Jimmy Stewart: American

If any actor can be called the quintessential American movie star, it has to be James Stewart, who was born 100 years ago, May 20, 1908, in the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania. His 6 ft. 3 inch lanky frame, his open sincerity and idealism (especially in his earliest roles), his obvious goodness and his determination, represent true Americana. A real-life hero as a bomber pilot in World War II, Jimmy (as he liked being called), was the son of a hardware store proprietor and attended Princeton, from which he graduated in 1932.

Stewart got his start on the stage, where he met his lifelong friend, Henry Fonda. Entering films under contract to MGM in 1935, the first part of his career saw him cast often as a small town or country boy, innocent and pure. In his second screen appearance, in The Murder Man (1935), starring Spencer Tracy, he had a short role working in a small town newspaper, playing a bit of a rube. Then he played Jeanette MacDonald’s younger brother in trouble with the law in the musical operetta Rose Marie (1936), and the murderer in the second of the popular “Thin Man” series starring William Powell and Myrna Loy, After the Thin Man (1936). In another early part, in Born to Dance (1936), Stewart was the young sailor on leave in New York, falling for Eleanor Powell’s Broadway star, even singing to her (creditably) Cole Porter’s “Easy to Love.”

This period culminated in Stewart’s great role as the naïve, young, idealist Senator Jefferson Smith, taking on Washington’s entrenched, cynical pre-inside the Beltway power elite in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) – one of the most anti-Washington (and anti-journalist) movies ever made. Two of his best films leading up to Mr. Smith were as Jason Wilkins, the ambitious only son of a poor, stern rural pastor (Walter Huston) in pre-Civil War Ohio, in Of Human Hearts (1938) and as yet another young kid from the sticks, Private Bill ‘Texas” Pettigrew, who falls head over heals for a Broadway musical star (Margaret Sullavan) in The Shopworn Angel (1938).

These little known, modest films are two of the very best of Stewart’s long career. In Of Human Hearts (based on a true story, Benefits Forgot), Stewart’s ambitions to escape the poverty-stricken life of his devout parents by studying medicine bring him into conflict with his father, Ethan. They even come to blows in a scene notable for its typically under-stated, pathos-filled direction by Clarence Brown, one of MGM’s top directors. Later, Stewart, now an expert surgeon in the Civil War, is called to the White House by President Lincoln for what turns out to be a lecture on a son’s responsibilities to his mother. Poor Mrs. Wilkins (Beulah Bondie, who also played Stewart’s mom in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)), now a widow, sold most of her few possessions – even trying to pawn her wedding ring -- to put her son through medical school, yet he stopped writing to her. Thinking he has been killed in the war, she has written to the President for assistance in finding his grave. Yes, this may sound corny, but thanks to the delicate writing and Brown’s understatement – and to the great character actor John Carradine’s compelling performance as Lincoln -- this is a beautiful, heartfelt scene and movie of the kind they really do not make any more. Carradine is Lincoln, and I would have to say his is the greatest depiction of Lincoln on screen. (Among his many, many other memorable character roles, Carradine played a rough cod fisherman in Captains Courageous the year before, the lay preacher Casy in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940), and the Nazi beast Reinhardt Heydrich in Hitler’s Madman (1943)). When Of Human Hearts opened in MGM’s palatial Capitol Theater at Times Square, the audience burst into applause when Lincoln appeared on screen.

In The Shopworn Angel, the sweet goodness of Stewart’s wet-behind-the ears soldier on leave in New York just before being shipped out to France (this is the First World War) melts the heart of the cynical, hard-edged glamour queen he falls for, Daisy Heath. Except that this serves to renew her relationship with her pin-striped manager, Sam Bailey (Walter Pidgeon). The story focuses on Daisy’s efforts to let Bill down gently, without hurting him, and on the simultaneous blossoming, thanks to the young soldier, of her long-time liaison with Sam into true love. Their relationship is made quite palpable – with the actors’ clothes on, of course – by the artfulness of the script and the accomplished direction of H.C. Potter. The plot turns on the kind of self-sacrifice that was a staple of movies of that era, and may surprise viewers in the end. Potter’s direction of the final scene – no dialogue necessary -- is masterly, and very moving. This is a perfect movie for St. Valentine’s Day, and is available on VHS, but not yet on DVD.

