Jame Stewart in Rear Window/Vertigo vs in Anatomy of a Murder/Shenandoah
Rear Window and Vertigo are acknowledged classics which seem to have taken a pounding over the years with regard to James Stewart's "prematurely aged" appearance AND his pairing with young beauties almost half his age(Grace Kelly, Kim Novak.)
So be it. I think that folks need to do a little thinking about how different not only the times were back then, but the movies. In the fifties, young men rarely became instant stars. You had to work your way up. Thus, Stewart and Bogart and Fonda and even Grant were invariably too old for their leading ladies. The suave and great-looking Grant pulled it off the best; arguably James Stewart pulled it off the worst. Though Bogart and Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina are pretty hard to take.
But even with that said, James Stewart was a top box office star in the fifties -- he had recovered from a late 40's slump as "the nice guy" and parlayed the simmering rage of his George Bailey into "tough guy Westerns"(Winchester '73, The Naked Spur) and, for Hitchcock...playing some weird ornery guys.
His looks were better than you might remember -- he COULD look very handsome. But his main draw was his great movie actor's VOICE. That was what sold James Stewart -- or Jimmy Stewart as he was known off screen.
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In 1958, James Stewart made two romantic movies back-to-back with Kim Novak. Vertigo, a tragedy, came out first, but Bell, Book and Candle, a comedy, ended the year. And with both films, it seems that Hollywood moguls AND James Stewart realized...he was just too old for such romantic films.
From 1959 on, we often find Stewart playing hardened loners in Westerns. We find him playing a hardened oil company airplane pilot in Flight of the Phoenix(the plane crash movie has an all-male cast less some fantasy woman.) We find him playing family men for Fox(Take Her She's Mine, Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation)
And we find him playing a confirmed bachelor in Anatomy of a Murder(1959) and a widower with multiple near-grown kids in Shenandoah(1965.)
With THOSE two movies, James Stewart's great power as an actor and continued value as a star shines through.
Funny thing: not being called upon to woo a woman of any age in those two movies, Stewart ends up looking -- and sounding -- more virile than in his romances. He's a movie star again, perfectly cast.
And ornery , again. His defense lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder really doesn't know if his client is guilty of cold-blooded murder, but he defends him anyway and uses a fair amount of trickery to do so. His Civil War-averse patriarch in Shennadoah starts the movie mean and ornery, his "rage" button always ready to go off. Its as if once sexual romance was taken out of the equation in the 60's, suddenly James Stewart was relevant again. As an actor. As a star. More for his voice than his face, but his face was leathery and strong.
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I'm not sure if Rear Window or Vertigo will ever really appeal to a younger generation who can't understand that James Stewart was a perfectly acceptable romantic star in the 50's. In the 60s -- having frankly used slightly too-old Henry Fonda in The Wrong Man(opposite Vera Miles), James Stewart in Vertigo(opposite Kim Novak), and even Cary Grant(opposite Eva Marie Saint) in NXNW , Hitchcock turned to a younger generation of men as his leads.
Hitchcock movies like Psycho(John Gavin/Janet Leigh), The Birds(Rod Taylor/Tippi Hedren), Marnie(Sean Connery/Tippi Hedren) and Torn Curtain(Paul Newman/Julie Andrews) would restore age equivalence to the male and female leads and nobody was complaining that the men looked too old for the ladies.
Still, its a funny thing. Even with somewhat older male leads(and honestly, Grant and Saint seem very well matched in NXNW), The Wrong Man, Vertigo and NXNW survive as great movies which, we can assume, bothered their audiences very little with regard to the age casting(honestly, those audiences would find Cruise, Damon, and DiCaprio "kids in adults roles" if viewed in 1958.)