The movie James Stewart was forced into making: “It just looked ridiculous”
Considering how long it takes to shoot and produce a film, you can understand why some actors may choose to turn roles down, no matter how lucrative it might be. On the other hand, a film might look really bad on your resumé, and you might want to avoid dedicating months of your life to a Razzie-baiting picture.
The thing is, sometimes your gut instincts have to fall by the wayside, and you’re going to have to pressure yourself to accept a role for reasons beyond your control. If it means getting greater opportunities down the line because you’ve done a production company or a director a massive favour, then maybe you’re going to have to suck it up and take on a role that you wouldn’t normally give a moment’s consideration to.
This is what ended up happening to one of Hollywood’s leading figures of the 1950s, when James Stewart was pressured into taking on a role because of a clause in the contract of one of his co-stars. In late 1957, Stewart had been cast in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a film that would go on to be regarded as one of the highlights of his career, but disaster struck when Vera Miles, who had been cast in the film opposite him, was forced to withdraw from filming due to falling pregnant.
With Hitchcock losing his leading lady, he had to scramble to find an alternative casting to play the character of Madeleine, and opted to try and acquire the services of Kim Novak as an alternative. The catch to this situation was that Novak was, at the time, contracted to work with Columbia on a film called Bell, Book and Candle, a romantic comedy with supernatural elements, and the studio would only let her work on a Paramount picture on one condition.
Bell, Book and Candle director Richard Quine hadn’t been able to get his leading man of choice either, and as part of an exchange with Paramount, they asked to see if Stewart would be willing to do the film to allow Novak to also work on Vertigo. The problem with this was that Stewart had absolutely no intention of starring in a film of this nature, and made his feelings explicitly known in the aftermath.
“I was almost fifty,” Stewart protested, “and it just looked ridiculous having someone like Kim Novak choosing me for a husband.” While audiences may have been able to suspend their belief in relation to Stewart’s casting, it would be the last time he accepted a role of this kind, given how he felt he was too old to be pretending to be a romantic interest as he approached a half-century. He had to do the film whether he liked it or not, otherwise Novak wouldn’t have been given the green light to appear in Vertigo.
Had he not done Bell, Book and Candle, then one of the greatest films in cinema could’ve been significantly different, or failed to come to fruition at all. Ironically, despite his protestations that he was too old to appear in the film, their first choice of actor who had declined the role was Cary Grant, who was four years older. His reasons for not doing Bell, Book and Candle? He was holding out to star in Hitchcock’s next film, North by Northwest.