By the end of the 1930s, with Mr. Smith and his second hit of 1939, in which he played yet another simple country boy, the Western Destry Rides Again, opposite Marlene Dietrich, Stewart was established as a leading star. He won the Academy Award for best actor the following year as a wise-cracking reporter in The Philadelphia Story, opposite Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. But everyone recognized this was a consolation prize for Mr. Smith, for which he was bested by Robert Donat’s still beloved performance as the English “public” (i.e. private) school teacher in Goodbye Mr. Chips. Stewart made another classic in 1940, again opposite Margaret Sullavan, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), directed by the great Ernst Lubitsch. The stars work together as sales clerks in a small ladies’ gift shop in pre-war Budapest. They don’t like each other. Each also is engaged in a correspondence with an anonymous person of the opposite sex whom each is convinced is that special other. Wait till they find out the identities! This was remade as You’ve Got Mail in 1998, with the internet substituting for the city post office, but lacks the special Lubitsch middle European warmth and charm.

Now, having reached the top, Stewart, age 32, months before Pearl Harbor, signed up with the Army Air Corps. F rustrated by the public relations role he had been assigned, he acquired the necessary training flying hours at his own expense and went on to command twenty combat bombing missions over Nazi-occupied Europe. He always carried with him the copy of the 91st Psalm his father had given him before he left for overseas. Earlier, among his PR assignments, in December 1941 Stewart hosted a radio program, "We Hold These Truths," celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Bill of Rights. Almost one-half the population, more than 60 million, then the biggest audience in radio history, listened in. At the end, Stewart reprised his great role as Senator Jefferson Smith, giving an impassioned plea for democracy, then introduced President Roosevelt. Stewart was one of many actors, directors and other Hollywood figures who saw combat in the war, many, like him, in their thirties or even forties (e.g. Clark Gable, John Ford).

Stewart returned to his career five years later with his most famous and beloved role as George Bailey in Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946). There is little more to be written about a film that all readers must know well, except that the film did not do well on its release, finding its audience only with Christmas broadcasts on television in the 1970s. Some have written that George’s life crisis and nightmare were too dark for audiences in the forties, although this sequence refects the influence of popular film noir crime dramas of the time. Ironically, showing the darker side of his characters helped to renew Stewart’s career after he turned forty, and the 1950s marked his peak as a leading star.

Frank Capra was the key director in the first chapter of Stewart’s career. Anthony Mann and, later, Alfred Hitchcock, were instrumental in the second chapter. For it was under Mann that Stewart moved beyond his earlier persona, portraying more rounded, adult characters with a dark edge in six Westerns they made in the 1950s, beginning with Winchester ’73 (1950). Stewart’s Lin McAdam set the characterizations for the other Mann-Stewart Westerns: here he is out to avenge a past wrong against his evil brother (Stephen McNally). The pattern is varied in some of their other Westerns, with Stewart playing the tough leader with the strength to protect the wagon train or the prospectors against the bad guys, but who doesn’t want to get involved because he is embittered by a past experience, only to be forced by his moral conscience to take the right, heroic action in the end.

