Winchester ’73 (1950) Conversation with Rick Barlow

Today, Rick Barlow and I are having a conversation about the great western Film Noir Winchester ’73 (1950). iMDB.com says it is:

A cowboy’s obsession with a stolen rifle leads to a bullet-ridden odyssey through the American West.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0043137/

This film has a pretty dynamic cast including:

James Stewart played cowboy Lin McAdam. Stewart was covered in It’s A Wonderful Life (1946)

Shelley Winters played saloon girl with a heart of gold, Lola Manners. Winters was first covered in Wild in the Streets (1968).

The great Film Noir actor, Dan Duryea, played the murderous Waco Johnny Dean. Duryea was first covered in the Humphrey Bogart World War II adventure Sahara (1943).

Millard Mitchell – High Spade
Charles Drake – Steve Miller

John McIntire      Joe Lamont

Will Geer Wyatt Earp

Jay C. Flippen Sgt. Wilkes

Steve Brodie Wesley

James Best Crater

John Doucette     Roan Daley

Ray Teal           Marshall Noonan

Stephen McNally Dutch Henry Brown

Rock Hudson Young Bull

Tony Curtis    Doan

Automated Transcript – Winchester ’73 (1950)

Hello, Rick, how are you today

I’m great, John. Great to be here.

Great. I’m glad you’re here. So we’re going to talk about a pretty interesting movie. It’s one of the few Western Film Noirs. You know, with the director Anthony Mann, and the storyline of revenge, pursuit, it’s generally considered a Noir, one of the top Western Noirs. Interesting.

So yeah, I haven’t thought of it that way. That’s great.

It was, I took a class many years ago and they brought this movie up in the class and the discussion was whether Shelley Winters was a Femme Fatale or not. It’s generally you thought that she’s not.

That’s. That would be my thought.

I was reading some of the comments and she said it didn’t she didn’t care for this movie to much because, you know, she was saying, well, you’ve got this beautiful women woman here, and all these guys are running around just chasing after some stupid gun and ignoring her, you know,

So I don’t think they were ignoring her, but it’s true. She didn’t have much to do

Now as he wasn’t much of the focus in this one,

But she did a good job. It’s kind of funny how in the end it looks like she and the hero have a real close relationship when in truth, they’ve sort of barely bounced off one another over the course of the movie. It’s

Yeah. They just stuck that together. Pretty good. But she

Was good. I thought she was good in the role.

Yeah. Yeah, she was good. And it was just strange to see her so young after the Poseidon Adventure (1972). I’m chewing on a little cough drop here. So clicking a little bit. That’s why. Jimmy Stewart was trying to make himself known as a solid hero as a solid actor and not just a guy that could play Harvey (1950) and George Bailey from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).

He was, as I understand it, he was looking to sort of broaden the audience’s understanding of him as an actor to give him more hard-boiled roles. And this, this was a hard-boiled role that’s for sure.

It sure was he did he did a solid in it. This was no Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) or Harvey (1950), the rabbit

Actually, I think, I think Harvey (1950) came out after this movie.

Yeah. So he could still do the soft one, but you know, he went on to play of the opposite of this and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), he went back to not being a tough guy again.

Yeah. He was more Mr. Smith in that one, but which is kind of a goofy movie because I think it, I think he was, I think he was about 56 playing the young pilgrim.

He was a little long in the tooth for that role

At the end of the movie, you could believe him, but man, early on, I thought this is a pretty old dude here.

I just got out of law school. I guess it took him 30 or 40 years.

I love that movie too, by the way. That’s the more I see it, the more I appreciate

The yeah, what’s the guy’s name from D.O.A. (1949) Okay. Pull the fellow newspaper editor. Oh, Edmond O’Brien everyone. Brian, I think there’s, you know, one of his better roles to that movie really. He’s really solid. Yeah. So I’ve got some notes here. I’m trying to look at. This a movie is kind of set just following the Battle of Little Bighorn as it is known now or formerly Custer’s Last Stand, but it took place in the end of June, June 25th, 1876. And this movie is set on the 4th of July the same year that’s when the gun contest is. Right. So when they get to that town Wyatt Earp is throwing which is, Will Geer or grandpa from The Walton’s is throwing Shelly Winters out of town for being a saloon girl. Will Geer said that he thought he was way too old for that role at 48.

Wyatt Earp was about 28 at that point.

