{"id":2969,"date":"2017-04-04T19:27:43","date_gmt":"2017-04-04T18:27:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/?p=2969"},"modified":"2023-06-17T09:49:26","modified_gmt":"2023-06-17T08:49:26","slug":"james-stewart-anthony-mann-westerns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mostlywesterns.com\/james-stewart-anthony-mann-westerns\/","title":{"rendered":"James Stewart & Anthony Mann – The Westerns P1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
During the 1950s James Stewart appeared in a series of films directed by Anthony Mann, eight in all, and five of them Westerns. The non-Western titles included Strategic Air Command, a semi-documentary depiction of the American Air Force, a melodrama about oil drillers called Thunder Bay and the most successful of the films the two made together, The Glen Miller Story. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s the Westerns that Stewart and Mann collaborated on that are of more interest and worthy of consideration for all of those cowboy fans out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
James Stewart enlisted in World War II and eventually ended up as a bomber pilot, and was deployed to England from where he flew a large number of missions over Germany. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
A number of biographies on the actor comment that he suffered from severe post-traumatic stress after the war ended and that this informed his onscreen performances for a number of years afterward. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There is a suggestion, for example, that Stewart channelled a lot of his post-war angst in the attempted suicide sequence in It\u2019s a Wonderful Life. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I feel he also did the same with certain aspects of the characters he played in the Anthony Mann Westerns. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Watching these films one can see Stewart leaving behind the \u2018aw shucks ma\u2019am\u2019 persona of his pre-WWII films and depicting tougher and more psychologically complex characters, possessed of a certain hysterical edge which bordered at times on the edge of the deranged, a trait which was hitherto hidden from the audiences of the time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although Stewart is still kind of likeable in these films with Mann, the actor plays characters that are a million miles away from Destry Rides Again (1939), that\u2019s for sure. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Winchester 73 (1950)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Filmed in black and white and with a co-writing credit for Borden Chase, who contributed to a number of other Anthony Mann Westerns as well as Red River for Howard Hawks, the story is very basic. <\/p>\n\n\n