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Whatever you think about the idea of there being no more movie stars, one thing I think we can all agree on is they don't make 'em like James Stewart any more. One of the rare Hollywood stars whose off-screen persona lived up to his on-screen pedigree, Stewart has so many great movie moments that it would be incredibly difficult to pick a definitive best-of list. We can, of course, list our favorite Stewart roles, moments, and movies, but the actor had such an esteemed, diverse, and prolific career that everybody's list would surely be strikingly different.

Whether you prefer early-career "aw, shucks" Stewart or complex, conflicted, late-career Stewart, the actor essentially made something for everyone during his time in the spotlight, which, as it happens, spanned World War II in which Stewart served as a pilot and commanding officer. From celebrated romantic comedies to celebrated Alfred Hitchcock films and...

Anthony Mann was an American filmmaker active between the 1930s and '60s. He specialized in film noirs and Westerns, although he also dabbled in historical epics later in his career. He is perhaps most well-known for his collaborations with actor James Stewart. This partnership resulted in a series of psychologically complex Westerns, like Winchester '73 and The Naked Spur, that redefined the genre. Some of them are frequently ranked among the genre's greatest works.

James Stewart was one of Classic Hollywood's best leading men, starring in some of the most successful films between the '30s and '60s. His early roles tended to be wholesome everymen, but he successfully redefined himself from the '50s onward with darker and more imposing roles in a string of influential Westerns like Winchester '73 and The Naked Spur. He's thus a good example of a star who reinvented himself as the audience's tastes changed, expanding the blueprint for future movie stars to follow.

James Stewart, more affectionately known as “Jimmy” to his fans, was an Oscar-winning performer who became famous for his polite, gentle screen persona, often playing the aww-shucks boy next door. Yet he also showed his range with a series of performances that found him playing against type. Let’s take a look back at 25 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1908, Stewart earned his first Oscar nomination as Best Actor for playing an idealistic young senator in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), which firmly established him as the patron saint of the common man. He clinched his one and only victory the very next year for “The Philadelphia Story” (1940), playing a tabloid reporter who stumbles into the marital strife of a high society couple (Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant).

After serving in WWII, Stewart returned home to play George Bailey, a businessman contemplating suicide on Christmas Eve,...

It's not often that Westerns make any serious waves at the Academy Awards. Only three times has the genre ever been honored for Best Picture, and there was a good 60-year difference between the first two. But in 1953, a horse opera starring Jimmy Stewart exceeded expectations everywhere and was quickly nominated for Best Writing, Story, and Screenplay at the Oscars. The third collaboration between Stewart and director Anthony Mann, The Naked Spur took a different approach to the American frontier, pushing Stewart (and in turn the whole genre) to deeper and darker themes.

Just in time for Succession‘s end, let’s look at method acting. The Criterion Channel are highlighting the controversial practice in a 27-film series centered on Brando, Newman, Nicholson, and many other’s embodiment of “an intensely personal, internalized, and naturalistic approach to performance.” That series makes mention of Marilyn Monroe, who gets her own, 11-title highlight––the iconic commingling with deeper cuts.

Pride Month offers “Masc,” a consideration of “trans men, butch lesbians, and gender-nonconforming heroes” onscreen; the Michael Koresky-curated Queersighted returning with a study of the gay best friend; and the 20-film “LGBTQ+ Favorites.” Louis Garrel’s delightful The Innocent (about which I talked to him here), the director’s cut of Gregg Araki’s The Doom Generation, and Stanley Kwan’s hugely underseen Lan Yu make streaming premieres, while Araki’s Totally F***ed Up and Mysterious Skin also get a run. Criterion Editions include Five Easy Pieces,...

Somewhere in between his Oscar-winning portrayal of a gay lawyer dying of AIDS in "Philadelphia" and his performance as the mild-mannered captain of an Army detachment ordered to rescue the sole surviving son of a family that lost three of their children to the Normandy Invasion in "Saving Private Ryan," Tom Hanks was declared the James Stewart of his generation. The evidence was compelling. As Forrest Gump, astronaut Jim Lovell, and Sheriff Woody, Hanks had come to exemplify all that is right and decent about America. We saw the best of ourselves in his characters, while, off-screen, he exuded good, clean charm whenever he turned up on a talk show or a red carpet. He seemed affable, erudite, and kind. But to call him the Baby Boomer James Stewart was to ignore Stewart's willingness to play hard against type.