Yeah. He was a young guy. Yeah. And so that was kind of interesting. So they you know, they, they made a few kind of historical inaccuracies about the battle and stuff, I guess we can get into later. But so they go to the, they go to this town for this shoot off for this one of a thousand Winchester model 73 rifle, which was not the first repeating rifle because the Union had Spencer’s. I worked at Chickamauga and the union one union brigade held off the Confederate Army with Spencer repeating rifles at Chickamauga. And that was 1864, but the army had decided to go with a single shot rifle to arm its troops, which was a kind of a single shot Spencer. And I know is the late as World War II commanders didn’t want to have they didn’t want to have automatic weapons because they thought soldiers would waste ammunition if they didn’t have to aim and shoot each.

I thought that was kind of interesting, but they say that Jimmy Stewart says that later in the battle that they use that single shot of the Indians use the single shot and then they would rush in while they were reloading. But I interviewed Doug Scott on my website for podcast, the guy that did the Little Bighorn metal detecting survey, the archeologists. And it wasn’t really that it was that the inexperienced troops collapsed and clustered in on themselves and they lost kind of tactical cohesion. And he followed like a claim that the Indians were heavily armed in the movie in this movie that the Indians were heavily armed would repeating rifles. But what Doug found out is he would find a rifle because he was doing ejector marks, then primer mark, like, and he would find a rifle that was on the top of the hill fighting. And then suddenly it would be in the other hands attacking up the hill. So as they were killing off people, they were picking up their weapons. And continuing on,

I remember reading one quote, when I was looking into this Spencer or into the Winchester, talking about repeating rifles where the Confederate soldiers said these Yankees had rifles that they’d load in the morning and they’d shoot all day.

That must’ve been that must’ve been quite a shock, you know? Cause I mean, I, I know in a musket, not a rifled-musket, but a regular colonial (smoothbore) musket. You could fire three shots in a minute, but I think that a Civil War musket is a little harder to load because of the Minnie ball. So that must’ve been quite a surprise when you’re expecting And they keep shooting it. So what do you think of this brother against brother? They don’t reveal until the very end of the story.

Well, I, you know, it’s interesting it’s it explains the, although they don’t go very deeply into it, but basically, they say one, one brother was one son was good and one son was bad from the, from the first day. And you, I think you can totally understand why the good brother would see his one goal in life to be tracked down and kill the bad brother after the bad brother kills the father. So, right.

Kind of a Cain and Abel. Yeah. And the gun is just kinda MacGuffin. It doesn’t really matter. They’re running through it with a gun, leads a story. It’s kind of like the, what was the golden Rolls-Royce or something, or the silver Rolls-Royce [The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964)] movie where they track the car like that is it changed hands and became part of, it had Shirley MacLaine in it. And it goes, and it belongs to rich people. And then it gets involved in the Spanish Civil War and it ends up the partisains and all of that. It’s not bad, you know, it’s not too bad. I like that. And so they come to the town and the guys are, you know, the sheriff Well Geer, Wyatt Earp is collecting weapons and just throwing them in there, you know, with like well, you know, maybe you could figure out which one is yours when you come back. Right. Yeah. That would have been quite an inventory system. Yeah. And so

And Will Geer was good too. I mean, all the performances I thought were really good and I, when I realized it was Will Geer, I thought, man, this, this is fun seeing this guy in this role because he’s, he’s definitely too old, but he does the role. Well,

Yeah, he was a good actor. Right. He goes all the way back to the what’s the first, the first theater or the theater project in New York. It’s not Mercury Theatre, but it’s one of the WPA theaters later, all the blacklisting and communists came out of, I forgot the name of it, but he goes, he goes back to that so easily. He’s a great actor.

Yeah. I loved him in Jeremiah Johnson (1972).

Oh yeah. As the old prospector or teaching the young guy what to do, Griz. So the gun contest, I think that Jimmy Stewart apparently worked a lot, worked. His hands were raw on practicing the shot, but it kind of bothered me where they would snap it in that position, you know, and like, you know, you’re not going to hit anything like that.

I, you know, I don’t know much about guns and I don’t shoot guns. And although I think I’d like to, and out here in Arizona, you know, guns are big, but I thought the same thing because there was that both those guys, their dad must have taught them that they would snap that gun up. And I didn’t understand the relevance. It seemed to me that it was not the way to do things, to just snap it up like that.

Right, right. Cause you have a good, better chance of missing that way. And so I thought that was it, it looked cool. It looked really cool. So it worked in the movie, but I don’t know why they did it and the shooting through the stamp, but shooting through the washer on the stamp. You could make a shot like that.

I kind of assumed it wasn’t stated that way. It was everybody assumed that both those guys had missed the first washer shot. I assume both of them shot right through the center of that washer. Because if you look at their patterns on the targets, their patterns were almost identical. Taught to shoot by the same guy the dad. And so I kind of assumed that the dumb, the dumb move was for the bad brother to agree to that bet. You know, if the good guy hits the washer he wins and the other guy doesn’t even get a chance to shoot.

