Darkness Visible: Anthony Mann and James Stewart’s Westerns

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Jun 9, 2023

It comes down to a moment. Late in Anthony Mann’s Winchester ’73 (1950), a man named Lin McAdam walks into a saloon and sees, first, a friendly face—the face of a woman he knows—before being drawn to another countenance, one not so friendly. As the title suggests, this is a movie with a rifle at its center, a rare, prized Winchester 1873 that McAdam wins at the start of the story only for it to be violently taken away by a sworn enemy—“Dutch Henry” Brown, McAdam’s brother, who, we learn, killed their father. McAdam’s dogged pursuit of the weapon is soon joined by a pursuit of Dutch Henry, the one mission enfolding the other.

For all of its twists of fate, all of the almost mythical bad luck that this gun seems to bring to any man who tries to keep it, Winchester ’73 is a movie powered by the satisfying promise of comeuppance. Vengeance. The linear thrill of one man hunting and killing another. Lin McAdam is played by James Stewart. Winchester ’73 is the first of eight films that he and Mann would make together in the 1950s, the bulk of them—five—westerns that play like variations on an idea: Stewart himself, or rather, the screen persona that he and Mann created. The unfriendly character whom Lin McAdam sees in that saloon is a compatriot of Dutch Henry. The telling moment in their encounter: McAdam twisting the man’s arm behind his back in an instant that quickly becomes more than mere interrogation. McAdam’s lips tighten with effort. His free hand grasps the man’s neck from below, restraining him, pulling his face down toward the bar. And there’s something else, something in McAdam’s eyes: a pent-up aggression that seems to broaden as we watch, widening—like McAdam’s eyes—from an expression of impersonal, practical frontier violence into something that’s harder to name, something like pleasure, something shocking. There’s a discomfiting hunger in it. We expect our western heroes to leave needless violence behind, just as—we think—McAdam has. We expect virtue to curb recklessness. The great heroes of westerns are often men who, with wars and countless personal battles trailing them like shadows, come off a bit wary, a little spent. They’re often looking for a way out, and the movies needn’t even tell us what they’re looking for a way out of for us to know that it is better left to the past. Hunger, we associate with villains or misguided youth: bloodlust is for the lost.

This is the most violent moment in a film that is not lacking for dynamic, memorable shoot-outs and uncomfortably intimate showdowns in tight confines that might make any man seem vulnerable. Its violence is owing almost entirely to a single shot of Stewart’s face—a money shot that undoes what we think we know about a man we’re inclined to trust, reveals him to be not only darker but more sour than we previously understood. He was already cynical, already eaten away by the death of his father and his hatred of his brother. But this—this is not the more noble, if still grim, violence of a typical vengeance tale, the kind that may make us wince but that we understand, intuitively, because we understand the codes of honor that keep western mythologies afloat. This is something sicker—obsessive, heedless, less bound to honor, or to even the makeshift laws of a lawless terrain, than feels appropriate.

It unmoors this already complex movie even further from our expectations. And it is echoed, over and again, in Mann and Stewart’s westerns, in which genre codes and iconography are often complemented, or perhaps compromised, by utter humiliation. This quality is not as apparent in Mann and Stewart’s other three films together, though Thunder Bay (1953) and Strategic Air Command (1955) are also masculine action movies of the high-thrills, no-frills, anti-prestige variety that critics like Manny Farber would eventually praise the Mann-Stewart films for being. (The Glenn Miller Story, from 1954, is the only outlier in this regard.) Still, the frontier is the most consequential terrain of their work together. Even Thunder Bay, in which Stewart plays a hapless entrepreneur trying to make a name for himself as an oil man on the Gulf Coast, owes heavy visual and psychological debts to the idea of unknown territory, untouched resources, and the blind pursuit of a new beginning.

