A James Stewart Omnibus Post

Chosen on account of the askew tie

I’ve done a couple of posts to date on Hollywood star James Stewart (1908-1997) and several others that mention him, but none that encompass his whole story, so I thought I’d tackle that today.

Stewart is certainly on the short list of America’s most beloved stars, very close to the top, I should think. As a child I naturally wondered if we were related, as I always speculate about all famous Stewarts, at least the ones who obviously hadn’t become Stewarts at Ellis Island (I’m a Stewart). If we are, it is farther back than ten generations, though if we are both genuine Stewarts (much can happen over a thousand years) then we are certainly related back there somewhere, probably in the Middle Ages, which scarcely counts towards anything but bemusement.

The son of a prosperous hardware merchant in Indiana, Pennsylvania (about an hour East of Pittsburgh), Stewart was a childhood lover of aeronautics, and studied architecture at Princeton, with vague aspirations to design airplanes. His youthful enthusiasm for flight later manifested itself both in real life and in fantasy. He commanded bombers for the duration of World War II, literally flying planes in combat. Afterwards he continued to serve in the Air Force reserve, retiring as a brigadier general in 1968. It’s hard to wrap your mind around. On the fantasy side, of course, several of his important films had planes at their center, including Strategic Air Command (1955), the Lindbergh bio-pic The Spirit of St. Louis (1957),The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), and Airport ’77. I’m also inclined to include The Glenn Miller Story (1954) with this bunch of films, as the climax of the story is that the bandleader’s plane disappeared in a fog during WW2.

Stewart’s father assumed that he would take over the family hardware store, but instead the young man got bitten by the acting bug in college theatricals, and was cast in productions by the University Players after graduating, where he became close friends with Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan. We don’t think of him as a stage actor, but Stewart did his time on Broadway in plays such as Carry Nation (1932, about the famous temperance nut), Goodbye Again (1933), Spring in Autumn (1933), All Good Americans (1933), Yellow Jack (1934), Divided By Glory (1934), Page Miss Glory (1934), and A Journey By Night (1935). Most of these plays have been forgotten, but there is a remarkable artifact from this period which has survived and that is the Vitaphone comedy short he appeared in with Harry Gribbon and Shemp Howard, called Art Trouble (1934). When I first saw that film on a TCM marathon of Vitaphone shorts, my mind was properly blown.

Jimmy Stewart makes a useful exhibit when trying to articulate the difference between an excellent actor and an excellent movie star. My formulation will no doubt irritate some people, for I would stipulate that Stewart, like most of his contemporaries, was of the latter category, and much less so of the former. I don’t think you can argue that Stewart would excel at classical material, or hardcore realism, or anything where he had to spill his guts all over the stage. He was superlative at what he did, and seemed to know his limits, rarely attempting to stretch outside them. He was great at light comedy, and various sorts of action pictures, and so forth, but a great actor, as opposed to a great movie star, can play King Lear, and that’s never going to be Jimmy Stewart. And there were times, as in Harvey and in Rope, where I would argue that he was badly miscast and didn’t carry it off. People point to the “hand getting shot” scene in The Man from Laramie (1955) as an example of Stewart’s acting chops. Granted — though the type of “great actor” I’m alluding to could boast of 50 such scenes.

Yet Stewart had assets aplenty to satisfy the needs of most ninety minute Hollywood entertainments. The lean lank beanpole physique and folksy demeanor were catnip to certain directors who wanted to infuse a film with Americana. Unlike Fonda, he was too much associated with comedy to play Abraham Lincoln, but if you really think about it, that’s precisely why he SHOULD have played Lincoln, who was considered a bumpkin and a fool by many in his lifetime. Frank Capra was the one above all who saw this quality in him and made the most of it, in You Can’t Take it With You (1938), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), and It’s a Wonderful Life (1947). George Marshall’s Destry Rides Again (1939) transmits a similar impression, as does (in a much gloomier way) his sad clown character in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).

In the post-war period he was a muse in a similar vein to other notable directors. To Alfred Hitchcock (following the misfire of Rope) Stewart became the sympathetic American Everyman blindsided by fate in Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958). (I’m of a mind that he was miscast in Vertigo as well, though he did good work in it. Hitchcock blamed the film’s failure on the 50 year old Stewart being “too old”, which is nonsense. The movie, arguably Hitchcock’s masterpiece, is creepy and unwholesome, and the main character is a controlling voyeur, seemingly halfway on his way to being Norman Bates. It was ahead of its time, that’s all).

Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959) rather ingeniously merges Capra’s Jimmy Stewart with Hitchcock’s!

And of course, he was also favored by Anthony Mann. My post on all of Stewart’s westerns, including those he made with Mann, John Ford, and others, is here.

While most of Stewart’s films of his mature years were westerns, when he finally caved to the lure of television, he went back to his comic roots. My post on his sit-com The Jimmy Stewart Show (1971-72) and some of his other comedy work is here. Then he had a mystery show called Hawkins in 1973. Lots of his later performances were in made-for-tv films such as Mr. Krueger’s Christmas (1980 — sadly, it’s not part of the Friday the 13th franchise), Right of Way (1973, with Bette Davis), and the Civil War mini-series North and South, Book Two 2 (1986). A voice role in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991) was his final screen credit. We were still hearing his voice in Campbell’s Soup commercials into the 1990s.