Stewart's next film, Billy Wilder's "The Spirit of St. Louis" (1957), saw him star as his childhood hero, Charles Lindbergh. It was a big-budget production with elaborate special effects for the flying sequences, but received only mixed reviews and did not earn back its production costs. Stewart ended the year with a starring role in the Western "Night Passage" (1957), which had originally been slated as his ninth collaboration with Mann. During the pre-production, a rift developed between Mann and writer Borden Chase over the script, which Mann considered weak. Mann decided to leave the film, and never collaborated with Stewart again. James Neilson replaced Mann, and the film opened in 1957 to become a box office flop. Soured by this failure, Stewart avoided the genre and would not make another Western for four years.