It is 2023, and Hanks has just delivered his first truly...

Daniel Day-Lewis is a method actor's method actor. He burrows so deep into his characters he becomes them for a time. When he portrayed Abraham Lincoln, he would text Sally Field, who played Mary Todd Lincoln, in the voice of the Great Emancipator. Given his knockout good looks and palpable screen presence, Day-Lewis could've made a killing as a movie star, but he understood his value as a performer, and carefully called his shots after winning his first Academy Award for Best Actor as artist Christy Brown, who famously created while having cerebral palsy, in Jim Sheridan's "My Left Foot."

Over his 20 credited performances, Day-Lewis has only made two movies that could be considered pure genre efforts: Michael Mann's frontier adventure "The Last of the Mohicans" and Rob Marshall's godawful adaptation of the musical "Nine." But even these are deep-tissue immersions. Day-Lewis has resisted the temptation to be Day-Lewis.

Before James Stewart became one of the most beloved stars in Hollywood history, he was -- believe it or not -- a struggling contract player at MGM. During the golden age of cinema, the small-town boy from Pennsylvania had found his way to Los Angeles, where he was churning out films as part of the studio system. It wasn't until Stewart stunned audiences with his turn as Senator Jefferson Smith in Frank Capra's 1939 comedy-drama "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" that his star seriously began to rise.

Considering how much work Stewart put into the part, the praise he received was well-deserved. Aside from breaking his rule regarding rushes for the great Capra, the actor also ingested mercury dichloride to give himself a sore throat and make his performance in the famous 24-hour filibuster scene more believable. Amazingly, after wrapping the movie, Stewart was far from "licked," as Senator Smith would say.

MGM sends James Stewart and Anthony Mann to Colorado high country locations for their third big-ticket western, a tight & tense psychological drama with a select cast: Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker and Millard Mitchell. Stewart’s anguished bounty hunter is a sick man on a mission he knows is self-destructive and just plain wrong; it’s the actor’s most fraught western performance. The landscape itself is psychological, with treacherous rocky outcroppings and a dangerous river. Even more impressive is the new restoration from Technicolor elements: this is one of the most beautiful westerns yet out on disc.

The Naked Spur

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1953 / Color / 1:37 Academy / 91 min. / Available at Amazon.com / Street Date September 21, 2021 / 21.99

Starring: James Stewart, Janet Leigh, Robert Ryan, Ralph Meeker, Millard Mitchell.

Cinematography: William C. Mellor

Art Directors: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown

Film Editor: George White

Production Illustrator: Mentor Heubner

Stunt Performers: Virginia Bougas, Ted Mapes,...

“They’re men, honey, and you ain’t. Remember that.”

James Stewart and Janet Leigh in The Naked Spur will be available on Blu-ray September 21st from Warner Archive.

Howard Kemp is a bounty hunter who’s been after killer Ben Vandergroat for a long time. Along the way, Kemp is forced to take on a couple of partners, an old prospector named Jesse Tate and a dishonorably discharged Union soldier, Roy Anderson. When they learn that Vandergroat has a $5000 reward on his head, greed starts to take the better of them. Vandergroat takes every advantage of the situation sowing doubt between the two men at every opportunity finally convincing one of them to help him escape

Special Features: MGM Short: “Things We Can Do Without, ” Cartoon: “Little Johnny Jet,” Theatrical Trailer

The post James Stewart and Janet Leigh in The Naked Spur Available on Blu-ray September 21st From Warner...

When things get tough, I’ve always turned to the Western for clarity and reassurance. Maybe it’s because most of these films are about finding solace during uncertain times, pursuing peace where none has existed before. Though central themes of sacrifice and redemption are certainty well-trodden in the genre, filmmakers from Budd Boetticher to Kelly Reichardt remind us why they can be infinitely tweaked and subverted to reveal something new within the familiar.

