Winchester '73 · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man rides into Dodge City on the Fourth of July, 1876, and leaves his pistol at the edge of town. Wyatt Earp is pleasant about it. The ordinance isn't really about violence; it's about where violence is allowed to live. Inside the line a gun is property, checked like a coat. Outside it, a gun is how things get decided. Then Earp stages a shooting contest and hands out a rifle as the prize, and the film spends the next ninety minutes outside that line, watching the prize refuse to stay in anybody's hands.

Six men own it before it comes back. It moves by theft, card game, trade, murder, and salvage. Meanwhile Lin McAdam rides after the man who stole it. Two engines, one destination: a rock face.

Deleuze splits the Western's basic engine in two. In what he calls the large form, a whole situation presses down on a man — the town, the land, the weather of lawlessness — until he acts, and the act changes the situation. That's Ford's shape, and it tells you what's at stake constantly and in advance. The small form runs the other way. You're given an act first, a gesture, a piece of behavior, and you work backward to the situation that produced it. Deleuze's word for a gesture pointing at a situation you can't see is an index; where the situation is never disclosed, he calls it an index of lack.

Which turns the standard complaint about this film into its design. We learn early that Lin McAdam wants Dutch Henry Brown, and we are not told why until the last reel. As suspense engineering that's a withholding trick, and a slightly cheap one. As form it's the entire method: Mann builds every scene out of behavior that points at a fact the film hasn't said. Watch the contest. It's cut on a strict rhythm of aim, report, reaction, and the reactions carry the drama, because what's actually happening is two men reading each other. Nothing is stated. Everything is legible.

Deleuze has a name for that kind of face. Not the face expressing a settled feeling, but the one accumulating pressure toward a threshold it hasn't crossed: the potisign, an icon of power rather than of quality. The saloon gives you that pressure at full. Lin pins Waco Johnnie Dean against the bar and twists his arm, face bared, the camera close enough to trap you in the same few feet of space. That scene isn't characterization. It's a symptom in Deleuze's sense, an act that reads as evidence of a drive the film hasn't named. Something is running this man, and he hasn't told us what.

This is where Stewart changes. He arrives from Capra as the decent, hesitant citizen and leaves Mann's Westerns clenched and unstable, the register he would work for a decade here and with Hitchcock. Mann's own contribution is the texture of the violence. He came to the Western straight out of T-Men and Raw Deal and brought the steam-room lesson with him: hurting someone is ugly manual labor, not choreography. Duryea's giggling sadist is Raymond Burr's, refitted. The habit of wedging an actor between a hard foreground object and the edge of frame becomes the compositional trap the saloon and cabin interiors run on.

Then there's the gun. Deleuze's relation-image is the image whose sense lives in relations the audience holds rather than in anything visible; an object that means by its customary chain (a rifle in a Western: see it, expect a shot) he calls a mark. What breaks the chain and forces interpretation is a demark. The One of One Thousand is a real industrial anomaly. Winchester test-fired barrels, set the freakishly accurate ones aside, engraved them, charged a premium. One instance lifted out of a mass-produced series. The film opens with a title card explaining this and then argues for ninety minutes about what happens to a tool declared exceptional. It becomes property, trophy, curse. Nobody in this picture wants the rifle for what it does. They want it for what it is.

That makes it a symbol in Deleuze's narrow sense: the object in which the film's organizing relation is condensed. It's also what holds the picture together. The relay comes from portmanteau cinema, where Tales of Manhattan passed a tailcoat between unrelated sketches, and Borden Chase with editor Edward Curtiss re-engineer it so the object's hand-to-hand passage advances one continuous moral argument instead of stitching vignettes. Curtiss makes the handoff itself the transition: laid down, picked up, carried out the door. Your attention rides the gun across cuts that would otherwise be breaks between separate movies. The continuity isn't in the plot. It's in you, which is exactly the knowing third Deleuze means by Thirdness.

He also names the path this traces: the line of the universe, or vector, a zig-zag connecting spaces that have no other reason to be connected. In the large form space breathes, alternating vast milieu with the taut line of the action. The small form often gives you only the line. Mann draws his in terrain, and his governing principle is that terrain is dramaturgy. Characters don't stand in landscape; they are advantaged or endangered by it. The climax is the shot everyone cites. Men reduced to small dark shapes distributed across a vertical field of boulders, the camera high enough that the rock, not the framing, decides who is exposed. Skeleton-space: space stripped down to the line of danger.

And it's built almost entirely from eyelines and sound. Shot, echo, ricochet, cut to the man who moved. Position gets established and then revised, so your spatial knowledge decays at the same rate as the characters'. Everything that matters sits out of frame, in the adjacent space the frame keeps promising. William Daniels shot it, fresh from the location work of The Naked City, and his deep staging is Bazinian in the strict sense: keep foreground and background legible at once and you hand judgment back to the viewer instead of making it for them. Mann uses that and then takes it away. He teaches you to read the space and then makes reading it insufficient. The picture is black-and-white in Academy ratio in a year when the A-Western meant Technicolor pageant, hard sun uncorrected, faces half black, rock as texture. It looks like a crime film. That's an argument about the genre, made in stock and light.

What it seeded is easy to follow. The ascent, the exposed shooter, the body forced against rock: that pattern runs through the whole Mann–Stewart cycle and hardens into The Man from Laramie and Man of the West. Chase carried his obsession, the man whose competence can't be separated from his capacity for violence, into Bend of the River and The Far Country. Offscreen, Stewart took a share of the profits instead of a salary, Wasserman's MCA built an empire on the model, and the package-unit system replaced the contract system. A film about what happens when one man owns the exceptional object was also the deal in which a star stopped being salaried labor.

Here is what it did to the art. Before Winchester '73, the Western's meaning tended to live in the encompassing situation, the thing that gathers a town and demands an act. Mann moved it into a line drawn across rock by a body with something unstated inside it, and proved that a genre built on plain sight could carry an interior it never shows you. Watch the hands next time. Who holds it, who sets it down, who reaches. The rifle comes back to the man who won it, which looks like a circle closing. Whether it closes anything is left with you.