Posted on 05/08/2022 9:36:35 AM PDT by Rummyfan
The five year gap in Jimmy Stewart's filmography between 1942 and 1946 was the most vivid and important period in his life, if you believe what the famously reticent and reserved movie star would say later. He spent it in uniform with the U.S. Army Air Force, much of it flying B-24 bombers with the Eighth Air Force over Europe. Interviewed by writer Jonathan Coe for the biography Jimmy Stewart: A Wonderful Life, the actor was asked to compare it to his career as one of the biggest stars in Hollywood for nearly half a century. Was it greater than that, Coe asked?
"Much greater," Stewart said.
Several biographies of Stewart like to point out that he never made a war film after coming back from the war, including Jimmy Stewart: Bomber Pilot, an account of his time in the USAAF, written by Starr Smith, who served as an intelligence officer in the Eighth alongside Stewart. The actor is quoted as saying that war movies never really got the truth of war right.
It's a great factoid, but isn't really true: Stewart made two films for MGM set during the lead-up to the war before he entered the service – The Mortal Storm (1940) and Come Live With Me (1941), typical of the mixtures of melodrama and propaganda the studios made to support President Roosevelt's persistent push for American entry into World War II. After the war he would split his time between genres with a heavy emphasis on westerns, but among them was Malaya (1949), with Stewart and Spencer Tracy smuggling rubber out of Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, and The Mountain Road (1960), as an officer fighting the Japanese in China.
(Excerpt) Read more at steynonline.com ...
Thanks. That is very touching. Reminds me of our current doggy Cody.
I know he watched Strategic Air Command, but I don’t recall him saying much about it. He preferred A Gathering Of Eagles with Rock Hudson as a more accurate depiction of life on a SAC airbase.
I was in SAC. Japan and Omaha.
Yes, he thought A Gathering Of Eagles was very good and had mentioned that to me several times. It was a much later discussion on the 2 movies that he said he didn’t know that B-47s were in the 2d half of Strategic Air Command.
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