Yeah. That wasn’t good. You know, bad guys are not known for making rational decisions that’s why the prisons are full of them. So he wins the gun, and he has the little first brush with what’s her name? Shelly Winters is Lola Manners. Right? She’s a great name by the way. He has his first brush with her. He almost comes into conflict with Wyatt Earp until he finds out who he is. And she talks about how Stephen would stand up. And we find out a little bit about that later. So he wins this rifle. That’s supposed to be one-of-a-thousand. And I think there were like 183 of those ever made. It’s a one-of-a-thousand model.

Yeah. That’s, that’s interesting. I did a little research on that. Probably the same as you, that those particular rifles were made from barrels that had unusually close clusters in test shooting. So they were actually by manufacturer, they were better than the typical off-the-line Winchester in terms of accuracy, which I thought was pretty interesting.

Yeah. And they sold, I mean, they sold like a 700,000 – 900,000 of those rifles out West

I think the number I saw, oh yeah—720,000 up until 1923.

That’s a lot of rifles and they have 40 or 44 40. So it would fit in the pistol too. You’d only have to carry one kind of ammunition. That’s some good American marketing right there, make it easy, make it assembly line and make it efficient.

You know, if you read any of the Louis L’Amour westerns and I during COVID I discovered Louis L’Amour. I read his memoir I forget the name of something of a wander, “Education of a Wandering Man” 1990. So I started reading his books. Hadn’t read them. Although I had seen several movies that have been made from his books, like Hondo, well, he wrote a hundred novels and I believe I’ve read all of them now. And some of them are read twice because there’s so much fun to read. They’re like, whoa, they’re like a good Western in book form. But the books that Winchester rifle is all over the west, it seems like in the latter half of the 19th century or the latter, third of the 19th century, if you were out west, you had a six-gun and a Winchester

And that’s it,

Man. You didn’t go anywhere without your Winchester.

It makes perfect sense. You know, they got, and they were pretty they kind of hit that theme in this movie. You don’t go without their don’t go without your rifle.

So Jimmy Stewart wins it and before he can get his name engraved on it, his brother who we don’t know is his brother played by Stephen McNally and his friends jump him and steal the rifle. And light out. And so I was thinking of a High Spade. So Jimmy Stewart, which is Lin, and High Spade, which is Millard Mitchell, the great actor, they head out after him. And because it’s supposed to be right after the Little Bighorn, the tribes are on the, on the rampage. And the Dutch Henry, which is the Jimmy Stewart, Dutch Henry Brown ends up and I guess, Riker’s Bar or Cantina. And there’s a gun, a gun dealer they’re played by an Indian seller; seller of guns to Indians played by John McEntire and the what was my point that the, okay, I want to get John McEntire and then he’s trying to buy, they’ve lost their guns. Cause

Yeah, they had to run out of Dodge so fast. They didn’t have time to go get a hold of their guns for Wyatt’s office,

Completely unarmed. So he plays a McNally. He tries to play our Dutch Henry tries to play a poker game against what is that guy’s name? Joe Lamond (McIntire). He tries to play a poker game against him. Did you get the feeling that he was being set up and I’m just a simple gun dealer?

Yeah. You wonder again, you wonder at the intelligence of that simple gun dealer. Cause there, he sits all by himself. These three guys come in that need guns and he wants that rifle. And I think he cheats at cards and he winds up with everything. And he also winds up dead. Why couldn’t he see that coming really in his favor here in terms of odds?

No, cause I’m pretty sure, you know, the once the guy’s got the pistols. Even if the bartender got the drawdown on them, they could still wait around and get that rifle back. Yeah. So that’s one of the mistakes he made a, I think he has the McNally Dutch Henry has a full house, aces and eight and he says, oh, I almost got a Dead Man’s Hand, which is a pair of aces and a pair of eight from Wild Bill Hickok when he was shot. But a Hickock wasn’t shot until August 2nd, 1876. So he still had another month or so to go. They kind of jumped down on that.

Yeah. The script supervisor should have caught the continuity error there

The aces and eights, I guess I’d always, you know, for a long time, I assume when you got aces and eights, you were you had a full house instead of two pairs, I guess. I guess they would have announced it as a full house. That way. There’s always confused me. I thought, oh, aces and eights, he’s got three, a one and two of the other, but the Dead Man’s Hand from Hickock and then Lamont, Joe Lamont, the gun dealer goes out to meet with the Indian chief. And did you notice who he was?

