Trivia / Winchester '73

• Career Resurrection: James Stewart credited this film with saving and redefining his career after a series of postwar flops threatened to seriously damage it.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Will Geer initially felt he was badly miscast as Wyatt Earp.
  • Shelley Winters didn't think much of her role:
    Here you've got all these men... running around to get their hands on this goddamn rifle, instead of going after a beautiful blonde like me. What does that tell you about the values of that picture? If I hadn't been in it, would anybody have noticed?
• Dawson Casting: Will Geer was 48 years old in 1950. Wyatt Earp was 28 in 1876.
• Doing It for the Art: The filmmakers didn't have the budget to pay James Stewart his requested fee of $250,000, so he suggested they take the then-unusual step of paying him a 50% cut of the gross profits instead, amounting to $600,000.
• DVD Commentary: On the laserdisc and DVD, James Stewart gives audio commentary about the making of the movie. It was the only such commentary he ever did.
• Fake Nationality: Rock Hudson as a Native American.
• Playing Against Type:
  • James Stewart had up to this point been best known for playing Capra-esque characters and heroic ones. While he's still the hero here, he's driven mostly by revenge and obsession, and this was the beginning of the Darker and Edgier roles Stewart played in the 1950s for Mann and Alfred Hitchcock.
  • Up to this point, Anthony Mann was best known for his crime dramas, but starting with this film, he switched gears to directing mostly Westerns in the 50s.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Fritz Lang was originally slated to direct, but Universal didn't want him to produce the film through his own Diana Productions company. Lang's idea was to have the rifle being Lin McAdam's only source of strength and his only excuse for living, making the quest for his rifle a matter of life and death.
  • Jean Simmons was considered for Lola Manners.

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