I rank as the best of these, and one of the best Westerns ever made, The Naked Spur (1953). Stewart plays Howard Kemp, a bounty hunter searching for a slick, ruthless killer, Ben Vandergroat (the great Robert Ryan). He is forced to allow an old prospector (Millard Mitchell, best known as the producer in Singin’ in the Rain (1952)) and a wise-guy cavalry officer (Ralph Meeker) just dishonorably discharged from the Army to join him when he captures Ben, along with Ben’s girl, Lina (Janet Leigh). As the five journey through Indian country (they comprise the entire cast), Mann lays bare how grim human nature can be through the interactions of the four men, three of whom are at one another’s throats. We learn the source of Howie’s inner rage from a past betrayal. The tension is conveyed visually by Mann’s typically taut compositions and elevated by his superb use of landscape (the characters framed against majestic blue skies and mountains, an artistry at which Mann was perhaps second only to John Ford. See my comments on Mann’s epic direction of El Cid at http://www.acuf.org/issues/issue106/080420med.asp ).

The finale is vintage Mann, as the climax is filmed against particularly compelling scenery – here a cliff overlooking a steep gorge and its roaring river, where the film’s human conflicts are resolved amid death and the protagonist’s catharsis. Stewart later commented that his favorite movies were Westerns “because they’re told against the background of a very dramatic period in our history” and “give people a feeling of hope, an affirmative statement of living.” And, one might add, they portray men of courage, heroes to look up to, such as Stewart’s. (In fairness, it must be noted that Stewart, good as he was as an actor, was more of a personality star than an actor star, like, say Bette Davis, and he is not at his best in the film’s highly emotional final scene.)

Hitchcock directed four films starring Stewart: Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and Vertigo (1958). Rear Window features one of Stewart’s best performances. Famous as daring magazine news photographer L.B. Jefferies, he spends the entire film trapped in his wheelchair (until the vintage Hitchcock climax, that is) with a broken leg, observing, as something of a voyeur, the lives of his neighbors in their New York apartments facing the courtyard during a hot summer, pre-air-conditioning. Thanks to the alert, inquisitive eye of his girlfriend, Grace Kelly (in gorgeous full bloom), he discovers a murder in one of the apartments facing his window. This is one of Hitchcock’s greatest films and, given the film’s limited space and action, demonstrates his unsurpassed mastery of his art.

Stewart served Hitchcock well as the typical Mr. American family man on vacation, with Doris Day as his wife, in The Man Who Knew Too Much; this was a role he would repeat several times in the 1960s. Their child’s kidnapping by a spy ring entangles them in a Hitchcockian web of mystery and suspense. Stewart then played a more troubled character in the film many regard, this writer included, as Hitchcock’s ultimate masterpiece, Vertigo. His San Francisco detective, Scottie Ferguson, has retired from the force after his involvement in a roof-top accident which killed a patrolman he was trying to help -- thus his petrifying fear of heights. As a private eye on a job for an old friend, he becomes obsessed with a certain beautiful blonde (Kim Novak – Hitchcock usually wanted blondes as his lady stars). His wounded, vulnerable protagonist unknowingly finds himself in a Hitchcockian swirl of events that serves ultimately as a metaphor for the director’s Catholic view of life. (That’s the best I can do, friendly reader, without giving anything away.) This is one of the handful of Stewart’s greatest films.

We cannot leave the decade of the fifties without mention of three other films, two from 1950. The first movie, Broken Arrow, was the second of a series of path-breaking postwar films that depicted Indians in a more balanced light and which showed white people in the wrong. Stewart is Tom Jeffords, a trader who marries an Indian girl (Debra Paget) and tries, unsuccessfully, to broker a peace between Cochise and predatory whites. The second film, Harvey, gave Stewart perhaps his third greatest role (after George Bailey and Jefferson Smith) as the eccentric, whimsical Elwood P. Dowd, who teaches the disbelieving people around him some truths about life and goodness with the help of his best chum, his (invisible to everyone else) pooka, Harvey. Harvey is a white rabbit standing about six feet tall (or maybe a little more) and accompanies Elwood much of the time visiting local bars and befriending everyone they meet. For this, his family tries to have Elwood committed. Detailed information can be found at Elwood’s website for Harvey on the internet. I had the great privilege of seeing Stewart perform this play live, opposite Helen Hayes, on Broadway in the early 1970s. I will never forget how he brought the house down when he called Harvey out to take his bows, amid thunderous cheers, raising his arm high to pet his distinguished (though invisible) friend. (Actually, since Stewart stood six feet three inches, this means Harvey must have stood about six inches taller than six feet!)

