Winchester '73

Burton's nemesis, the Austrian Count Karl von Bruno, although this is set in the 1700s and a lot of the political geography of that era doesn't map easily onto our modern conception of Germany or Austria, is played by Stephen McNally, a character actor who played more than his fair share of thugs and villains.

He got his start in 1942 with the film Grand Central Murder, and kept right on going for the next 40 years with plenty of bad guy roles including Lockie McCormick in Johnny Belinda, Nazi Karl Reicher in Rogue's Regiment, the sinister David Vogel in Sword of the Desert, and probably most notoriously the rifle-stealing Dutch Henry Brown in the Jimmy Stewart western Winchester 73.

He did have some hero roles, like in No Way Out, City Across the River, and The Duel at Silver Creek, but he was far better known as a bad guy, and that helped him greatly when television came around and there was always an opportunity to get shot by Matt Dillon or menace the six million dollar man.

He did the full tour of 50s, 60s, and 70s television, including Starsky & Hutch, Charlie's Angels, and Fantasy Island, before retiring to spend time with his wife, Rita Wintrich, and their eight children, and passed away from heart failure in 1994 at the age of 82.

What do you think? Well, I think we're crazy, too, but we're gonna be rich.

Then we're gonna- You know, here we've got our two actors sort of jammed against a, a wall there, and with the third character sort of sleeping in a bunk supposedly in the scene, and this is unusual for Mann because in Westerns that he had previously made with James Stewart, such as, uh, Winchester '73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, there was a big emphasis on landscape and on the depth, deep space, depth of focus in the landscape.

This film, The Far Country, despite its title, in fact, is much more about kind of flattened spaces and enclosed spaces.

It's something that Mann seemed to really fix on in this film, and obviously he worked it through with his, his collaborators, including the, the esteemed, uh, art directors, uh, Bernard Herzbrun and Alexander Golitsin.

It's not Jeff and Ben in this sense.

Mr. Gannon ain't gonna like this.

"This relationship between the men," Basinger goes on, "it may be an actual blood relationship as in Winchester '73, a mutual past experience as in Bend of the River, competition over an economic goal in The Far Country, or an adoptive father-son link as in Howard Hawks' Red River.

In some cases, the conflict is internal, the hero against the evil inside himself." Um, now in, in terms of The Far Country, uh, I don't think it's so much the evil inside Jeff, uh, in this particular scenario.

This may be a good answer, 'cause Sean and I have a shared, um, a shared list of Westerns that we're watching for this next project.

And, um, to my... on, on my list, the next up is Winchester '73.

Whoo.

So that should be fun.

... it's crazy, 'cause, you know, you'd think you'd see some like cool like '60s or '70s film, and a lot of it is Value of the Dolls.

He did stuff, Winchester '73, so yeah, he worked, you know, '40s, '50s, '60s-

Yeah

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