Winchester '73

Winchester '73 is a 1950 American Western film noir starring James Stewart, Shelley Winters, Dan Duryea and Stephen McNally. Directed by Anthony Mann and written by Borden Chase and Robert L. Richards, the film is set in 1876 and follows the turbulent passing of a prized Winchester 1873 repeating rifle from one ill-fated owner to another interwoven with a cowboy's search for a murderous fugitive. It is the first of eight films that Mann and Stewart made together, and is also the first film from which an actor received a percentage of the receipts, a practice known as "points", as compensation. Along with Millard Mitchell and Charles Drake in featured support, Rock Hudson portrays a Native American tribal leader, and Tony Curtis appears as a besieged cavalry trooper, both in minor roles at the beginning of their careers. The film received a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for Best Written American Western. In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".