The Alfred Hitchcock movie James Stewart was banned from starring in: “He lobbied hard”
Whenever Alfred Hitchcock and James Stewart made a movie together, the results spoke for themselves. The actor was one of the director’s favourite collaborators, but that wasn’t enough to guarantee him a role in whatever project the ‘Master of Suspense’ would cook up next.
Famously, or infamously, Hitchcock wasn’t a huge fan of acting as a profession. Although he tried to distance himself from calling them “cattle” despite that exact word coming out of his mouth, it became clear that the filmmaker abhorred the idea of a performer doing anything other than standing where he told them to stand and playing a scene the way he told them to play it.
Naturally, he didn’t get along too well with Lee Strasberg student Paul Newman, but Stewart wasn’t a proponent of the method. He was American cinema’s effervescent everyman and a consummate professional who was among the most popular stars of his era, a reputation Hitchcock gleefully subverted.
Injecting shades of grey into his established persona across Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, Stewart and Hitchcock were a match made in heaven. They made four pictures together, and it would have been five had the Academy Award-winning favourite gotten his way. Instead, it sounds as though the auteur deployed some trickery and subterfuge to get him out of the way.
Alongside Stewart, Cary Grant was another of ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s foremost icons. Like his contemporary, he also made a quartet of Hitchcock flicks. Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief, and North by Northwest saw Grant do much the same as Stewart and showcase a darker side of the persona that made him a household name, with the ‘Master of Suspense’ refusing to budge from casting him in the latter.
According to TCM, Stewart “lobbied hard for the lead role in North by Northwest,” but Hitchcock thought Grant’s naturally debonair and dashing profile was better suited to Roger Thornhill. To avoid a conflict with an angry star who wanted to headline his next picture but wouldn’t be allowed to under any circumstances, the director guaranteed he wouldn’t be involved.
Instead of having the stones to simply tell him no, Hitchcock effectively banned Stewart from leading North by Northwest by deliberately scheduling production against the actor’s next film. With that in mind, it can’t be a coincidence that Grant’s fourth and final film with the ‘Master of Suspense’ was shot at almost the same time Stewart was starring in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder.
Not only that, but the two movies were released 24 hours apart in July 1959. Apocrypha suggests that Hitchcock initially promised Stewart the lead role and then had to backtrack to get out of his self-created predicament, but what can’t be argued is that the actor wanted the part, and the director who didn’t want him to play it made sure scheduling conflicts eliminated that potential headache.