Oh yeah. Rock Hudson.

I didn’t even see it. I read it in the credits after the movie and I’m like, oh my God, that’s Rock Hudson. Oh yeah. I just, I mean, he was so young, I missed it. So he did a credible job as an Indian. You know.

If you can’t find a real Indian,

They didn’t try back in those days.

It wasn’t like he had a lot of lines, you know?

Yeah. I’ve got that broken grammar thing, going. It said on IMDB.com That he was first wearing a Lewis and Clark peace medal that they had given out during their Core of Discovery. You know, something like you would have inherited, but later he didn’t have it on. I thought that was an interesting little detail to put something that was,

But, but, but unless I’m mistaken, this is all this movie took place almost entirely from a geographical point of view was down in the Texas panhandle. Right. So I don’t believe Lewis and Clark ever made it over there. They were entirely north and west, but I’m even wondering why these Indians are inspired by the Sioux who were probably a thousand miles away, but who knows?

Yeah, I knew there was a general uprising after, but most of them were getting the heck out of town, you know because they knew the army was coming back after him. And you know, but in Texas that would have been Comanches, you know, and they were, they were fighting at a drop of the hat anyway.

Oh yeah. I mean, they wouldn’t have been negotiating for those guns. They know they would’ve been,

So they kill him. And then, so the chief is, ended up with the one-of-a-thousand and heads out and that’s when they think that’s when they get after Lola and Steven, the wagon and he runs off and leaves her behind and I’ve known a few women and I don’t think they’re going to forgive you for that.

And it looked like she was having a hard time figuring out how she was going to stay with him. In fact, I think that was true throughout the rest of that storyline. It looked to me like she was done with him pretty much,

Pretty much, you know, because the guy from the guy that was going to stand up to Wyatt Earp, if he was in town to the guy that runs away and leaves her to the Indian. So he wasn’t much of a guy. And so Lin and High Spade make it into a Calvary camp where Stephen and Lola have already taken refuge. They’re surrounded by the Indians. But that was a Jay C. Flippin is one of the John Wayne posey guys.

Yeah. And you know I mentioned this movie to you called The Far Country (1954) which James Stewart made in 1954, also with Anthony Mann, the director, the same director as Winchester ’73 (1950). And in that movie, you’ve got the same gang. You’ve got John McEntire playing the villain, you got Jay C. Flippin playing an innocent good-hearted character actor, and then you got James Stewart as the hero. His sidekick in that movie is Walter Brennan. It’s a good movie, frankly. I enjoyed it more than I enjoyed Winchester ’73 (1950), but apparently, Anthony Mann and James Stewart made four westerns together. The first of which was Winchester ’73 (1950).

Okay. Yeah. They had worked together on something else earlier, but it wasn’t a Western. So Jimmy Stewart or Lin in his gentle way doesn’t offend the sergeant and teaches him how to fight the Indians. They say they don’t attack at night after they’ve been chasing them and shooting at them as they run into camp at night. You know? So I noticed that like a lot of the myths, I saw a lot of myths that I’m familiar with from cowboy movies in this movie. And I wonder, you know, how many times I’ve watched this before and didn’t, you know, just had it somewhere back there and didn’t know what was going on.

I have to say though, what I’ve noticed and I, and I continue to see it as I watched these fifties westerns, you’ve already got the white man or the Indian, or both talking about how the white man has destroyed the Indians life. You know, the Rock Hudson Indian says, you take our land, you kill our women or something like that. And I remember John Wayne in Hondo (1953) had some line about this Indian life is over, but it was a good way of life. It’s. I mean, already back in the fifties, we were acknowledging the impact of European civilization overcoming Indian civilization.

Yeah. I don’t, I mean, it would be almost impossible to not, you know, I mean, I mean streaming across a continent like that, and you imagine you’d be a people with no way to slow it down. You know, if they’d all joined together on day one and shot arrows at Columbus, which I think they did in the Caribbean, but if all the tribes that united early on, they could have probably put up a defense, but as individual tribes, they never had a chance.

That’s the, I think that’s the essence of American Indian culture that it was so fractured. It was, there were just hundreds, maybe thousands of tribes and very little unity over the centuries. And I mean, how does a primitive culture resist developed culture like European, especially when Europeans bring smallpox and germs that there’s no immune natural immunity. I mean, probably a third of the Indian population killed was killed by germs, which in most cases, not in every case, the Europeans didn’t even know they were bringing

And they had a, you know, that had been going on for, you know, 300 years. I mean, the Spanish brought the first diseases into the new world like that and took some back too. But yeah, so you can imagine that even if they were 300 years before, even if they’d have been fairly homogenous, all the waves of death and the reduction in population, it’s kind of a fracture them up. Yeah. And kind on that same line about the awareness of the people about the Indian’s way of life being over. I also liked the way they tried to smooth the Civil War out, you know, in many ways like the fifties and sixties and seventies, people weren’t as mad about the American Civil War as they are now, you know, they made a Lin and a High Spade Confederates that fought against the U.S. Calvary, but they didn’t have any animosity. And now it seems like we’re past all that.

