Sunday, July 25, 2010

Flashback, July 1950: James Stewart Starts New Phase as Western Hero


By the end of July 1950, Hollywood’s oldest movie genre—the Western—had put James Stewart back among the film world’s box-0ffice elite for the first time since the start of World War II. In the process, the two films, Winchester ’73 and Broken Arrow, helped inaugurate the so-called “psychological Western” and established a form of Tinseltown economics with stars such as Stewart replacing the old studio system as the new center of gravity.

Premiering within nine days of each other, Winchester ’73 and Broken Arrow formed half of a quartet of movies starring Stewart that were released in this year.

The other two—Jackpot, a genial but slight comedy, and Harvey, a piece of delicious whimsy about a gentle tippler and his invisible six-foot-plus rabbit—could have been released in the star’s pre-World War II era with MGM, when his slow-talking, aw-shucks manner made him a natural to play the young man next door.

The first major Hollywood star to enlist in the armed forces after Pearl Harbor, Stewart had subsequently been decorated for bravery. But he had seen too many people die—comrades he had befriended and foes he’d shot down in the sky—not to be chastened by the experience.

You can sense these encroaching inner shadows in his first major postwar release, It’s a Wonderful Life, but there was still enough starry-eyed idealism in George Bailey for the public to associate the actor with his other prewar work with director Frank Capra (You Can’t Take It With You and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington). Maybe the lack of box-office success for It’s a Wonderful Life owed something to the public’s disinclination to accept a view of human possibility that still stressed the positive.

Stewart had tried a Western before (Destry Rides Again, in 1939), but it had played off his early innocent, idealistic image. In contrast, Winchester ’73 and Broken Arrow introduced the public to a new, tougher, more complicated Stewart. The actor would never really attempt a villainous role, as good friend Henry Fonda would do in Once Upon a Time in the West, but the public’s acceptance of him in the two gimlet-eyed Westerns would make it possible for Stewart to expand his range further in the decade with Rear Window, Vertigo and Anatomy of a Murder.

Winchester ’73 was notable as the beginning of the actor’s collaboration with director Anthony Mann. Other director-star teams (Sternberg-Dietrich, Ford-Wayne, and Scorcese-DeNiro) have attracted more attention over the years, but none re-focused a career the way that Mann did in his noteworthy movies with Stewart.

Several months ago, in watching Night Passage (1957), I was sure it was another Mann-Stewart film. It wasn’t, but it was supposed to be. Mann had picked the location, cast and crew, and even directed the pre-credit sequence, when what was supposed to be his ninth film with the star ended abruptly in a quarrel over a script Mann regarded as a rehash of their prior work.

Before they reached that sorry parting of the ways, however, Mann and Stewart had worked on five other Westerns that effectively remade the genre. Oh, their Western still had the kind of action sequences and stunning cinematography that, say, Ford and Howard Hawks had employed. But Mann and Stewart were now pioneering another kind of Western hero—one driven not simply but justice, but by an obsessive quest—Captain Ahab way out West.

Broken Arrow, directed by Delbert Davies, was notable as one of the first Western scripts that sympathetically viewed the plight of Native-Americans. It took awhile before this attitude became more general in Western films.

Winchester ’73 had a more immediately effect on Hollywood, but in the only way in which members of the film community know how to speak to each other: through the medium of money. Stewart’s agent, Lew Wasserman, pioneered a deal that made his client a very rich man—and himself one of the powers-that-be in the industry.

For a percentage of the profits, Stewart agreed to make Winchester ’73 and Harvey for Universal Studios, which was down on its luck at that point. His subsequent healthy payday led other Hollywood stars to look for similar deals—and enabled to help Wasserman expand his talent agency, MCA, directly into film and television production. That, in turn, led the agent to become head of the studio whose deal with Stewart had made it all possible: Universal.

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