Watching Paul Greengrass’ sturdy new saddle opera News of the World in the late stages of 2020 felt thoroughly cleansing in this regard. Set in post-Civil War Texas, it doesn’t shy from acknowledging the racial violence, ideological bitterness, and economic distress Reconstruction has brought to the region. Tom Hanks plays Capt. Jefferson Kyle Kidd, who in the years since the war has traveled from one Panhandle town to the next reading out-loud the latest news to captured (and sometimes enraptured) audiences.

The reunion of Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray for the new A24/Apple release “On the Rocks” comes 17 years after their first collaboration on the Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation.” Such repeated pairings between directors and actors have been mainstay a in Hollywood since the earliest days of cinema. In the silent era, there were multiple films from D.W. Griffith and Lillian Gish and Charlie Chaplin and Edna Purviance.

One of the great partnerships during the Golden Age of Hollywood was John Ford and John Wayne. Ford had actually befriended Wayne when the young man was doing odd jobs as well as extra work-including in few of the director’s films-at Fox Studios in the late 1920s. Wayne made his official film debut starring in Raoul Walsh’s 1930 epic western “The Big Trail.”

The film wasn’t a hit and Wayne found himself spending the decade doing “B” westerns including 1938’s...

Cimarron (1960) starring Glenn Ford is available on Blu-ray From Warner Archives. Order info can be found Here

Edna Ferber’s epic Western, famously lensed in 1931 with Irene Dunne and Richard Dix, gets the widescreen full color treatment in this remake starring Glenn Ford, Maria Schell and Ann Baxter. As thousands of would-be settlers race across a barren desert to be the first to stake their claim to a plot of land during the Oklahoma Land Rush, Yancey Cravat (Ford) is outwitted by dance hall girl Dixie Lee (Baxter). Without the farm they had hoped to start, Yancey and his wife, Sabra (Schell), take over the local newspaper after the editor is assassinated. But as the newspaper helps bring order to a lawless land, Yancey feels the wanderlust to find new frontiers and new adventures, while Sabra stays to build a publishing empire. Western master Anthony Mann directs while the legendary...

Once upon a time, MGM launched a big spectacle Western remake with the top star Glenn Ford and the bright import Maria Schell — and then second-guessed the whole production, cutting back on everything so severely that director Anthony Mann ankled the set for Spain and El Cid. The storytelling is a mess — after starting big, the show soon falls into pieces. But many of individual scenes and set pieces are exemplary, especially Mann’s re-run of the Oklahoma Land Rush, staged in Arizona and augmented by classy special effects. The large cast rounds up some big talent — Mercedes McCambridge, Russ Tamblyn — to tell Edna Ferber’s multi-generational story about ambition, intolerance and dreams of glory on the frontier.

Cimarron (1960)

Blu-ray

Warner Archive Collection

1960 / Color / 2:35 anamorphic widescreen / 147 min. / Street Date January 21, 2020 / available through the WBshop / 21.99

Starring: Glenn Ford, Maria Schell, Anne Baxter, Arthur O’Connell, Russ Tamblyn, Mercedes McCambridge, Vic Morrow,...

Did star James Stewart and director Anthony Mann corner the market on upscale ‘A’ ’50s westerns? This beauty sends Stewart, Ruth Roman and Corrine Calvet on a breezy trek over a Canadian glacier, with Walter Brennan as a folksy, ditsy sidekick — not very original but endearing. John McIntire saves the day as a charmingly malevolent self-appointed Judge Roy Bean-type swindler and murderer — he’s so hilariously evil, even Stewart’s character is amused. The special edition has two aspect ratio versions, a full commentary and two film history featurette-docus.

The Far Country

Blu-ray

Arrow Academy

1955 / color / 1:88 + 1:2 widescreen / 97 min. / Street Date November 12, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: James Stewart, Ruth Roman, Corinne Calvet, Walter Brennan, John McIntire, Jay C. Flippen, Harry Morgan, Steve Brodie, Connie Gilchrist, Robert J. Wilke, Chubby Johnson, Royal Dano, Jack Elam, Kathleen Freeman, Connie Van, Eugene Borden, John Doucette, Chuck Roberson.

Cinematography: William H. Daniels...

