Furious Jimmy Stewart's Oddly Compelling

I hadn't seen Winchester '73 before, though I thought I had. I must be confusing it with The Man From Laramie, or else Gary Cooper's Springfield Rifle, since those both involve trying to track down a load of weapons.

In this case  there's only one of the title weapons, and it's ancillary to Jimmy Stewart's dogged pursuit of Dutch Henry Brown. They have some history, and Stewart's been after him for some time, determined to kill him. He finally catches up to him in Dodge City, but with Wyatt Earp around making everyone turn in their guns upon entering town, there's not going to be any settling the scores. So the two end up in a shooting competition for one of the extremely rifles, and Stewart wins. So Dutch promptly jumps him in his hotel room and steals the rifle, then flees with his associates, Stewart again in pursuit.

What I didn't expect is the film to take the winding path it does. The rifle cycles through several other owners over the course of the film, from an trader, to an aggressive chief (played by Rock Hudson), to a man promising to make a new life with his lady love (the lady is played by Shelly Winters), to a different, slightly crazy, criminal, before ending up between Stewart and Dutch again.

I think Stewart is supposed to she the value in a life outside vengeance, which is why he needs to run into other people along the way. He has a friend with him throughout, but seeing as that guy's devoted his life to following Stewart around, he's not a shining example of life outside vengeance. Winters' character, Lola Manners, was getting run out of Dodge the first time we (and Stewart) meet her, I guess for being a dance hall girl, which made her undesirable to certain elements in town. She was hoping to start a happy life with her beau on a farm, but that didn't work out.

I'm not sure why the rifle needed to cycle through so many hands. The plot could continue pretty much as is if Dutch weren't such an impatient dope he couldn't wait 5 minutes to steal that rifle. I guess the argument could be made Hudson's character wouldn't have attacked a cavalry troop without his nice rifle, but he seemed pretty excited at the prospect of replicating the recent victory by Sitting Bull over Custer, so he might have gone for it regardless. It's a new piece of killing equipment that seemingly everyone wants, but it's only relevant to Stewart and Dutch's characters. They were both taught to shoot by the same person, and so the rifle can be seen as the reward for the one who absorbed all the lessons best. Not just how to shoot, but why, and at what.

Seeing Stewart in these darker roles is always a little odd. I tend to picture him more as slightly absent-minded, frequently befuddled stringbean, but he's pretty good at these roles. He's able to get this tension, where he's almost vibrating, and he's good at sort of spitting his words through clenched teeth. And he can snap into it quickly. When he meets someone with a line on Dutch, he goes from politely asking to suddenly smashing the guy's face against the bar and demanding answers before hurling the guy into the street.