How James Stewart’s last great performance alienated his audience: “Some people thought it was offensive”
The margins might be fine, but there’s a difference between an actor embracing a proven and successful persona and outright typecasting. It’s a tricky tightrope to walk without a doubt, especially in a career that lasts decades, but few have ever navigated it better than James Stewart.
Once he initially emerged as a breakthrough star in the late 1930s, he rarely played against type. Stewart was cinema’s ultimate everyman who injected every character with what would become his signature traits: his roles were affable, relatable, humble, and possessed a rigid moral compass.
History is littered with performers who grew a little too comfortable playing variations of the same archetype in perpetuity, but Stewart was so good that it didn’t hamper him in the slightest. Instead, audiences came to anticipate each of his new movies because they knew that he wouldn’t let them down, regardless of the context in which he was acting.
That kind of inbuilt goodwill is a difficult thing to come by, and one of the downsides is that it means people who’ve become so attached to a certain name playing a certain type of part don’t take too kindly to deviations from the formula. It wasn’t as if Stewart was cast as a serial killer or an out-and-out villain, but Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder was enough to alienate a large part of his fan base.
The Academy Award winner played a lawyer drawn out of semi-retirement to take on a new case, defending an army lieutenant accused of murder after his wife claimed the victim had sexually assaulted her. That alone made it a darker, harder-edged production than Stewart was typically associated with, which many cinemagoers didn’t care for in the slightest.
Paul Biegler was the last truly great performance of the icon’s legendary career, earning him his fifth and final ‘Best Actor’ nomination at the Oscars. He made another two dozen films between the 1959 courtroom drama and his swansong in the animated An American Tail: Fievel Goes West in 1991, but Anatomy of a Murder was the last time he was in truly phenomenal form.
It was an opportunity he couldn’t resist, even if Stewart admitted he was shocked at how his longtime supporters among the general public reacted. “A lot of people wrote to me and said, ‘You let us down,'” he told Michael Munn. “‘I took my family to see a Jimmy Stewart picture, and you’re up there in court talking dirty and holding up a pair of women’s panties.'”
That’s the drawback of having so much cache as the industry’s most likeable leading man, even if he didn’t quite understand the backlash. “I was puzzled why so many people thought Anatomy of a Murder was in bad taste,” he explained. “I never understood why some people thought it was offensive. I thought we handled the whole thing very delicately.”
It was heavier material than Stewart and his fans had been used to, but he wasn’t going to let such a meaty role slip through his fingers: “The kind of part I had in the picture was the kind of part you just can’t turn down,” he said. The folks who’d grown up watching him were aghast, but an Oscar-nominated tour-de-force meant it was a worthwhile about-face.