The analogy here is too easy, but it nevertheless rings true. Winchester ’73 came about when Stewart, having seen some of Mann’s westerns, was looking to reestablish himself after the relative disappointment of It’s a Wonderful Life, a critical and commercial letdown upon release, and the familiarity of Harvey, a passion project for Stewart. Mann, for his part, wanted a way out of the punchy noirs that had defined his career to that point. The ruggedness Stewart brought to these works was not artificial. He performed a good number of his own stunts and had a trusty horse and hat that he insisted on using to the point of superstition, with the combination amounting to more than a costume. When their collaboration proved profitable, other studios besides Universal came calling. (Strategic Air Command was a Paramount picture.) By the time of Glenn Miller, Stewart trailed only John Wayne, Gary Cooper, and Martin and Lewis at the box office. Mann and Stewart’s collaboration ended over a disagreement regarding another western, which Mann would back out of to make the Henry Fonda picture The Tin Star. Stewart went on to make that movie—1957’s Night Passage—and it flopped.

Thunder Bay, Glenn Miller, and Strategic Air Command all have their merits—Glenn Miller, in particular, is a triumph of populist biopic filmmaking and a memorable tearjerker—but nothing of that lot quite approaches the heights of the westerns, perhaps because they are so much more mysterious, attractively confounding, in their psychology, and satisfyingly brutal. These movies make you wince. In Bend of the River (1952), the Stewart hero is betrayed by a friend (played by Arthur Kennedy) and, badly beaten, is isolated in his rage, with the vast landscapes beyond Mount Hood serving as a capacious backdrop for an anger that seems fit to swallow up the world as he says, “You’ll be seeing me.” If you watch this movie directly after Winchester, you might see in it an appealing, if ultimately heartbreaking, inverse image: a sudden, natural, easygoing friendship between two men that verges on brotherhood of the kind denied in Winchester; redemption in place of vengeance; an eye toward the future rather than an inner life overly beholden to the past. The film goes out of its way to shatter this with betrayal, and in so doing opens outward toward questions that in another movie might have felt stale, even if entertaining. Can a man change? Can a man like the Stewart-Mann hero, whose anger has slowly fermented, triumph over himself, and move toward betterment?

Top of page: *Winchester ’73;* above: *Bend of the River*

It is a lonely existence. And if Stewart’s face isn’t convincing enough of this, Mann’s nearly grotesque landscapes exaggerate the point. Look at the jagged rocks of The Naked Spur (1953), which are more than a setting, more than a tactical advantage for warring parties, but rather a persona unto themselves, an unpredictable force, a means for these personalities to wear themselves out toward some desperate end. Or the desolation of The Man from Laramie (1955), which finds Stewart more isolated than he is in perhaps any of these other films, visually and otherwise. Neither friendship nor nascent romance seems fit to last in this story, and none of the movie’s somewhat overwrought plot mechanics are as incisive as a straightforward scene of him being shot in the hand by a foolhardy wannabe cowboy, a Fauntleroy with a gun, who inflicts a measure of pain that Mann again leaves to Stewart’s face to communicate to us directly. We don’t see the bullet enter Stewart’s body: we instead watch the defeated rage overtake his face—just as, earlier in the movie, when the same incorrigible brat of a man strings the Stewart hero up to drag him over flames, shoots twelve of his mules, and overturns his wagons full of salt, the writhing and struggling Stewart can no longer contain the bile that had only barely been kept down to that point, and it erupts, puncturing his cool demeanor and controlled expressions with a surprising range of colors that his face struggles to manage. Ebbs and recessions of anger overtake this film, and it’s Stewart’s face, more than anything else, playing the part of the shore.

The Stewart moviegoers had known up until then was the Stewart who had carried The Philadelphia Story with his easygoing, respectable wit and who had fashioned It’s a Wonderful Life into a mirror that peered back at its audience’s withered aspirations. The Stewart who seemed judicious and fair—the Mr. Smith who goes to Washington—and was a particularly painful target for injustice precisely because he is so slow to inflict it on others. The psychological thrashing of Mann’s cinema unmoored Stewart from these more readily relatable images. It’s in the way Mann’s westerns double back to echo acts of violence, as in Laramie, or make the world feel cohesive in their cynicism, as when we watch the titular Winchester ’73 pass from owner to owner like some cursed relic, painting a world so round in its promise of violence that even a moment of Stewart walking into a bar to meet an unwelcome face seems to recur, like a musical motif, with grim fatefulness. As if these men were mere flakes in a snow globe, tracing the same, contained arcs, trapped in each other’s orbits until one or all of them die.

