Winchester '73

Winchester '73 (1950)

The Gun That Won The West!

Lin McAdam rides into town on the trail of Dutch Henry Brown, only to find himself in a shooting competition against him. McAdam wins the prize, a one-in-a-thousand Winchester rifle, but Dutch steals it and leaves town. McAdam follows, intent on settling his old quarrel, while the rifle keeps changing hands and touching a number of lives.

Date of release
1950-07-06
TMDB
7.3 / 10 (423)
Runtime
1h 32m
Genres
Western
Director
Anthony Mann

Casting

Interesting facts

Winchester '73 is a 1950 American Western film noir starring James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally. Directed by Anthony Mann and written by Borden Chase and Robert L. Richards, the film is set in 1876 and follows the turbulent passing of a prized Winchester 1873 repeating rifle from one ill-fated owner to another interwoven with a cowboy's search for a murderous fugitive.

Production

The film was originally intended to have been directed by Fritz Lang, but Universal did not want Lang to also produce it through his own company, Diana Productions. Lang's idea was for the rifle to be Stewart's character's only source of strength and his only excuse for living, making the quest for his rifle a matter of life and death.

With Lang out of the picture, Universal produced the film with up-and-coming Anthony Mann directing, Stewart's choice, as he had admired some of Mann's prior work. Mann had Borden Chase rewrite the script to instead make the rifle a bone of contention, showing it passing contentiously through the hands of various people.

Mann said, "I didn't like the property; I didn't like Winchester at all. This was Lang's version. I was working at Metro and everybody was pressuring me to make the film and I said, 'I'd like to make the film, if you let me rewrite it completely.

Stewart had wished to make Harvey for Universal-International, but the studio could not afford his $200,000 salary ($2.06 million in today's dollars), so studio head William Goetz offered to allow Stewart to make both Harvey and Winchester '73 for a percentage of the profits, spread over some time and at a lower capital gain tax rate than a single payment to Stewart would be.

Stewart was already cast in the part of Lin McAdam and spent a lot of time practicing with the rifle so that he would look like an authentic Westerner. As Mann later related, "[Stewart] was magnificent walking down a street with a Winchester rifle cradled in his arm. And he was great too actually firing the gun. He studied hard at it. His knuckles were raw with practicing...

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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