Will mentioned Cary Grant.... yea.... did he ever play a villain? Did Jimmy Stewart? We all know Henry Fonda did, but did these other powerhouses?
Jimmy Stewart played a really badass crazed killer in the second of
The Thin Man series (
After the Thin Man) Not only does he kill one person and try to frame his former girlfriend for the murder but he's planning to kill her, Nick Charles, and others when cornered before he's disarmed. Stewart was very good in the role--he should have played more villains.
There was another film where he plays (as I recall) a moonshiner who kills a government agent trying to shut him down, is sentenced to prison for the crime, and while on a southern chaingang invents and makes a rifle that the military manufactures as the semiautomatic M-1 carbine for troops in World War II. Think the film was
Carbine Williams (1952), as Stewart was called because of his invention.
In real life, the best that could be said for the M-1 carbine is that it is lighter than the M-1 rifle, the Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR) or the Thompson machine gun (the last two being extremely heavy to tote). Based on my limited experience, the carbine was more prone to jamming than was the M-1 rifle, and I've been told by WWII veterans that, unlike the M-1 rifle or the .45 automatic pistol, bullets fired from an M-1 carbine had virtually no knockdown power at all. One guy told me he emptied the whole clip from a carbine into a smallish Japanese soldier charging at him without stopping his assailant until he fell dead at his feet. Hit someone with the bigger M-1 rifle slug and he goes down. Pistols are notoriously difficult to fire accurately, but veterans swear if you hit an enemy in the finger with a shot from a .45, it will knock him on his butt.