The third film of the fifties is The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), based on Charles Lindbergh’s account of his famous first solo flight across the Atlantic in 1927. In light of his wartime service, playing Lindbergh meant a great deal to Stewart, although he was a bit old for the part. Naturally, for most of the film he is alone in the cockpit of his one-engine aircraft, a problem solved by Billy Wilder’s clever direction and Stewart’s sincere, knowing performance. Once again, he excelled in giving life to a simple American hero.

The last classic movie Stewart appeared in is one of the two last great classic Westerns, John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). (The other widely regarded last great classic Western, made the same year, is Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country.) He plays a young lawyer out of his element trying to tame a Western town, but John Wayne, also playing a much younger man than he was at the time, has to put things right. Thereafter Stewart starred in a number of respectable films, mostly Westerns, through the 1960s. He had two television shows in the first half of the seventies and appeared infrequently on television and screen until his last performance as a rocket science professor in 1992.

Stewart was a staunch conservative, a friend and supporter of Ronald Reagan (and a frequent White House guest during his presidency), who also actively backed Richard Nixon (if he can be called a conservative) and Barry Goldwater. Like Goldwater, he served, as a brigadier general, in the Air Force Reserve. For his war service, among his many honors, he received the Distinguished Flying Cross. One of his sons, Ronald, a Marine officer, was killed in action in Vietnam in 1969. Stewart was awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, by President Reagan in 1985.

James Stewart was an unpretentious, regular guy who kept close to his roots and did not let Hollywood go to his head. A very eligible bachelor for many years, he married for the first and only time in 1949 and by all accounts remained always faithful to his vows; his wife, Gloria, died in 1994. They had twin daughters, plus her two sons by a previous marriage, whom Stewart adopted. He gave his Oscar to his father, who kept it in the window of his hardware store. Stewart returned to his hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania in 1958 as the guest of honor at a Boy Scout testimonial dinner celebrating his fiftieth birthday. (Remember his Senator Jefferson Smith was a Boy Scout activist in the film.) He told everyone:

On his screen persona, Stewart said on another occasion: “I have my own rules and adhere to them. The rule is simple but inflexible. A James Stewart picture must have two vital ingredients: it will be clean and it will involve the triumph of the underdog over the bully.”

As Simon and Garfunkel called out decades ago for a baseball immortal, we might ask today: “Where have you gone, Jimmy Stewart?”

What about John Wayne’s last movie, The Shootist ???

Jimmy played the doctor...

One of my favorites is Shenandoah

I've got to get up to Indiana someday to see Jimmy's museum. His films are still family favorites. We watch "It's A Wonderful Life" every Christmas and own both the original and the colorized version.

Unlike the Hollyweirdos of today, I don't even know what his politics were. However, if forced to bet, I would say he was a Republican.

My Father in Law was in a B-24 Bomb Wing along side Steward. He swears to this day the Steward would would not accept promotion unless his entire crew was promoted also.

Fire away I will see him Saturday and give him your observations.

"I don't even know what his politics were. However, if forced to bet, I would say he was a Republican."

Back in 1983 Jimmy returned to Indiana for his 75th Birthday, which brought out a huge crowd of people. During his address, Jimmy received a call from Ronald Reagan, which was put over a public address system for the crowd to hear. Their conversation strongly suggested they were kindred spirits and that their friendship went far beyond the Hollywood connection.

After VE day, there was a Life magazine photo featuring Stewart. That's the (old) Indiana County courthouse in the background which still stands there today...

I a big JS fan, but I recently saw “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1956) and was disappointed, not in Stewert’s performance, but in the movie in general.

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