James Stewart, more affectionately known as “Jimmy” to his fans, would’ve celebrated his 111th birthday on May 20, 2019. The Oscar-winning performer became famous for his polite, gentle screen persona, often playing the aww-shucks boy next door. Yet he also showed his range with a series of performances that found him playing against type. In honor of his birthday, let’s take a look back at 25 of his greatest films, ranked worst to best.

Born in 1908, Stewart earned his first Oscar nomination as Best Actor for playing an idealistic young senator in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), which firmly established him as the patron saint of the common man. He clinched his one and only victory the very next year for “The Philadelphia Story” (1940), playing a tabloid reporter who stumbles into the marital strife of a high society couple (Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant).

SEEOscar Best Actor Gallery: Every Winner in...

As Without So WITHINDear Fern,"Risky" festival choices can take all sorts of forms, whether betting on first time filmmakers (Hello Destroyer, which you rightly praised, and Ashley McKenzie's promising, incredibly compassionate debut Werewolf), or hoping that something as potentially goofy as Justin Timberlake + The Tennessee Kids might just be something special. (Judging by both our responses, it very much was—in fact, it's one of the best films of the year.) Still, I encourage you to come to Wavelengths with me—it's bliss!While much of the festival area here in Toronto is fairly condensed, which finds us sprinting across a multiplex with mere minutes between screenings or from one venue to another but a few blocks away—these being press and industry timeslots; the public ones are spread around a bit more—I had the pleasure to discover more of our host city by tracking down several...

"She's a camp event and a celebrity and that's all and the last thing anybody needs is to make a giant bomb with her that any fool could see coming." —Scott Rudin, lover of many women. Akhmatova has a great poem, one of her Northern Elegies, which starts like this: I, like a river,Have been turned aside by this harsh age.I am a substitute. My life has flowedInto another channelAnd I do not recognize my shores. The poet uses the power of imagination to do a mild perversion of Proust’s Madeleine. Or not Proust, a realization of Heisenberg. To conjure an entire dead-cat life, another conditional mood persona, the ahistoric Akhmatova, who would have been. If this By the Sea, with all its creaky dollhouse dust, had been made by Rainer Werner Fassbinder or by Todd Haynes I bet you all $10 everybody (and Scott Rudin in particular) would be creaming their jeans.

Below you will find our total coverage of the 2015 Berlin International Film Festival. New interviews will be added to the index as they are published.

Correspondences

Between Adam Cook and Daniel Kasman

#1

Introduction by Daniel Kasman

#2

Adam Cook continues the festival introduction

#3

Daniel Kasman on Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room, Jafar Panahi's Taxi

#4

Adam Cook on Jem Cohen's Counting, Guy Maddin and Evan Johnson's The Forbidden Room, Jafar Panahi's Taxi

#5

Daniel Kasman on Berlin Critics' Week, Nathalie Nambot and Maki Berchache's Brûle la mer, Kevin B. Lee's Transformers: The Premake, Alex Ross Perry's Queen of Earth

#6

Adam Cook on Pablo Larraín's The Club, Kidlat Tahimik's Balikbayan #1 Memories of Overdevelopment Redux III, Andrew Haigh's 45 Years, Wim Wenders' Everything Will Be Fine

#7

Daniel Kasman on Werner Herzog's Queen of the Desert, Patricio Guzmán's The Pearl...

Cyclops Observes the Celestial Bodies

Dear Adam,

I want to quibble with you on a point you made about an art installation in the Forum Expanded section. Discussing the simple but strangely transfixing Je proclame la destruction, you wrote to me of the order of its two shots, of first the radical speaker coming to the microphone and then the young student hero pushing through the crowd. But this installation was on loop—couldn't it be the other way around, that the hero enters, we see an empty stage, and then the radical steps up to declare destruction? I don't recall Robert Bresson's original film (from which these two shots are taken) enough to know the order, but one of the shifting pleasures of this installation was how sometimes one shot seemed to precede the other, only for the continual repetition to shift that sense of time and causality.

