Posted on 05/21/2008 1:00:28 AM PDT by Rummyfan
An enduring Hollywood icon, James Stewart, star of Harvey and Hitchcock, was born one hundred years ago today:
James Stewart was a nervous flyer. Commercial airlines made him jittery, he wouldn’t touch chartered flights, and, inveigled into a Cessna during bad weather on a publicity tour for It’s A Wonderful Life, he made the pilot turn around and take him back to the airport at Beaumont, Texas. Just a few months earlier, he had been in the Air Force; he had flown twenty bombing missions and won a Distinguished Flying Cross; he was a genuine war hero. Yet he remained a nervous flyer.
For Wonderful Life, Stewart had a clause written into his contract forbidding any publicity exploitation of his service record. Half a century on, I think we can be permitted to make a discreet connection between his acting and his flying - in and out of uniform. He played heroes, but they tended to be nervous heroes, men of exceptional courage who nevertheless, in defiance of the cliché, did know the meaning of the word “fear”. Think of the moment in Rear Window (1954) when Raymond Burr, the killer in the apartment opposite, looks back at the wheelchair-bound Stewart, and the watcher becomes the watched. Look at his face when he picks up the telephone, realizes it’s the murderer on the other end, and pushes the receiver away. Stewart was the only golden-age leading man secure enough to show real fear, the only one strong enough to appear weak. He expanded the boundaries of male movie stardom in much the same way as Sinatra, around the same time, was expanding male pop singing , introducing to the male vocalist’s art such hitherto unknown nuances as vulnerability and self-disgust. For Stewart’s take on the latter, see him in The Philadelphia Story (1940). Then, as now, Hollywood leading men were happy to appear fatalistic, cynical, even psychopathic, but few were willing to expose such a turbulent mix of emotions as Stewart - passion, recklessness, courage, anger, despair, gnawing dissatisfaction, and even measured thoughtfulness.
He died just before Fourth of July 1997, and a day after Robert Mitchum’s passing. Two American archetypes, one embodying an optimistic republic’s urge to prove It’s a Wonderful Life, the other laconically shrugging that, well, it’s a life, but what the hell? In the real-life versions of Bedford Falls, the small town in which that wonderful life passes, you hope to meet Jimmy Stewart but you’re just as likely to find yourself at the lunch counter sitting next to Bob Mitchum. Stewart was a modest fellow who lived a pleasant, quiet life; Mitchum was set upon by half-a-dozen sailors and was on his way to whipping ‘em until his wife stepped in because he was beginning to enjoy it. The two were physically complementary, too: Stewart was lanky, stringy, gangly, and every inch sucked out of his own chest measurement seemed to have been poured into Mitchum’s; Mitchum was sleepy-eyed, Stewart’s baby blues were fiercely awake, blazing with indignation, wonder, curiosity. Mitchum favoured economy of speech; Stewart played men with so much to say their tongues couldn’t always keep up — either that or he was shrewd enough to realise that those big theatrical speeches needed his trademark stammer to make them digestible.
In contemporary Hollywood, the wannabe Mitchums are everywhere - tough guys with a laconic wit and plenty of “attitude”. But where are Stewart’s heirs? When he died, most commentators settled on Tom Hanks. But look at the evasions of Hanks’ own Philadelphia story, the way the film desexes its protagonist, the way the star uses the make-up - the perspiration, the stick-on lesions - to signal his separateness from the role. Stewart never did that. As evidence of his acting ability, forget Destry Rides Again or Mr Smith Goes to Washington; instead, try The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and marvel at how Stewart captures the bandleader’s curiously stiff smile: for so natural an actor, there can have been few more awkward assignments than Miller’s woodenness.
That in itself suggests that he was a cooler, more calculating character than we imagine. There was certainly a Jimmy Stewart persona, but it was created late in life for the talk-show circuit: a genial type who artfully deployed his trademark hesitation - that long, stammered “Awwwwwwwww” - in showbiz anecdotes. If Mitchum was the tough guy, then Stewart was the nice guy, star of America’s most beloved sentimental movies. But it is we who are sentimental, certainly not Stewart: It’s A Wonderful Life brims with frustration and bitterness. You want tough? Any guy who can work with wingless angels and imaginary rabbits and come out on top has got to be tough. There’s a hard steel to Stewart’s performances that pierces Frank Capra’s paeans to hicksville integrity.
He was born in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the sort of just-big-enough small town - population 9,000 – most people understand by the term. It was big enough to support a hardware store, which the Stewart family ran for over a century. As a young movie actor, Jimmy would come home for the Christmas rush and clerk behind the counter; his dad displayed the Oscar for The Philadelphia Story in a glass cabinet formerly used for kitchen knives.
It was Capra who gave Stewart the role that transformed him into the emblematic everyman - Jefferson Smith, the naive Scoutmaster who’s appointed to the Senate to complete an unexpired term and discovers the place is awash in graft. Senate Majority Leader Alben Barkley denounced Mr Smith Goes To Washington as “silly and stupid”, and Joseph Kennedy, US Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, wired the President to demand the movie be withdrawn from overseas distribution because it “will cause our allies to view us in an unfavorable light”. With enemies like that, who needs two thumbs up? There is a problem with the film, but it’s not the portrayal of a festering, pork-happy Senate so much as the fact that the story posits a false choice - between smoke-filled sleazebags and a know-nothing. Jefferson Smith has no political principles - indeed, no interest in the place at all, except for a minor, parochial ambition to sponsor a bill for a national boys’ camp. As the Washington correspondent of The Daily Worker, Britain’s Communist paper, grumbled, this is a “phony issue”: why couldn’t Smith have championed a minimum-wage bill or unemployment benefits?
