Credit: Far Out / TCM

Every Alfred Hitchcock movie starring James Stewart

Wed 2 October 2024 17:35, UK

Among all of Alfred Hitchcock’s leading men, none became more synonymous with his filmmaking than the great James Stewart. Stewart’s likeable, earnest on-screen persona had elevated many a screwball comedy, romance and heart-rending drama before Hollywood’s master of suspense came calling. And so, it might seem surprising that Stewart was the male actor who played the most starring roles in Hitchcock’s films.

His earthy, well-meaning charm surely set him at odds with the tone of a Hitchcock thriller. Or so it seemed, until his game-changing performance as prying photojournalist LB ‘Jeff’ Jeffries in the 1954 masterpiece Rear Window. Stewart had worked with the director once previously on the single-shot experiment Rope, which both agreed hadn’t quite come off. Hitchcock then had to wait six years for his second chance at working with the actor, but it was worth it.

Stewart’s portrayal of Jeff as a self-absorbed goofball who didn’t realise how good he’d got it with Grace Kelly trying to marry him proved to be the perfect foil for the terrible crime committed just across the courtyard. The actor strikes the difficult balance between playing the fool, the people-watching weirdo, and the skilled amateur detective all in one. It’s difficult to imagine anyone else pulling off such a feat.

The likes of Anthony Perkins, Hitchcock’s Norman Bates in Psycho, are rightly acclaimed for breaking new ground in acting terms, diverging from cinematic norms and pushing the boundaries of sympathetic characterisation. By comparison, Stewart’s performances are often dismissed as stock characterisations getting by on his star appeal. Anyone with that view clearly hasn’t watched his final appearance in a Hitchcock movie closely enough.

So, what was his final Hitchcock film?

After Rear Window, Stewart starred in Hitchcock’s remake of his own 1934 mystery caper, The Man Who Knew Too Much, which didn’t really tread any new ground. However, his next role as the director would become his most celebrated in a career that already included a litany of historic performances.

The actor’s last outing in a Hitchcock picture was as Detective John ‘Scottie’ Ferguson in Vertigo. If Jeff’s long-lens camera in Rear Window is a literal reflection of the cinematic perspective on life, then Scottie’s vision of the character Madeleine is a profound metaphor for the voyeuristic tendencies which attract us to the cinema screen and the impact the audience’s perspective can have on a film.

Stewart conveys Scottie’s descent from a clear-thinking detective with a fatal phobia to a desperate obsessive, overcome with emotions powerful enough to outweigh his fear of heights, with the kind of range and nuance not many would have thought him capable of at the time. His performance is an integral part of what makes Vertigo so engrossing. He draws us in as the story’s everyman before taking us with him down the rabbit hole into the madness that overtakes him. His acting during the movie’s climactic scene, in particular, is probably the finest of his career.

Hitchcock transformed the perception of Stewart as an actor during the 1950s, by gifting him the opportunity to play darker and more complex roles than the romantic leads he was known for. And Stewart, in turn, brought a warmth and humanity to some of Hitchcock’s greatest films, that they otherwise might have lacked. The two made an unlikely match in Hollywood, but ended up complementing each other’s talents to perfection.