A Film Canon

Winchester '73 relocates the narrative density of noir, replacing the epic, linear scope of the Fordian western with three circuitous, convoluted trajectories - the passage of a coveted rifle, gunfighter Lin McAdam's (James Stewart) pursuit of it, and the camera's own meandering movement between the two, elaborating all the makeshift connections and contingencies that they produce, and providing an oblique ancillary to the canonical Dodge City-Wyatt Earp topos with which the film opens. Concomitantly, the horizon is gradually occluded, its simple majesty deflected into Lin and rival 'Dutch Henry' Brown's (Stephen McNally) exquisite marksmanship, reticulating topography until even the most ostensibly panoramic space - the desert of the final sequence - is contained by a sea of cacti, cliff faces and crevasses, and plagued by the difficulty of attaining a clear sight-line. This all serves to undermine the archetypal characterisation upon which the classical western is founded, most explicitly by blurring the lines between Indian and Caucasian, and, to a lesser extent, man and woman. Not only is a "half-breed" presented as a formidable presence, but Mann orchestrates the central battle sequence so as to imbue the Indians with the more conventionally European heroism of the cavalry charge, while even the residual homogenisation of the Indian is offset by the heterogeneity of its Caucasian counterpart, beautifully encapsulated in a series of odd couples, including Lin and his nemesis (brothers), a cowardly man and courageous wife, a pair of soldiers who fought on opposite sides at Bull Run, and, most memorably, outlaw Waco Dean, suffused with Dan Duryea's schizophrenic, picaresque screen persona. As the latter's presence might suggest, Mann's project of defamiliarisation also involves fusing the revenge ethic with a more explicitly psychotic imperative (and reinventing Stewart's screen persona in the process), most poetically by fusing the rifle itself into both agent and object of revenge, thereby imbuing both with an unsettling intensity that is even clearer in its absence - generally, in Dodge City's gun ban (and the accompanying spectacle of a room full of confiscated weapons); specifically, in Lin and Henry's desperate, instinctive fumble for empty holsters.