Well, and it’s pretty hard in my mind. It’s pretty hard to imagine that these two guys who I think we should assume are Texans pretty hard to imagine that those Texans, after the experience of Reconstruction in Texas and all the conflict of that could be that, you know, that settled and friendly with the former Blue Jackets.

There enemy. Maybe they were, maybe they from the west, they were out there in the near Amarillo. Maybe they were missing a lot of the stuff. Yeah. That was some bad times. I think that’s when the they started getting the tick disease and couldn’t drive cattle out of Texas and stuff following the Civil War, some of that went on. So it was pretty bad. It was really just like when I go ahead,

Oh, there’s a great history of Texas by a guy named Fehrenbach “Lone Star: A History of Texas.” He also wrote a fantastic history of This Kind of War: The Classic Korean War History, but his history of Texas goes into the, well, it’s the history of Texas. So, but it’s fascinating to read about Texas, it’s such a unique place in our history. And I mean, the only state that entered the Union as an independent nation.

Right. And apparently, they were really economically in trouble then too. Right.

And the reconstruction was pretty tough on those Texans because it was pretty exploitation and brutal down there. Not that I’m apologizing for the Confederate loss or anything, but Texans weren’t necessarily ready to kiss the feet of the Union, former Union soldiers.

I can get into The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) later. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, it is, it’s one of my favorites. So they use their I guess Stephen the coward, Lin, and High Spade. Oh, I have a repeating rifle and they use that to beat back the Indian’s attack, eventually killing the chief who now who drops the one-of-a-thousand out there. I was watching that scene. And I’m like, man, that soldier looks like Tony Curtis. Sure enough. It was. I Iike Jim Best because he was in the other, Jimmy Stewart movie Shenandoah (1965), which is a heart-tugger. He was the soldier that helped his son escape from the Confederate side. But yeah. So I was surprised to see those young guys in there hidden in the background.

Yeah, well, 1950, it’s pretty early for them.

Yeah. And so Tony Curtis, as a soldier, finds the rifle, gives it to his Sergeant who gives it to Stephen, the coward, you know, and him and Lola head off and Lin and I don’t know why I can’t keep saying, High Spade. I can’t get it right. High Spade. They head off still searching for Henry Brown, Dutch, Henry Brown, which was apparently the name of a real criminal, a real robber a little farther north of Texas. Interesting. They took that in. So when they go to the hideout, when Dutch Henry Brown goes to the hideout, you know, into ends up meeting Dan Duraya, and Steve Brody, and Charles Drake who were all Film Noirs actors, you know, the bad gang was just straight out of the Film Noirs catalog. So I thought that was really interesting.

And I guess, well, that’s, I jumped ahead, but you know when Steve and Lola make it through the house where they’re going to build the farm she’s ready to settle down at, but she’s already having issues with him and then Duryea and part of the gang show up chased by the posse. And then the posse the what was the guy’s name? Ray Teal was the marshall just stuck in there in the shadows, not too much of a role for him, but he’s always a good guy to have in there. So they’re Duraya basically forces Steven into a gunfight over the gun, you know, and the so, you know, just to get the gun and he loses a man and then he sacrifices his whole crew. So he can escape and uses Lola as a shield, which is his kind of role. He played in all those Film Noirs too.

I have to tell you in this movie, he’s my favorite character.

He’s the

Worst thing and the most fun.

Yeah. Yeah. He is.

There’s no two ways about it. He’s just evil and having a ball being evil

Exactly. Living for the day.

You know, I wondered about that too because the sheriff burns down a whole farmhouse. I wonder if sheriffs, in order to get bad guys were in the habit of burning down farmhouses.

I’m wondering about that too when they did that, what are they going to do? They’re going to have a house raising for their family or something.

Exactly my question, you know, what, how do you make up for this destruction of property?

Yeah. And maybe if you have like nine guys, don’t all stand together, maybe surround the house.

So the windows don’t provide escape routes.