Well, for obvious reasons: it’s much easier to be a paragon of virtue if you never make any choices. See Mr Obama Goes To The White House, which was running as the umpteenth Jimmy Stewart remake until the Senator got tripped up by Jeremiah Wright et al and, at least to those paying attention, emerged as a doctrinaire liberal trying to passing himself off as a blandly Smith-esque empty suit. Mr Smith spawned a long line of films in which the alternative to greed and political corruption is men with no coherent philosophy at all. In their glorification not of the Jeffersonian citizen-legislator but of the idiot savant, these films themselves contribute to cynicism about politics. Stewart dignifies the part - his baby blue eyes ablaze with indignation - but it’s unworthy of him.
A much better Jeffersonian role is that of Deputy Sheriff Thomas Jefferson Destry Jr in Destry Rides Again (1939). Deputy Destry prefers whittling napkin rings to firing guns, and, in the frontier town of Bottleneck, that does not impress Boss Kent and the rest of the gang. “You shoot it out with them and for some reason they get to look like heroes,” muses Stewart. “But you put ’em behind bars and they look little and cheap.” Stewart can shoot if he has to, but he’s more concerned to establish the concept of the rule of law. Most westerns are about personal ethical codes, but Stewart’s, from this through The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), are about the difficulties in imposing more abstract values on the frontier.
Not that he lacked for personal ethics. At the start of the Second World War, Stewart had just achieved his career breakthrough, the defining role of Mr Smith. Yet he was one of the first Hollywood leading men to enlist, putting his career on hold for half a decade - which, in movie-star terms, means you may never have anything to come back to. After his death, one or two commentators sniffed about “his caustically right-wing views” and “his support for the Vietnam War”, but, unlike Alec Baldwin or Barbra Streisand, he never thought his status, either as an “artist” or as a bona fide war hero, entitled him to be heard on such matters.
Stewart managed his career more shrewdly than most stars before or since. Having established himself as a reluctant, drawling, folksy charmer in the Thirties, be chose increasingly to play against this image. He understood that, with great movie stars, the audience sees not only their latest picture but the accumulation of past roles. Because of his reputation as a crusading innocent, Stewart could afford to present himself as the obsessive loners of Vertigo and The Man from Laramie or as the wary defense attorney in Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1960) - the film in which all Stewart’s assumptions as a long-standing heartland hero, all his beliefs in conceptual authority, are tested to their limits by an insolent brute of a client and his brazenly sensual wife.
John Wayne managed his career by aging his genre - so that by the Sixties, all westerns seemed to be about paunchy gunfighters past their prime struggling to come to terms with a changing world. Stewart, by contrast, delved deeper within himself, finding in The Far Country or The Naked Spur ever subtler tensions between his toughness and his vulnerability. He never had a “Play it again” or “Frankly I don’t give a damn”, and he never needed one: sometimes that stammer indicated a man with so much on his mind his tongue couldn’t keep up; sometimes it indicated diffidence, sometimes a calm confidence. And just occasionally he didn’t say anything at all: few other actors could have carried Rear Window, which works out at something like a 35 per cent silent picture. Granted that Stewart’s character is wheelchairbound, and confined to his apartment, and has long periods with nobody to talk to, and spends his day observing the comings and goings of neighbors he can see but can’t hear, granted all that, it’s still amazing that Hitchcock gives one of the longest shots in the picture (thirty seconds) to Stewart silently relieving an itch in his cast with a Chinese back-scratcher. That’s a real movie star: someone you’re happy to watch scratching his leg.
Most of us have a favorite Jimmy Stewart moment like that. I’d be happy with the couple of minutes from Born to Dance (1936) we discuss in this week’s Song of the Week. It’s the scale of Stewart that makes him a quintessential American movie star: like an Irving Berlin ballad, he’s modest and conversational, finding all the effects he needs within the narrowest of ranges. For that reason alone, George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life was made for him. It teaches us a uniquely American form of heroism: that one man, leading an apparently unexceptional life in an unexceptional town, can prove the decisive and transforming force in dozens of lives. Let Barbra Streisand and Leonardo Di Caprio save the planet; Bedford Falls will always have Jimmy Stewart.
Not like these folks, though.
"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus
As the Washington correspondent of The Daily Worker, Britain’s Communist paper, grumbled, this is a “phony issue”: why couldn’t Smith have championed a minimum-wage bill or unemployment benefits?
Hmm.
Been a long time since Hollywierd has produced a great man like Jimmy Stewart.
One of my favorite Jimmy Stewart movies is Harvey...a real commentary on life. I try to watch it whenever it comes on cable just to remind myself that the crazies are really the ones in charge, they just want you to think they’re sane, LOL.
The golden age of Hollywood is long gone, never to return.
My impression of Stewart is that he was a very decent, moral man. Like Ronald Reagan. People with high personal standards are usually politically conservative, IMHO.
In fairness, let’s note that it is properly General Stewart.
are my favorite Stewart flicks.
My favorite all time movie - Mark Steyn captures what makes it great. One man can make a difference. Or put another way, God has a plan for each and every one of us. We don't know what it is but our every action - or non-action - ripples throughout the world.
My favorite, and one of his best, was Liberty Valance where he starred with John Wayne. A classic...
He did “Spirit of St. Louis” portraying Lindbergh’s trip across the Atlantic.
It was good.
Compare that day of golden Hollywood to today’s anti-American traitors. Things have really gone downhill. Jimmy Stewart you can remember with fondness. It’s a bad day when there are no more Jimmy Stewarts and never will be. And I think he is lucky to not see what has happened to our country.
Have any idea where there's a web copy of the photo of him climbing out of a B-52 after a mission over Vietnam? I saw one once about ten years ago; but have no idea where it was.
The Flight of the Phoenix was another good one.
Jimmy Stewart was exceptional!
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