Stewart Goes West
Given how effective Jimmy Stewart's forays into the Western genre were, it remains astonishing that, on the eve of his centenary, the late actor is still remembered almost entirely for his aw-shucks "Harvey" and "It's a Wonderful Life" personae. A recent tribute by the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle, for instance, praised the extremes of emotion lurking beneath the surface of Stewart's do-right everyman roles prior to World War II, and the flawed but graceful neurotics he played for Alfred Hitchcock in the 1950s. Yet the wholly unique and highly influential cycle of five Western films the actor made with director Anthony Mann between 1950 and 1955 did not merit a mention.
Universal Pictures / Photofest
Jimmy Stewart as Lin McAdam in Anthony Mann's 1950 Western 'Winchester '73.'
The cable channel Starz has, however, chosen to buck the sentimental trend and honor Stewart this evening not with a Capra-Hitchcock double bill, but with a pair of Jimmy Stewart Westerns.
"Winchester '73" (1950, airing tonight at 9 p.m.) was the first of the Stewart-Mann films set on the frontier. Shot in inky chiaroscuro by one of the true masters of black-and-white film photography, William Daniels, "Winchester '73" subtly transformed "Saturday Evening Post"-style retro Americana into a sprawling journey of revenge and redemption. The film contains nearly every Western film cliché in the book — a laconic sidekick, historical cameos (notably, future blacklist victim Will Geer as Wyatt Earp), barroom face-offs, a bank robbery, Indian attacks, and a fallen woman with a heart of gold played by Shelley Winters.
Its narrative device, which parallels the changing ownership of the titular lever-action rifle with Stewart's laconic cowpoke Lin McAdam's dogged pursuit of an outlaw named Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), is also a familiar contrivance.
Yet Mann exerted a characteristically tight visual control over the familiar proceedings, studding his picaresque tapestry with tense moments and hushed expressions, and sustaining a dreamlike narrative forward motion that keeps one in wide-eyed anticipation, regardless of the nominal familiarity of it all. It's as if Stewart's character were wandering some strange out-West afterlife peopled by ghosts whose actual lives have ended, but whose tormented and damned souls keep them going about their mostly futile and unsavory businesses. By the time "Winchester '73" climaxes on a barren, rock-strewn, and murderously ricochet-friendly hillside, McAdam's drawling, pragmatic forbearance has given way to a seething, teeth-bared rage, and a hatred of an intensity and reality hitherto unseen in American Western films.
Starz Encore's centennial presentation of "Winchester '73" is also particularly apropos, as the film represented something of a rebirth in Stewart's career. In the years since returning from decorated service with the Army Air Corps in Europe, Stewart struggled to regain the solid box-office footing he'd established before heeding Uncle Sam's call. Middling success in a variety of movie roles had, by 1947, driven him back to the Broadway stage, where his career had gestated in the early '30s. Auspiciously, Stewart took over the lead in Mary Chase's long-running comedy "Harvey," a choice that rejuvenated the play's popularity and Stewart's deal-making clout.
Shortly thereafter, Lew Wasserman, the infamous Music Corporation of America super-agent, took his client and two properties owned by MCA to budget studio Universal Pictures. The pitch Wasserman made was unique. According to Dennis McDougal's excellent biography of Wasserman, "The Last Mogul," Universal was offered Stewart and "Harvey" — a prestigious actor and property that would both ordinarily be out of reach for the next-door-to-Poverty-Row studio — for the not outrageous sum of $350,000. But as part of the deal, Universal also had to take "Winchester '73," for which Stewart would receive top billing and, most important, half the film's gross profits after Universal recouped its investment.
"Harvey" flopped. "Winchester '73" was a smash hit that re-crowned Stewart as box-office royalty and made him a millionaire. The film revived the Western with a jolt of violence and a dollop of obsession that paved the way for Stewart and Mann's subsequent operatic, rawhide-tough oaters, including "The Naked Spur" (1953) and "The Man From Laramie" (1955), and the increasingly violent big-screen visions of America's frontier past that lay ahead in the '60s.
Wasserman's deal, meanwhile, forever changed the playing field in agent-driven, post-studio-system Hollywood — so much so that 15 years later, when Stewart made "Shenandoah" (the other, and frankly fairly conventional and forgettable, Civil War drama in the Starz Encore double bill) for Universal, the MCA label had devoured the studio completely. Stewart's agent didn't negotiate the deal for "Shenandoah." As head of MCA-Universal, Wasserman green-lit the picture outright.
