The “miserable” movie James Stewart barely survived: “The whole atmosphere was awful”
All things considered, it doesn’t bode well for a movie production if the man at the helm thinks the script is “the worst piece of crap” he’s ever laid eyes on, and James Stewart can attest to this.
Stewart’s horrible experience while making 1961’s Two Rode Together can be entirely laid at the feet of director John Ford. Stewart got along with co-star Richard Widmark like a house on fire, and they had a lot of fun shooting their scenes together. For some reason, though, he believed their friendship aggravated Ford, the iconic director of many John Wayne and Henry Fonda westerns, including Stagecoach and Fort Apache.
In truth, Ford had been reluctant to sign up for the film in the first place, believing he’d said all he could say on the American West in his magnum opus, The Searchers, five years earlier, but the lure of the almighty dollar proved too strong. In the end, he accepted a lucrative $225,000 contract, which also funnelled a quarter of the film’s profits into his coffers. Then, he hired his trusted screenwriter, Frank Nugent, to work his magic on the tale of a corrupt sheriff and his lieutenant trying to rescue white captives from the local Comanche tribe. Clearly, Nugent didn’t do a great job, as Ford still hated the script when day one of the shoot rolled around, and it resulted in him being a miserable git on set.
“Ford wasn’t having much fun, and he took it out on the crew,” Stewart claimed in Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend, “There was a scene where me and Dick had a long conversation sitting on a log by the edge of a river. I thought the scene would look just perfect if Ford had shot the scene so the river was behind us. That would have been a beautiful shot.”
Unfortunately, on that day, Ford had other ideas, and the entire crew paid for it.
For whatever reason (most likely because he was being a stubborn jerk who didn’t want to admit Stewart was right), Ford decided to ignore the Vertigo star’s suggestion. It would have been the most conventional way to shoot the scene, certainly, but would also have resulted in the most picturesque shot. To Stewart’s disappointment, what the director decided to do instead left him with a “plain ordinary” shot that paled in comparison to countless other gorgeous, evocative vistas from his previous films.
So, what exactly did Ford insist on that upset everyone he worked with and yielded a crappy shot no one liked anyway? Well, instead of capturing Stewart and Widmark with the river behind them, he forced the camera crew to wade into the “freezing” river to shoot the two stars from the reverse angle. A baffled Stewart couldn’t believe what was happening and remarked, “Dick and I were the only ones on dry land”. He felt for the crew, who were cold, wet, and getting increasingly pissed off with Ford because they knew there was no real reason for them to capture the scene that way.
“The whole atmosphere was pretty awful,” Stewart confessed, adding, “He would have got a great classic Ford shot if he’d photographed it from the bank, with Dick and me against the river in the background. But he just wanted to make everybody miserable.”