Yeah. So yeah, I thought that was like, okay, they’re going to burn everything these people have. And I guess wood was cheap. All her possessions and the cast iron would survive. So I guess it wouldn’t be too bad off. He might. So a Lola and Lola and Waco, Waco, cause he’s from Texas,

Johnny Waco Dean or something like that,

Waco Johnny Dean. And so they make, they go to the big hideout where Dutch Henry Brown and the other ones are there waiting. And the Dutch Henry Brown just takes the gun away from Waco, you know? And so it was he showing a coward streak himself. Does he say he could get it back later?

Oh, I think, I think Waco Johnny Dean had every intention of not only getting that gun back but taking all the money from the bank robbery eventually. He’s has no loyalty to his buddies. You know, it’s all.

Yeah, because he wouldn’t have been out robbing early. If they, if he’s sticking with the plan. So half the group or the majority of the group goes to find the stagecoach that’s carrying the gold that we don’t know about. Lola and Waco go to the bar in Cascora. And Lin and High Spade show up and Lola’s playing the piano. And now you’re trying to make a case for that, she was just a piano player and not a salon girl. I guess they don’t run you out of town for playing the piano.

That’s it, man, you can’t have any piano playing here.

Maybe if you play like I do you know that that could get run out of town, the

Women, piano players, we, we don’t like,

Yeah. Yeah. So she actually warned I keep Lin, right? Yes. She warns Lin about Waco’s trickery using his left hand. And that’s when they said that they said it in the reviews, that’s when people really jumped on Jimmy Stewart when he brutally beat down Waco right there. And I thought that’s pretty far into the movie to kind of, you know, really you know, become interested in the character. Cause I was trying to figure it out, you know, figuring them out before that. But so does he kill Waco? I can’t remember. And then the bank robbery takes place across the street and those guys are trying to get away and shooting back and forth between the bank and the saloon. And Lola runs out to save a little child and get shot in the arm. And that was one of their other interactions. When he starts to tie a bandana on her arm before he takes off after his brother, who’s probably the only one of the gang that’s still alive. And then they get back to the old hideout. And I wasn’t sure if that hideout was the family ranch. Cause it had the picture in it.

That’s a good point. It didn’t look like it was big enough to be a ranch was set up in the rocks. I just wondered whether or not the bad guy had a soft enough heart to keep a picture of his brother and his dad

Right after he shot him and has one, a one of um chasing around like a, see this guy, let me know. Okay. He’s trying to kill me.

Yeah. But, and, and, and obviously the character Dutch wouldn’t have a picture like that. It’s just, there’s just a gimmick so that Shelly knows what’s going on. I think,

Yeah. They, you got to get it in there somehow, I guess. So the battle in the rocks, it was really interesting when the Dutch Henry and Jimmy Stewart started fighting it out with Henry on the top and Lin on the bottom, the way they were ricocheting the bullets into the rock. And you know, instead of hitting them, you didn’t have to hit them with a bullet if you could chip off granite and hit him with it pretty good. And I guess it came down to fire discipline, right? Because the older brother, a younger brother ran low on bullets, and then Jimmy Stewart goes back and he could live happily ever after with Lola. And I thought, okay, so what happens to the buddy? That’s been following you around since, before the Civil War, is he make a ranch next door?

Yeah. He’ll probably stay around as the cook and the general you know, the right-hand flunky. It’s a good question. I mean, when you really stand back and look at the movie, it’s, it’s, it’s a fun story to watch, but it’s full of these little gimmicks and inconsistencies things that don’t seem to fit. But, but I like this,

I enjoyed it. I really, like I said, I hadn’t watched it in a while, but when I got to sit down and watch it, that’s what I really enjoyed it,

All this stuff, John, that they got into 94 minutes. I mean, they got all the ingredients. So they got, they got the Western bad guy against the hero. They got the heroic sheriff that you didn’t want to mess with, you got the sidekick that goes wherever you go, he’s loyal to the last minute, you got Indians, you know, you’ve got cavalry you got horse chases and then gun battles in the rocks. You’ve got a bank robbery. How much more stuck in 94 minutes. Oh, I forget. You’ve got the dance hall girl.

You have the dance hall girl. You had a wagon chase. You didn’t have a stagecoach chase, but you had a good wagon chase that they go for. Yeah. They really packed it in here. I that’s probably why, why it’s so good. Let me look at my list and see if I missed anything off here. So you like this movie because it’s just action-packed more than a, you know, a good, solid Western story.

Yeah. I, first of all, I’m a Jimmy Stewart fan. I’ve seen a lot, probably haven’t seen all his movies. I think he made 80 movies. And but I’ve when I look back at the list I’ve seen most of them and I’ve always liked them. And I liked him in all of the different kinds of roles that he played, even as he got older and he was still doing sort of Westernish kinds of movies, like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), for example, right.

