“A piece of genius”: the greatest role James Stewart never played was in a 1946 classic
There are a few actors in film history who made so many incredible movies, put in so many performances for the ages, that it’s tempting to wonder what they might have done with films that they didn’t star in – James Stewart certainly falls into that category, and he was very nearly cast in a classic western that he would no doubt have elevated even further.
In the 1940s, Stewart was just about reaching the height of his profession; he still had the glory of those genre-defining Alfred Hitchcock thrillers ahead of him, but he was already making films that would stand the test of time as genuine classics – there was the brilliant political comedy Mr Smith Goes to Washington in 1939, the even better The Philadelphia Story with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant a year later, plus the future Christmas must-watch It’s a Wonderful Life in 1946.
The same year as that Frank Capra standard, the great director John Ford was assembling the cast for My Darling Clementine, a story about Wyatt Earp and the gunfight at the OK Corral that he wanted to place Henry Fonda in the lead for. Fonda was Ford’s favourite actor, and he had already cast him to great effect six years earlier in the epic The Grapes of Wrath, winning an Oscar for ‘Best Director’ and a ‘Best Actor’ nomination for Fonda.
Having decided that Fonda would play Earp in the movie, Ford then turned his attention to his close friend and associate ‘Doc’ Holliday, and the then-production chief at 20th Century Fox, Darryl F Zanuck, was determined that James Stewart would be perfect for that role.
Ford’s lead actor, Fonda, agreed, and some years later said, “I think Zanuck’s idea to cast Jim as Doc Holliday was a piece of genius. Nobody else saw Jim in the part, least of all Ford, but Jim would’ve been great. He’s a real craftsman when it comes to acting.”
The man whose decisions counted, however, was Ford, and he was not convinced, and even said that his own lead actor could be “short on vision, despite what everyone says”. Instead, Ford cast relative unknown Victor Mature as Holliday, an actor who, by his own admission, wasn’t much of an actor, and thus denied film fans the chance to witness Fonda and Stewart in a leading one-two that would surely have made a great film greater.
Ford and Fonda would eventually fall out and stop speaking for good, almost ten years later, due to a disagreement on the set of Mr Roberts, but Ford would eventually turn to Jimmy Stewart to star in his movies, and not just once, but three times, most famously in the 1962 western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance alongside John Wayne and Lee Marvin.
Along with My Darling Clementine, that movie has now gone down as one of Ford’s greatest achievements, but even those were eclipsed by his 1956 western The Searchers, another collaboration with Wayne that is often voted the greatest example of the genre in history and one of the finest of any category in general.
Stewart, meanwhile, would instead go on to make the first of his movies with Hitchcock in 1948 with the stylish thriller Rope, six years before the pair made their own ‘greatest ever’ contribution with Rear Window.
