The only director who brought out James Stewart’s dark side: “It was an almost manic rage”
The entire point of acting is to convince the audience that the person playing a role is believable enough to make them suspend their disbelief and invest in the character. However, certain actors could never play a convincing villain no matter how hard they tried, and James Stewart would be near the top of the list if he weren’t guaranteed a spot at the summit.
Tom Hanks is in a similar boat, which makes sense when he was immediately ordained as Stewart’s natural successor. Further down the rungs of the industry ladder, it’s a stretch to imagine names like Michael Cera, Adam Sandler, Keanu Reeves, or even Betty White projecting genuine menace, intimidation, or outright evil.
Stewart was celebrated by his peers and embraced by viewers as one of the nicest guys in Hollywood, which didn’t detract from his talents. Obviously, there were parts he wouldn’t tackle because he was smart and savvy enough to play to his strengths, which yielded a legendary Academy Award-winning career punctuated by several seminal films that placed him among the utmost icons of the ‘Golden Age’.
The decorated war veteran wouldn’t play a reprehensible character just for the sake of it, but one director managed to bring out his dark side. It may not have been a complete reinvention that permanently altered his perception in the eyes of the average cinemagoer, but Anthony Mann’s 1952 western The Naked Spur was nonetheless a drastic departure for the always affable Stewart.
The protagonist, Howard Kemp, is a bounty hunter who’s been tracking his latest quarry for some time. He starts out as an everyman rancher before gradually allowing the mask to slip; Kemp’s violent tendencies are slowly revealed, and he manipulates his partners to achieve his own ends.
It was a performance unlike anything Stewart had given before, with Mann integral to coaxing it out of him. “It was an almost manic rage that would suddenly explode,” producer Aaron Rosenberg told Michael Munn. “The audience knew Jimmy Stewart from the Capra films, but there was an underlying toughness that hadn’t been seen much before.”
In fact, the actor was shocked by his own work. “It was like he was possessed,” he recalled of the character. “He had a demon that drove him. He had a violence that was driving him mad.” Stewart wouldn’t be anywhere near the forefront of people’s minds were they to imagine the perfect performer to play an unscrupulous and calculating bounty hunter who uses psychological warfare to their advantage, which was exactly what made his casting so perfect.
It’s arguably the most against-type turn in Stewart’s filmography and one that clearly affected him on a personal level, leveraging the star’s signature attributes to take everyone by surprise.
