In contrast to his popularly remembered "all-American" screen persona, film critics and scholars have tended to emphasize that his performances also often showed a "dark side." According to film scholar Murray Pomerance, "the other Jimmy Stewart ... was a different type altogether, a repressed and neurotic man buried beneath an apparently calm facade, but ready at any moment to explode with vengeful anxiety and anger, or else with deeply twisted and constrained passions that could never match up with cheery personality of the alter ego." Bingham has described him as having "two coequal personas; the earnest idealist, the nostalgic figure of the homespun boy next door; and the risk-taking actor who probably performed in films for more canonical auteurs than any other American star." According to him, it is this complexity and his ambiguous masculinity and sexuality with which he approached his roles that characterised his persona. Naremore has stated that there was a "troubled, cranky, slightly repressed feeling in [Stewart's] behavior," and Thomson has written that it was his dark side that produced "great cinema."