, as he insists on perpetrating the same racist myths about Indians that have been in effect for the past 100 years, which makes his historic vision as a filmmaker no better than the dime store novelist that originated these misconceptions.  Ford has always portrayed Indians in the least desirable light, showing them to be less than human, vicious savages, terrible shots, poor military strategists, and little more than pathetic wretches of humanity, so little sympathy is ever shown when a gazillion Indians are killed onscreen, such as in STAGECOACH (1939). 

Compare that to the elevated sympathy offered to two white women escorted by a cavalry troop through hostile Indian territory in SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949), an overreaching drama that opens in 1876 just as news is spreading about the defeat of General Custer at the hands of the Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe, sending waves of anxiety and fear throughout the West, where a newsreel style narrator misinforms the audience straightaway, probably exactly as the newspapers speculated in that era, believing various Indian tribes were gathering together in great numbers to purge the West of white settlers.  In reality, Indians were gathering in record numbers to defend themselves against the inevitable advance of the whites into their territory.  After the Custer debacle, however, rather than remain a fighting force of multiple tribes united in opposition, as is suggested here, they split back up into smaller tribes, each going their own separate way, as they had always lived, reflective of their nomadic lifestyle of living off the land.  But that’s not the way the movies tell the story, instead projecting a view of the white settlers as victims of random and indiscriminate Indian violence, overlooking the genocide initiated against Indians by the U.S. cavalry throughout the West, ordered to militarily defeat one tribe after another, rounding up all free Indians in a form of ethnic cleansing, eventually forcing them into submission, legally requiring that they live away from their traditional hunting grounds, forcing them to live in isolation on desolate reservations, subject to rampant disease and the rotted food of government rations where more than half died within the first few years.  Ford conveniently leaves out all references to the true story of “American” history and instead recounts the same mythological racist lore that turns Indians into savages while the whites are noble heroes. 

While you may perceive Indians as clever in THE SEARCHERS (1956), this is a film about a racist and bitterly hateful man, perhaps the most racist film ever made, where Wayne's character is the ultimate Indian hater who rides for years harboring the racist view that whites raised by Indians are better off dead, as his captive niece has been irredeemably "soiled" by the experience, a view he reluctantly revises when he later rescues the daughter of the one woman he loves.  But this view recurs in Barbara Stanwyck's role in yet another Western portrayal, TROOPER HOOK (1957), where she is so scorned by the townsfolk just for having been an Indian's woman, her fall from grace is so severe that she is forced to live outside any society, white or Indian, much like Wayne at the end of THE SEARCHERS.  Wayne would also rather kill buffalo and leave it to rot on the plains than allow Indians to have food to eat, while the director Ford includes a despicable scene, also Aldrich in ULZANA'S RAID (1972), where whites raised by Indians are depicted as having been raped into insanity.  With Wayne typically the hero that audiences always root for, they are NOT apt to question this horrendous depiction of Indians and the generational harm these images cause both in planting the seed of ignorance in the brain and then having to re-learn how to reject such negative stereotypes, not when there is near unanimous praise for the film and the filmmaker. 

There is no question that in any John Ford/John Wayne movie, but in particular STAGECOACH (1939), SHE WORE A YELLOW RIBBON (1949), and THE SEARCHERS (1956), together they forged a tough guy persona as the good guy, a lone man who harbors private secrets from a life filled with experience, adding a touch of intrigue and mystery, not to mention power to his character, personifying the freedom that is associated with the West.  In each, Wayne is viewed as the hero and will inevitably be the most skilled practitioner with a gun or rifle, but also in devising strategy whenever he and/or his men get caught in a tight situation.  It's also safe to say that James Stewart was known for his likeability which continued throughout his career, becoming one of the most beloved figures in American cinema, and that Mann used this trait against type in several of his Westerns, starting with this one. 

Indian strategy is at least mentioned in WINCHESTER '73, but the Jimmy Stewart character is already, in just a matter of weeks, well informed on the Indian military strategy in defeating Custer, displaying a kind of superhuman intelligence.  Again, what's racist is the demeaning and racially restricted view that only whites have a capacity for intelligence, as Indians are never depicted as having knowledge and skill, or powers of analysis, or exhibit a sense of humor or a concern for others, or any capability for being human. These qualities, in both Ford and Mann films, are only allowed for whites, just like a white-only neighborhood, or a drinking fountain, or a rest room.   

I'm not suggesting all Westerns need to be revisionist, this was the 50's after all, a time when Americans found Communists lurking under every rock, and call me an anti-racist if you will (I've been called worse!), but I will call them out on their misrepresented portrayal of Indians, as enough is enough, and Westerns are among the worst offenders of a culture plagued by race and culture hatred, so it's about time someone sought to eradicate some of the harm done by these damaging and misconceived historical perceptions which only cloud and distort reality, further leading to an ill-informed populace.