Anthony Mann

As much as any other filmmaker who found a niche in a given genre, in the 10 Westerns Anthony Mann directed from 1950 to 1958 he carved out a place in film history as one who not only reveled in the conventions of that particular form, but also as one who imbued in it a distinct aesthetic and narrative approach. In doing so, Mann created Westerns that were simultaneously about the making of the West as a historical phenomenon, as well as about the making of its own developing cinematic genus. At the same time, he also established the traits that would define his auteur status, formal devices that lend his work the qualities of a director who enjoyed, understood, and readily exploited and manipulated a type of film's essential features.

Though he made several fine pictures outside the Western, Mann as an American auteur is most notably recognized for his work in this field,...

Men in War

Written by Philip Yordan

Directed by Anthony Mann

USA, 1957

Director Anthony Mann was a specialist at genre filmmaking. From early crime dramas like T-Men and Raw Deal, to historical epics like El Cid and The Fall of the Roman Empire, he seemed to have a knack for working within — and working with — the conventions of a given generic formula. His Westerns, especially, are among the best that that particular type of movie has to offer. And when he set his sights on the war film, his natural aptitude for genre would be as prominent as it was anywhere. Men in War, from 1957, his second war film of the decade (released two years after Strategic Air Command), contains much of what makes Mann a distinct filmmaker, and reveals much of what makes the war film its own unique form of motion picture.

Set in Korea, 1950, Men in War...

Cinema is a kind of uber-art form that’s made up of a multitude of other forms of art including writing, directing, acting, drawing, design, photography and fashion. As such, film is, as all cinema aficionados know, a highly collaborative venture.

One of the most consistently fascinating collaborations in cinema is that of the director and actor.

This article will examine some of the great director & actor teams. It’s important to note that this piece is not intended as a film history survey detailing all the generally revered collaborations.

There is a wealth of information and study available on such duos as John Ford & John Wayne, Howard Hawks & John Wayne, Elia Kazan & Marlon Brando, Akira Kurosawa & Toshiro Mifune, Alfred Hitchcock & James Stewart, Ingmar Bergman & Max Von Sydow, Federico Fellini & Giulietta Masina/Marcello Mastroianni, Billy Wilder & Jack Lemmon, Francis Ford Coppola & Al Pacino, Woody Allen & Diane Keaton, Martin Scorsese & Robert DeNiro...

Man of the West

Directed by Anthony Mann

Written by Reginald Rose

Us, 1958

Anthony Mann directed more than 40 films but is mostly known for his remarkable collaborations with Jimmy Stewart during the 1950s. These five westerns aren’t as well-known as the genre legends but match them in quality and depth. In Winchester ’73 and The Naked Spur in particular, Mann finds a surprising darkness in Stewart that Hitchcock would later use to great effect in Vertigo. This intensity carries over into his 1958 picture Man of the West, which provides the stern Gary Cooper with the chance to flex his muscles. Although he spends much of the story quietly observing the action, it’s clear there’s anger lurking beneath the surface. Adapted from Will C. Brown’s novel The Border Jumpers, this spare production drops a small group of characters into the wasteland and asks them where they stand. The...

All of Allison’s commentaries in one convenient place!

2011 has been the biggest year yet for our little internet spaceship of cinematic love and we’re growing everyday. Part of that is always trying to get you guys (or guy; how many of you are out there?) something new, something different, something interesting and something that’s going to continue to foster the love and admiration we have for the cinema, however you want to cut that particular pie.

One of the most requested features has been the ability to simply and quickly watch all of the trailer commentaries from a specific guru. We can only aim to please here at Trailers From Hell, and, since you’ve asked, you shall receive. Today is the launch of a hopefully weekly feature right here at Tfh, something I’m simply calling the Tfh Omnibus. The simple conceit is that a YouTube...

Lee Remick, Eve Arden, James Stewart in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder James Stewart on TCM: The Stratton Story, No Highway In The Sky Schedule (Et) and synopses from the TCM website: 6:00 Am The Last Gangster (1937) When a notorious gangster gets out of prison, he vows revenge on the wife who left him. Dir: Edward Ludwig. Cast: Edward G. Robinson, James Stewart, Rose Stradner. Bw-81 mins. 7:30 Am The Shopworn Angel (1938) A showgirl gives up life in the fast lane for a young soldier on his way to fight World War I. Dir: H. C. Potter. Cast: Margaret Sullavan, James Stewart, Walter Pidgeon. Bw-85 mins. 9:00 Am Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939) An idealistic Senate replacement takes on political corruption. Dir: Frank Capra. Cast: Jean Arthur, James Stewart, Claude Rains. Bw-130 mins. 11:15 Am Wife Vs. Secretary (1936) A secretary becomes so valuable to her boss that it jeopardizes his marriage.

