The most challenging movie of James Stewart’s career: “The craziest, most difficult thing”
We all like an ‘everyman’, an actor we can relate to or identify as someone familiar, and James Stewart certainly embodied this archetype. A Hollywood heavyweight, the star appeared in countless acclaimed movies during his career, but his greatest collaborations saw him working under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock.
The pair collaborated four times, and Stewart proved to be the perfect leading man for many of Hitchcock’s most thrilling and complex films. In Rear Window, released in 1954, Stewart is paranoid and cynical, playing a character who drives himself into a intense spiral of obsession as he spends his days nursing his broken bones by staring out of the window and watching his neighbours like they’re characters in a soap opera.
With Vertigo, Stewart also played obsessive incredibly well, falling into a web of deceit, romance and doppelgangers as he investigates his friend’s wife, Madeleine. With these performances, Stewart helped to elevate Hitchcock’s ideas to the perfect heights – his characters are charming and complicated, existing on the precipice of stability and disorder.
It was Rope that would become their first collaboration with each other, all the way back in 1948. The movie was a landmark moment in Hitchcock’s career, with the filmmaker deciding to use incredibly long takes compared to the average shot, innovatively masking cuts between scenes by placing an actor in front of the camera so that the film appeared to be fluid and set in real-time.
Of course, this could easily be achieved today, but in 1948, without any digital technology to aid the process, Hitchcock and his crew had to meticulously plan the shots – something that Stewart admittedly found challenging.
Stewart revealed (via The New York Times), “It was the craziest, most difficult thing, it was completely new. Making it was so complicated that when I finished the picture I was talking to Hitch and I said ‘You know, I think you missed the boat a little with this one-set thing. You should’ve built bleachers around it and soaked them five, ten bucks to watch us do this.’”
Rope was noted for its homosexual subtext between the characters played by John Dall and Farley Granger, who murder their classmate in the name of art. The film received mixed reviews, with some critics believing that Hitchcock’s artistic choices were more novel than they were worthwhile, although it is now widely believed to be one of the director’s finest works.
Stewart continued, recalling the filming of the movie, “The last time I saw Rope, maybe it was just my imagination but as the end of the reel came closer and closer I was conscious of everyone’s getting sort of glassy- eyed. All of us were thinking, ‘Oh God, don’t let me go up on my lines now. If I do we’ll have to go back and do the whole thing again.”
Stewart would go on to appear in Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo, before Hitchcock inevitably replaced Stewart with Cary Grant for North By Northwest, which could’ve been their fifth collaboration.
