Winchester 73

Winchester 73 – Anthony Mann’s famous 1950 Western is so packed with incident and so populated by vibrant, memorable characters that the film banishes anything like contemplative thought.  It’s impossible to reflect on the movie while watching it – the plot is simply too intricate and ingeniously wrought.  In retrospect, the film seems remarkably complex and thematically challenging.  But a critical question remains:  is it a travesty of the picture to reflect upon it in any terms other than the most obvious?  Some pictures are designed to be wholly representational – that is, what you see is what you get; surface action and appearance is the raison d’etre of the film, nothing more.  I don’t think Mann’s movie exactly fits this category, but one is hesitant to devote too much critical thought to something that is essentially an exercise in different modes of motion, combat, light and shadow.  Jimmy Stewart plays a virtuous, ex-Civil war veteran (Confederate) hunting down the bad man that killed his father.  The penultimate shot of the film finally reveals explicitly what the viewer has suspected for the last couple reels of the picture – this is the story is a variant on Cain and Abel and the man that Stewart is tracking is his brother.  Entwined or inter-wrought with the Cain and Abel plot is a sequence of events tracing the peregrinations of the titular weapon.  The “one in a thousand” Winchester rifle, one of which we learn is owned by former General, now President, Grant, passes through seven transactions bookended by Stewart winning the gun at a target-shooting contest in Dodge City and the hero regaining the gun after slaying his brother.  Stewart’s wicked brother ambushes and clubs him stealing the rifle which is, then, lost to a cynical gambler and Indian trader who, in turn, is murdered by the Indians to whom he is selling weapons.  Young Bull, an Indian chief (played by Rock Hudson in his first screen role) loses the gun when he is shot attacking besieged cavalry.  A coward, who is also a crook, has fought valiantly in the battle with the Indians and so he is given the gun retrieved from the corpse of the Indian as a souvenir of the fight.  But the coward loses the gun to a vicious bad guy who, then, has the gun taken from him by Jimmy Stewart’s evil brother who, then, is shot and killed by the hero, closing the loop so that the rifle returns to its proper owner, the virtuous warrior who will, presumably, make use of the talismanic weapon in the service of civilization.  Although the rifle is alleged to have special qualities, like the treasure of the Sierra Madre, or the Maltese Falcon, it doesn’t confer anything upon its (temporary) owners but death and destruction.  It seems that anyone not fated by the film’s intensely involuted and doom-ridden plot to ultimately retain the weapon is, in fact, destroyed by it.  Mann is a master of landscape photography and the film features vast open spaces of desert and chaparral.  But this huge arena for the film’s action only emphasizes the picture’s essentially confined, and, even, claustrophobic design – the same people keep encountering one another in this enormous terrain of badlands and barren hills and everyone is related somehow.  There are no random encounters; the film’s pattern is like M. C. Escher’s engravings, sequences are complementary and all ingeniously interlocked.  Two men sharing a defensive position fighting against Indians turn out to have been soldiers who fought on opposite sides of the battle of Bull Run; the protagonists of the film are brothers, a fraternal link that is mirrored in the bickering between Wyatt Earp and his brother in Dodge City.  Shelley Winters, as the love interest, is essentially an item of currency like the rifle – she is also passed from hand to hand, seems indifferent to exactly who possesses her at any given moment, and functions as a narrative link between the characters in the film.  The movie invites speculation as to how Shelley Winters, pouting and luscious, is somehow like the phallic gun that everyone lusts to possess.  All motifs in the film are doubled or tripled – a comment about someone being scalped in one scene rhymes with a man mentioning his fear of this same fate a few minutes later.  The film’s action moves toward a fatal knot tied together in a squalid adobe town (it looks like the ruins of Pompeii) named Tascosa – that place-name as a destination is obsessively repeated throughout the picture.  Mann uses a variety of camera-styles and strategies to film the various deadly encounters – each episode is shot with slightly different emphasis and texture:  for instance, the scenes involving Young Bull are backlit against a setting sun with elegiac Indian warriors in silhouette posed artistically against the horizon; by contrast, the scenes in Dodge City are teeming and shot with neo-realist methods, something like Rosselini’s Rome Open City.  In the final chase, the two brothers pursue one another across a landscape in which mutely gesturing saguaro (organ pipe) cactus seems like frigid statuary – a kind of Greek chorus gesturing toward the archetypal image of brother pitted against brother, the Civil War reduced to a psycho-drama.  The film features three strands of intertwined action characterized by location:  Dodge City, the Indians (barren chaparral), the bandits (desert).  The film’s coda (the gunfight between the two brothers) is set in a stony, naked landscape of granite pinnacles.  During this fight, Mann materializes the concept of the “shot” and “shooting” as applied to film production into a perverse parallax view of the battlefield.  The camera vantage is equated with the gunsight on the rifle – we see the two combatants blazing away at one another in a stony labyrinth and the question implicit to the viewer is whether our perspective, which lets us see both men, is equivalent to what they can perceive at the end of the barrels of their smoking guns.  In other words, if the camera can see both men, do they have a clear shot at one another equivalent to the image registered impassively by the lens?  Thus, in the last scene, the viewer is constantly doing lethal calculations himself – I could shoot the bad guy from this vantage but would I be exposed to his shot or is the camera perspective subtly different from what the men can see from their granite foxholes in the cliffside?  These kinds of concerns are stated in earlier dialogue when someone remarks that firearms recklessly traded to the hostile Indians have crooked barrels – hence, the Indians naively think they can shoot around corners.  The raw poetry of Mann’s climax is achieved by establishing a close identity between a shot fired from a rifle (Shelley Winters carries around a bullet as an emblem of the hero) and the shots registered by the camera.