Critical reaction to Winchester '73 was mostly positive, though often condescending; many saw the plot to be essentially a grab-bag of Western cliches. The only critic who seems to have missed the point, and the entire tone of the film, is Bosley Crowther:

There you have it: simple, direct and action-crammed – and, as Universal presents it, good-humored and tongue-in-cheek, too. For neither the script of Robert L. Richards and Borden Chase nor the direction of Anthony Mann have taken the formula too seriously or the cliches as anything but larks. The dialogue is humorous, the characters are broadly picturesque and, as a matter of fact, the whole picture has the nature of a marginal burlesque. As the cowboy hero, Mr. Stewart drawls and fumbles comically, recalling his previous appearance as a diffident cowpoke in "Destry Rides Again"...Dan Duryea completely clowns the villainies of the reckless highwayman and Stephen McNally is as dark as thunder in the role of the original thief....It is far from the mature outdoor drama that might be brilliantly filmed around a gun. It's just a frisky, fast-moving, funny Western in which a rifle is the apple of a cowboy's eye. – Bosley Crowther, the New York Times, June 8, 1950.

Stewart brings real flavor and appeal to the role of Lin, in a lean, concentrated portrayal that is completely convincing. He's supported by a cast that, even in the bit roles, makes each character a standout. McNally is hard and unbending as the runaway, patricidal brother. Mitchell lends warmth as Stewart's loyal henchman and friend. Shelley Winters is just sufficiently hard-bitten and cynical as the dancehall girl mauled about by sheriffs and bandits. Dan Duryea comes into the film in its latter part only as a trigger-happy cutthroat, but makes each appearance felt...Direction and pace are on a par with performances. – Brog, Variety, June 7, 1950.

Winchester '73 is a crisp western in which a handsome repeating rifle ("the gun that won the West") inspires such yearning, fondling and fighting as not even horses, let alone heroines, ordinarily provoke....Before the hunt ends, the rifle is lost & found by half a dozen other characters, giving director Anthony Mann plenty of story line to tie together some classic horse-opera situations. Among the episodes: the scalping of a crooked trader by redskins; a deafening battle between Indians and the U.S. cavalry; the ambush of desperados in a burning house; a bank holdup and, finally, an exciting rifle duel on the side of a craggy cliff. Strikingly photographed in black & white, the film is directed with an eye to realistic detail, an ear for the script's frequently natural dialogue and a knack for building suspense. It also has some good performances by Dan Duryea, John McIntire and Millard Mitchell, as well as actors Stewart and McNally. Heroine Shelley Winters, who seems lost in all the uproar, might as well have been lost in the script. - Time, June 19, 1950.

The seductive heroine of this appendix to the well-thumbed history of the old West is Shelley Winters. But neither the good guy in the cast (James Stewart), nor the two major bad guys (Stephen McNally and Dan Duryea) show nearly as much interest in her as they do in a brand-new Winchester repeater rifle (model 1873). The new-fangled weapon is capable of killing a lot of Indians and/or cavalrymen. And once it gets stolen from its original owner (Stewart), it changes hands often enough to take its toll of both. But for all its eleven-shot capacity, the '73 lacks the personality to justify the blood shed on its behalf. At best, this well-directed but poorly motivated saga of the "gun that won the West" serves as a doubtlessly merited tribute to the Winchester Repeating Arms Co. - Newsweek, July 3. 1950.

Mann's first film with James Stewart, with whom he was to make a series of classic Westerns, this offers the clearest example of Mann's use of the revenge plot. Hero (Stewart) and villain (McNally) are brothers who have been taught to shoot by their father. After McNally murders the father, Stewart sets out to seek revenge and so prove himself worthy of his father's name, symbolized by the perfect Winchester Stewart wins in a shooting contest and McNally steals from him. So begins the long chase to one of the most neurotic shootouts in the history of the Western. – Phil Hardy, Time Out Film Guide.

Mann's Westerns are psychological, and his best heroes are beset by self-doubt. But it's too big a stretch to call those films neurotic when they revel in the beauty of daylight, space, and distance. Rather, I would suggest that Mann discovered his own Western sensibility, which was to see human stories as small, and even aberrant, in the vastness of terrain. Thus, Winchester '73 is a round, a circle, that needs huge horizons..." - David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.

"Mann's first western with Stewart is often a throwback. Though purposefully stripped of Fordian sentimentality and transcendence, Winchester '73 has many counterparts in plot, characters, and settings, to the 1930s and 1940s films of John Ford, especially Stagecoach and My Darling Clementine...The most radical thing about Winchester '73 is that its protagonist is not the locus of western myth. What's held in awe, what's fetishized throughout the movie, both by characters who clutch it and fondle it and by Anthony Mann's camera, is that titular rifle. Practically every scene starts and ends by Mann focusing on it in close-up, and it appears in many scenes from which Lin is absent." - Gerald Peary, The A List: 100 Essential Films (Da Capo Press).

"Classic adult western...What makes it special are the unusual characterizations and interesting relationships. The characters have all made choices about how they want to spend their lives. There's fine, unpretentious dialogue." - Danny Peary, Guide for the Film Fanatic (Fireside).

"Stewart, in career doldrums, made a comeback in two Westerns that were filmed back-to-back: this one and Broken Arrow [1950]. Although Broken Arrow was the bigger of the two (filmed in color, this one is black-and-white) and received more attention because of its theme, Winchester '73 is the superior film." - Brian Garfield, Western Films: A Complete Guide (Rawson Associates).

"First rate in every way, this landmark film was largely responsible for renewed popularity of Westerns in the 1950s." - Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide (Plume).

"Entertaining, popular, hard-riding, hard-shooting Western of the old school." - Halliwell's Film & Video Guide (HarperPerennial).

Compiled by John Miller & Jeff Stafford