James Stewart: The Man from Laramie rides the high country of Telluride | Festivals & Awards
Farber talked about some of the complex action scenes in Mann's Westerns, where there's dust and confusion and dozens of extras in the background, and then in the foreground, Stewart reacts with perhaps just his eyes, or a special way of moving his body. "How long," he asked, "did it take to get one of those takes, with maybe a lasso around you and everything filled with confusion and disbelief?"
"If you do more than two or three takes," Stewart said, "they begin to get worried that there's something wrong with the scene. They've set up a lot of people and movement in the background, and it's all very closely planned, and the actor had better be ready to do his part. There's a certain amount of discipline to it, acting not just with your face but with your body, and never allowing the body reaction to stop.
"Sometimes there's a temptation in a big scene to relax for a moment, but a real person in a scene like that would be completely in the scene, and so the actor can't afford to let the tension fall."
That sort of talk sounds a little technical coming from Stewart, whose screen persona is often that of an "aw, shucks" common man. But Telluride is a festival attended by many film professionals, and the standing-room audience not only embraced Stewart with a standing ovation, but asked him some fairly technical questions, which he answered with the directness and self-knowledge of a man who has been at the top of his craft for 50 years. He didn't get there by not knowing what he was doing.
"Well, it's entirely different now," Stewart said. "When the movies were being made, I was a terrible sneak preview person. When I was in a scene, the only person I could look at was myself. I wouldn't have any idea how the scene played, or whether it worked, because I'd be thinking, 'They had another shot that was better - why didn't they use that one?' Or 'Why do they let me talk so slow? And why do they show me scratching my nose?'
"So I never went to sneak previews and I haven't gone to see the daily rushes in 50 years. But today, looking back at these films, I kind of enjoyed it."
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