Shucks to shivers: On Stewart’s darker side
The Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto kicks off its summer season with a James Stewart festival, and a somewhat adventurously programmed one at that.
No “It’s a Wonderful Life.” And no “Vertigo,” an omission that I thought was against the unwritten rules of Bay Area arthouse programming. To which I say: good. It’s time to delve a bit deeper into the filmography of one of classic Hollywood’s most iconic actors.
Instead we have such littleknown films as Clarence Brown’s “Come Live With Me,” with Stewart marrying Hedy Lamarr so she won’t be deported; George Stevens’ “Vivacious Lady,” in which conservative professor Stewart throws all caution to the wind to marry nightclub singer Ginger Rogers; and Frank Borzage’s fantastic “The Mortal Storm,” in which — get this — Stewart is an anti-Nazi German under threat in a film that climaxes with a James Bondian ski chase in an attempt to flee the country.
The centerpiece of the series: all five of the tough, game-changing Westerns he did with Anthony Mann, a director as important to Stewart’s career as Alfred Hitchcock.
Oh, rest assured there are many well-known classics among the 21-film series, which opens Friday, May 24, with a Hitchcock doubleheader (”The Man Who Knew Too Much,” another chance to say goodbye to Doris Day; and “Rear Window”) and ends June 30 with a Western double feature that includes John Ford’s “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”
Essentially, this is a chance to look at how Stewart and his films changed from before World War II to after the war. Stewart, of course, was one of the few A-list Hollywood leading men to see active combat in the war, flying several bombing missions over Germany. The combat experience hardened him.
Suddenly, the young idealistic rube of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (June 14-16) and aw-shucks star of romcoms such as “The Philadelphia Story” (May 31-June 2) was gone. After the war, his acting darkened and deepened, as did his films.
Yes, Stewart was still, in some ways, America’s Dupe, one of the reasons he isn’t among my favorites from old Hollywood, although I respect his work. Too often, he was the sucker who always falls victim to others’ agenda before getting wise. In “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” his openbook folksiness puts his family in grave danger — fortunately Day, his wife, is more savvy. In “Bell, Book and Candle” ( June 5-6), he is hilariously hypnotized by Kim Novak and her cat.
But in 1950, everything changed with “Winchester ’73” (part of a Mann-Stewart double feature, with “Bend of the River,” June 7-9), a film that has been credited as singlehandedly revitalizing the Western. Stewart wanted so badly to do it that he refused to do “Harvey,” another goofball, but well-loved, role in which he co-starred with a 6-foot tall invisible rabbit, unless Universal Pictures green-lit “Winchester ’73.”
In it, he stars as a man who wins a coveted new rifle in a shooting contest, then has it promptly stolen from him. As the rifle passes from hand to hand, Stewart tracks it down in a film that is part revenge picture and part essay on the prominent role of violence in the making of our country.
Stewart once said the film’s success was “a lifesaver for me. It opened up a new sort of area for me in the picture business, in the type of story I could do.”
Indeed, Mann opened up sides of Stewart never before seen. In most of the Mann westerns, Stewart is a gruff loner with a secret burning inside. Take the double feature playing June 21-23, for my money the best of this series. It starts with “The Man From Laramie,” one of the first Westerns filmed in Cinemascope, which shows off not only the gorgeous landscapes of New Mexico and Arizona, but also the vast emptiness inside Stewart’s soul.
A violent tale of revenge, Stewart is tracking down everyone responsible for his brother’s death, a drifter and would-be deliverer of vengeance that prefigures John Wayne’s wanderer in “The Searchers” and later, Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name persona of the 1960s.
But the best of their collaboration is on the second part of the bill. “The Naked Spur,” beautifully filmed in Technicolor in the Rocky Mountains, has Stewart as a bounty hunter tracking down a murderer (Robert Ryan), who is traveling with his girlfriend ( Janet Leigh). His prey proves too hard to handle alone, so Stewart accepts the help of a grizzled prospector (Millard Mitchell) and a dishonorably discharged soldier (Ralph Meeker), who both suspect Stewart intends to stiff them on the reward money.
His single-minded quest to get the reward money and his brutal treatment of the prisoner horrify his companions to the point where they can’t tell who is more dangerously unbalanced — the accused killer or his captor. The compact portrait of how greed and obsession can eclipse morality features one of Stewart’s best performances and is one of the best Westerns ever made.