Cynicism is the flavor that sets Mann’s best western films, including those that don’t feature Stewart (such as Man of the West), apart from many of the more picturesque, myth-bound efforts of the period. The ’50s were already a more mature moment in the development of the genre, all the more so after Mann got done with it. Mann’s way with violence is the secret—it defines even the craggy, inhospitable terrains that would earn Mann comparison to Antonioni. And it’s what attracted Mann to Stewart in the first place. It’s what Mann noticed when, after being contracted to film double features at Universal in the early 1940s, he would watch Stewart on the lot, noticing what others had apparently missed. “He had a great way with violence,” Mann would say. “Most people don’t realize that about him, but when he was mad about something, when he had been wronged in a film, when he showed anger, it was much more intense than in most actors. He could be extremely volatile.” Mann’s Stewart westerns take that volatile man and trap him. They give us, and the Stewart persona, something to seek out that surpasses the satisfaction of a climactic shoot-out. You won’t find it, whatever that essence is, in Monument Valley. Nature, for Mann, was a battleground, not a symbolic suite of locales meant to reflect our heroes’ mythologies back onto themselves and secure their place in time and history, but a contentious, dangerous, alienating landscape, as unconcerned as an absent God, and just as powerful. Into that absence, Mann injects an actor known for his humanity, his believability, and asks his persona to make it make sense.

Stewart and Mann’s collaboration has proven intriguing, in part, because of how thoroughly the reputation of the latter is anchored to the former. Mann’s fragmented reputation largely rests on these westerns, a few of his brilliantly sharp noirs from the ’40s, and the best of his later epics. The westerns loom above it all. Stewart is, of course, Stewart: an actor with a peculiar habit of starring in some of his repeat collaborators’ most enduring films. It’s a wonder how persistent those directors’ canons have been, not merely because of the heroic valorization of the French New Wave and auteurist critics who would elevate their critical standing but crucially, I think, because of the presence of James Stewart, and his capacity for ambivalence, his knack for a masculine self-assurance that was nevertheless vulnerable—sometimes comically, even crudely so, as in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, which gets great mileage and pleasure out of consigning Stewart’s voyeur to an awkwardly sexless pajama suit for most of the movie. Stewart’s panic-stricken face, dangling from a ledge, is the face of Vertigo—a movie purportedly haunted by the face of a phantom woman, but more thoroughly rooted in a man’s obsessive, fearful pathology. Stewart’s is a human, all-too-human presence, closer to the way men “are” than to what mythology wants them to be, yet still, inescapably, a product of movie fantasy: a humanity that appeals to us for still being worthy of big-screen history, larger than life yet ostensibly also a reflection of it.

When I Googled Jimmy Stewart recently, the question of who might be “the modern Jimmy Stewart” appeared among a set of related search inquiries. The answer generated by the search engine was Tom Hanks. But more interesting than the answer is the persistence of the question. “The modern Jimmy Stewart”: sought after because he was an enduring type, so successful in fleshing out a recognized model for what a Hollywood man could be that in his wake there would remain a void that we, in the audience, and the movies themselves would seek to fill in his absence.

Stewart shares this fate with many of the great, formative actors of his era—the Grants and Davises and Bogarts, too singular in their styles to succumb to imitation—a fate that, by the time he was acting, had already befallen the great silent stars, whose absences haunted the Golden Age. The risk is in allowing our sense of these gaps to harden our impressions of these actors into inflexible myths, top-down truths that cannot quite account for actorly persona as an ongoing negotiation, a push and pull between the audience’s expectations, the actor’s impulses, the industry’s needs, their directors’ whims. Stewart’s collaborations with Mann are instructive. Through them, we can see an accomplished actor in the midst of precisely this form of negotiation, exploring an ugliness in himself that was new to the screen but perhaps not to the man himself. Stewart must have realized what Mann seemed to know up front: that there were still hidden, raging vulnerabilities to plumb, angles obscured by the veneer of likable good-naturedness, however nuanced and skillfully presented, that seemed to define the actor to that point. I watch Stewart’s collaborations with Mann and try to imagine what an audience who thought it knew what Stewart had to offer must have thought seeing Winchester ’73 for the first time, with almost all of that good nature drained and replaced with a low-lying hum of volatility, a joylessness with a purpose. Stewart’s star endures because he could surprise us. In Mann’s films, he seemed to surprise even himself.

Darkness Visible: Anthony Mann and James Stewart’s Westerns

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