Even as late as when The Shootist (1976) with John Wayne, when did his last movie.

That that’s the little, that’s a movie within a movie that scene between those two, are it constitutes a movie within a movie and it’s just perfect.

Unlike this movie that has stuff in it that you wonder why it’s there. And it seems out of play that’s there’s not a wasted frame. There’s not a wasted note. There are two guys talking about something dead serious, man. That’s a beautiful sequence there. Okay.

Did you get a chance to take a look at Destry Rides Again (1939)?

No, I haven’t done that.

It’s kinda, oh, that’s a Jimmy Stewart movie, but it’s a, it’s a comedy and kind of a comedy Western.

The other thing I think is so interesting about Jimmy Stewart, but it’s true of a lot of those actors when World War II came around those guys, some of them went in for it. I mean, he, he was 33 years old. He enlists in the Air Corps as a private because he’s got a private pilot’s license. I think he’s got a commercial pilot’s license. And he’s, he’s really too old to go into their training program. So since he’s a Princeton grad and 33 years old, he’s commissioned as a Second Lieutenant and they give them all of this sort of entertain the troops kind of duty. And he says, no, man, I want to see some actions. So he winds up flying what it’s B, B 40. No, B 24 bombing missions over Europe for two years. I mean, a lot of those guys didn’t come back.

Right. Especially in the beginning. And he ended up Jimmy Stewart ended up a general in the California National Guard, which is just as, I mean, it’s so impressive. And that dastardly, John Wayne decided not to go, you know. Even Clark Gable flew bombing missions over Europe. Yeah. I mean, I like, I think I like to think I’m a brave guy, but would I fly on, you know, a B-17 over Berlin, if I didn’t have to. I’m not sure I could now not sure I’d like that.

Yeah. Yeah. They were the real deal. That’s why I’ve always respected, you know, Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable and the ones that a lot of, you know, like, well, just so many of them, I did From Here to Eternity (1953) And I just mentioned, I looked up whether everybody was in the military and how many of those actors just like Tom Tyrone and stuff went into the Navy and stuff. And I can’t imagine how many didn’t come back. You know, how many people would have been actors. And so that’s, that’s really brave. And it’s always been a pretty amazing thing to me.

Yeah. It’s very impressive. And then the other thing about the movie, because I had read about this, I mean, separate from watching and appreciating the movie, the unique business deal that Jimmy Stewart’s agent Lew Wasserman cut for him because back then, Jimmy Stewart’s standard fee was $200,000, which in today’s money would be about 2 million and the budget for the movie. Couldn’t, couldn’t put $200,000 on the star. So Lew Wasserman said, I’ll tell you what, we’ll take half the profits, no fee. We’ll just take half the profits. If the movie does well, we do well, you do well. And that’s the first of its kind since silent movies. And he wound up Jimmy Stewart wound up making 600,000, which would be a little over 6 million today’s dollars. And it was sort of another nail in the coffin that the studio system because once Lew Wasserman cut a deal like that and saw that kind of money for his client and himself, I mean, all of the big actors were cutting deals. They weren’t signing multi-year contracts with studios anymore.

Right. Hard to go back to $250 a week after that, you know, and that’s the way, I guess they’re all making 40 million now because of that knowledge, whatever it is good money. If you can get it. I wish I knew how to act. I would quit after one movie. You know, like once that guy going to make another movie, he’s not spending his money somewhere.

The only thing about that is once you get all that money, you learn how to spend more of it faster. So you, in that other movie, He something, and I’ve just been reading about his friendship with Henry Fonda. Apparently, they were lifelong best friends. And I guess there’s a whole book about their friendship, which I’m tempted to read.

So I still got to read “A Third Face” 2004 by Samuel Fuller. It’s the story of director Sam Fuller from when he was in the newspaper business, to when he went in the military, to because of becoming a director and just

Made a note, I’ll look it

Up. Yeah. It was about, it’s really good. I’m about a third of the way through it. And I put it down and got, and I got to get back and get on it. There’s one more thing I wanted to bring up about this movie. The relationship between slapstick half Dick, what is his name, High Spade and Lin. You remember The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), had Henry Fonda and James Stewart, right? The partner talks about, we talk about do you know why I follow you everywhere you go? You know, like, and I don’t remember what the resolution is, but they talk about that relationship about, you know, what you Cowboys hang out. And there are partners like that at one point because when Jimmy Stewart inherits the social club, there was a question of whether Henry Fonda is going to follow him down. And he was like, of course, you know, cause I’m your partner. I’m going to go with you. You know? And so that kind of just, just a bond, you know, a straight bond of probable necessity. Cause you probably, it was probably a lot harder to survive by yourself, out in the west.

