Lin McAdam, a sharpshooter who wins a prized Winchester rifle in a contest, spends the film chasing the man who stole it — and the rifle passes through many hands along the way.
In Winchester ’73 (1950), directed by Anthony Mann, James Stewart plays Lin McAdam, who enters a shooting contest in Dodge City and wins a rare Winchester rifle, only to have it stolen by Dutch Henry Brown, played by Stephen McNally. Lin follows Dutch across the West, and the rifle changes hands several times, linking a series of stories about the people who hold it.
Stewart’s Lin is a new kind of western hero for him: driven, angry and sometimes brutal, a man whose search for revenge has cost him his peace. Mann films the West in stark, open landscapes, and Stewart’s performance, lean and intense, matched that hardness. It was the first of several westerns Stewart made with Mann, and it changed how audiences saw him.
Winchester ’73 remains a landmark western, and Stewart’s Lin McAdam is a landmark performance: the everyman grown hard, but never losing the humanity that made him a star.