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Criterion Spine #1248  ·  Episode 5

Winchester '73

Anthony Mann, 1950  ·  with Brady Crytzer
"The gun really doesn’t mean anything until people start obsessing over it."
Runtime 1h 32m
Country USA
Language English
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Winchester '73 Criterion cover

Lin McAdam wins a perfect Winchester rifle in a Dodge City shooting competition — only to have it stolen immediately by his nemesis Dutch Henry Brown. The rifle then passes from hand to hand across the frontier, linking a series of characters whose fates it connects. Anthony Mann's revisionist western stripped the genre of its mythology and replaced it with psychological depth, moral ambiguity, and barely concealed violence. The film that reunited Mann with James Stewart and helped reinvent the American western.

BC

Brady Crytzer

Historian & Author

A historian specializing in American frontier history and the culture of the West, Brady Crytzer brings the era of Winchester '73 to vivid life — situating the film within its historical context and examining how Mann reshaped the genre.

Film Details