Historians still disagree on what killed Classical Hollywood Cinema. Academics with an analytical bent tend to write about the Paramount Decree of 1948, postwar suburbanization, the increasing popularity of television, and the new economic independence of stars who began to package their own deals to shop around to the studios. But, as with Toltec creation myths or my aunt’s disquisitions on her recipe for California Taco Supreme*, sometimes it is the most poetically irrational explanations that have the most satisfying relationship to the truth. I had one of those illogical revelations myself the other day, entranced by Jimmy Stewart’s rage near the end of Anthony Mann’s The Naked Spur. He’s the one who did it, I realized: it was Jimmy Stewart who killed Hollywood.

I used to point to four movies in particular as marking the symbolic death of old Hollywood. I liked Peter Bogdanovich’s description...

Director Walter Hill.

Kicking Ass with Walter Hill

by Jon Zelazny

Action flicks. Two-fisted tales. Guy movies. Whatever you want to call them, writer, producer, and director Walter Hill is one of the living masters, with a resume full of classics from The Getaway (1972), to the Alien series, and the definitive eighties action-comedy blockbuster, 48 Hrs. (1982).

2009 marks the 30th anniversary of The Warriors (1979), Hill’s surreal “street gang on the run” cult classic, and his breakout success as a director.

Jon: A couple years ago, you did an audio commentary and on-camera intro for a new DVD edition of The Warriors. It was the first time I’d ever seen you; is it my imagination, or have you kept a low profile over the years?

Walter Hill: I’d never done a commentary before on one of my films. I don’t like the idea of explaining a movie; I...

Actress Janet Leigh, whose ill-fated shower in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho became one of the most frightening moments in cinema, died Sunday at her home in Beverly Hills; she was 77. According to a spokeswoman for Leigh's daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Leigh "died peacefully" at her home on Sunday afternoon, and had been battling vasculitis, an inflammation of the blood vessels, for the past year. A California native, Leigh (birth name Jeannette Helen Morrison) was reportedly discovered by actress Norma Shearer, who saw a photo of a young girl on the desk of Leigh's father and asked if she could borrow it. A screen test for MGM followed, and Leigh was cast in 1947's The Romance of Rosy Ridge. A number of ingénue rolls followed, most notably Little Women, Angels in the Outfield, and The Naked Spur. In 1951, Leigh married the equally photogenic Tony Curtis, and their romance and marriage was press fodder for years, even as they appeared in less-than-memorable films together, including Houdini, The Perfect Furlough, and The Vikings; the two divorced in 1962 after having two daughters, Kelly and Jamie Lee. Leigh's roles improved with her age, and she graduated from maidens in costume dramas to more contemporary heroines, and throughout the 50s she starred in My Sister Eileen, Pete Kelly's Blues, and Jet Pilot, among other films.

Leigh had one of her most memorable roles as Charlton Heston's abducted wife in Orson Welles' 1958 noir classic Touch of Evil, but just two years later she made film history by playing the doomed heroine Marion Crane in Psycho. Her brief but memorable turn in the Hitchcock film, punctuated by the classic shower scene in which the actress was slashed to death by Anthony Perkins, earned Leigh a Golden Globe and her only Academy Award nomination. Though she also appeared opposite Frank Sinatra in the now-classic The Manchurian Candidate, Leigh's Psycho turn overshadowed the rest of her career, a fact that she happily embraced, writing a book about the film's making, Psycho: Behind the Scenes in the Classic Thriller, in 1995. Leigh worked sporadically through the 70s, and appeared with daughter Jamie Lee in 1980's The Fog, but went into semi-retirement in the 80s and 90s; she appeared again with her daughter in the 1998 sequel Halloween: H20. Leigh is survived by her fourth husband, Robert Brandt, and daughters Jamie Lee Curtis and Kelly Curtis. --Prepared by IMDb staff...