Yeah. You needed at least one person that could, you could count on no matter what

You needed your Will Geer to your Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson (1972). Yeah.

But I that’s, you know, that’s probably true today for that matter. It’s good to have one person you can count on no matter what.

Well, you know, they say, they do say in that line and Jimmy Stewart says, my father says, if you have one friend, you’re rich, which is, they said it was a play on a, It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), you know, I’m the richest man in town because what man has friends

That’s right. Yeah.

Yeah. Wow. Okay. That was exciting. We’ll talk about Winchester ’73 (1950), we didn’t even really talk about the guns that much. I wanted to, I did want though in there that I read about the Henry rifle, that it didn’t have a wooden understocked and then it heated up when you used it and it’s like, why would they make a gun like that? Yeah, apparently it had a, he said it doesn’t kill fast enough to one of the guys did. And apparently, it had a, he had a tube bloated. He had some kind of slide tube where the bullets spin, whereas the Winchester you could just pop ’em in one at a time that’s a completely reload. But yeah, I think it’s a very interesting movie and the fact that it is a Film Noir Western, and I think it’s an important movie and a very good action and very good acting in it.

Yep. I enjoyed it. I also noticed that that those one, one-of-thousand rifles at the time sold for $2,400 each

Holy cow. Yeah. That’s a lot

Of money. Yeah. So they weren’t, they no wonder the bad guy, you know, other Stephen McNally wanted that gun because there’s no way he was going to buy one until he robbed a bank.

Yeah. So it gets the gold. I’m going to stem. I’m going to rob that bank and buy a rifle. Yeah. Oh, that was great. Let’s wrap this up and then I will talk to you just a minute after that then. Yeah. So I had a great time and I appreciate you coming on. And I think people will like this and get a lot out of this.

Because I love these movies from my youth, you know, from the fifties. And I love westerns, but not just Western. So I mean, there are so many good movies and that’s the, in my mind that sort of the golden age, the sixties gets real interesting in the seventies. And then the eighties coming along and there are fewer and fewer movies you want to watch.

Yeah. I watched the movies that were supposed to be a highly recommended from the seventies. I watched Klute (1971) with Donald Sutherland and The Parallax View (1974) and didn’t care for them. I thought they were just slow pace trying to bring the anxiety up, but it was like, something needs to happen in these movies, you know?

Yeah. I know what you mean. I liked Klute (1971) though. I did.

Have you seen that recently though? No, I don’t think

I probably need to revisit that

It was shocking because of the stuff that Jane Fonda said, you know, the way she talked and cursed and everything and it wouldn’t be shocking now.

I’ve never understood. Donald Sutherland is a leading man. That’s one of the homeliest faces you can put on the movie screen, I think.

Yes. But right up to Kelly’s Heroes (1970) though, you know, he’s not quite the leading man there, but he’s the major character

Have you, have we done? Did we do Hard Times (1975) together?

No, I did that before. Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. I love that movie. That’s my favorite Bronson movie. And I love that

We have Mr. Majestyk (1974) too, though. There hasn’t been, we haven’t done.

Yeah. That’s I enjoyed the hell out of that movie too. I’m trying to think of the author. One of my favorite crime authors, he wrote oh. The movie with John Travolta and Danny DeVito. And it’s about the loan shark that comes to Hollywood and

Get Shorty (1995).

Yeah, the same author of many of his stuff. Like Jackie Brown (1997) was one of his books that Tarantino made. All of those, all of the movies on his made on his books, I think are pretty interesting. That’s I think that’s the second movie I saw James Soprano guy, you know, Gandolfini he’s that you’ve seen Get Shorty (1995). Am I right? The first time I saw Gandolfini was in a great Tarantino wrote the script, True Romance (1993). If you haven’t seen True

Christian Slater. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a great movie.

A great movie. And that’s got a great movie within a movie too, between Christopher Walken and man, my mind is so rough today. Oh, the guy from, Oh, well I’ll think of it, but it’s a, it’s a fantastic movie because Tarantino wrote it. It’s just packed with funny lively dialogue, and it’s got these fantastic characters, Gary Oldmen. Remember that he plays the drug dealer. He’s a white guy, talks all black.

And then there is it Dennis Hopper?

Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. When he’s trying to torture the torture him, and he knows he’s going to break, and he provokes him into killing him. Oh, that’s a great movie. So we’ve got lots of choices. So, you know, I’ll

Think of a few, I’ll let you know, and we’ll do it again.

All right, Rick, thanks for, thanks for doing this today. Adios. Ah, Adios, I’ve been out west too long.