Why James Stewart didn’t trust “precious” British actors
You could throw a dart at the filmography of James Stewart and it would probably hit something great.
The tall, handsome embodiment of a simpler time in America starred in a collection of superb films across his lengthy career. From playing a police officer afraid of climbing ladders in the mind-bending Vertigo to taking a comic turn with the politically savvy Mr Smith Goes to Washington to hailing the Christmasy spirit of It’s a Wonderful Life, Stewart amassed a CV that left pretty much all of his contemporaries in the dust.
One movie that escapes discussions about the Oscar winner’s output is the 1965 survival drama The Flight of the Phoenix, which saw him piloting an international cargo plane crash-landing in the middle of the Sahara Desert. The Robert Aldrich feature, who also helmed the influential noir thriller with a Christina Rossetti poem conceit, Kiss Me Deadly, was lauded by critics, even though the box office reception was a little disappointing.
The Flight of the Phoenix constituted a very intentionally international cast. Richard Attenborough was English, Ian Batten was Scottish, and Hardy Krüger hailed from Germany. Future Oscar winner Peter Finch was also involved, and Stewart considered him to be part of the European crew, even though he was from Australia. There were other American actors there, such as Ernest Borgnine and George Kennedy Jr, as owing to the nature of the story, actors of all sorts of nationalities were required.
According to Aldrich in the Michael Munn-authored Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend, behind the scenes, his leading man struggled to get along with some of his co-stars. He seemed to avoid Attenborough, Batten, and Krüger, which made life on set quite difficult. As it turns out, this had nothing to do with the people but rather where they were from.
“He’d worked with European actors, including British actors, before, and found them a bit precious,” Aldrich said, adding, “He came into the film wary of a heavyweight cast largely made up of Brits and Europeans… So for the first couple of weeks, he was kind of distant from them. I had the British actors asking me what was wrong with him.”
Stewart was deep into his career by the time The Flight of the Phoenix came out, so he had worked with almost everyone from every corner of the globe. He starred alongside German actor Marlene Dietrich in three films and even admitted that he fell a little bit in love with her. He routinely worked with British director Alfred Hitchcock, starring in some of his biggest films, but clearly had very little time for the fellow countrymen of the ‘Master of Suspense’.
Eventually, the actor came to appreciate his foreign co-workers. “They were like kids out to have a good time,” he reportedly told Aldrich, “I wondered if their antics would ruin the picture. But before I knew it, I was having a good time too…right along with them. I’d never really raised hell before…but there I was, having a ball.”
The multi-national quality is one of the film’s biggest appeals, and it’s a shame that this caused Stewart some initial discomfort. In the end, the rowdy European lads won round the stern American over, which sounds like the plot of an entirely different film; if only wars could be so simply solved.
