IT WAS A WONDERFUL LIFE: THE FILMS OF JIMMY STEWART

Jimmy Stewart was as well-loved and as thoroughly trusted an actor as there is ever likely to be. He embodied the all-American ideal, and in his long film career seemed to play the gamut of the American biographical canon. His own contradictions and occasional dark roles were all the more accepted because of this trust. As the American "Everyman," people could see in him their own faults and shortcomings, yet not feel disturbed or find therein anything sinister. He was "the incorruptible American patriot," a persona created and cemented by two Frank Capra films: Mr. Smith Goes to Town; and It's a Wonderful Life. These two films are jewels of American Cinema. And it's Jimmy Stewart's amazing acting abilities and his naturalistic style of playing film roles that makes it impossible to imagine anyone else playing these roles so well. 

One imagines that Jimmy Stewart was born and raised in a small town in Indiana, or on a ranch in Montana - basically a country boy arrived wide-eyed in the city. But he was actually born in the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania, and was a graduate of Princeton University like his father before him, a prosperous merchant. This should not detract from Jimmy's screen persona, though he acted on stage at the university and in New York, his acting style and sentiments seemed always to be naturalistic and genuine. He had joined the Ivy-League University Players acting troupe, where his friends (and roommates) included Josh Logan and Henry Fonda. They were also close to Margaret Sullavan, another member. Henry Fonda was married to Sullavan briefly - Jimmy Stewart carried a torch for her a long time. It was Hedda Hopper who got Jimmy a screen-test at MGM, where he landed a bit-part in The Murder Man, then moving up to play Jeanette MacDonald's wayward brother in Rose Marie. Henry Fonda by this time was already well established in Hollywood, and Jimmy once again roomed with him. One would have liked to be a fly on the wall when they double-dated with Ginger Rogers and Lucille Ball, two of the RKO gals.

Tall and good-looking, Jimmy Stewart had the makings of a leading man and Hollywood star. His film roles were as diverse as his persona: a cadet in Navy Blue and Gold; a jealous murderer in After the Thin Man; a Navy sailor in Born to Dance; a biology professor in Vivacious Lady, and a soldier in Shopworn Angel. But it was Frank Capra that saw in him the straight-forward and earnest patriot and devoted protector of individual freedoms that perfectly fit his ideal actor for the role of junior U.S. Senator Jefferson Smith. Indeed, Stewart's deadpan idealism and ferocious determination as played in the role led to it winning the Oscar for Best Picture, his nomination for Best Actor, and its place as one of the most admired films of all time.

The Philadelphia Story, 1940 is one of those outstanding movies you never get tired of watching. It was the film that brought Katharine Hepburn back into popularity after being labelled box-office poison. As for co-stars Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant, you couldn't get any better, with Jimmy playing a reporter and mid-list author. It has one of those truly sublime moments in screen acting history, when Cary and Jimmy sit on some front porch stairs after a night of drinking while carrying on a lop-sided conversation. We know Cary Grant could be a great comic, but here we see a glimpse of what Jimmy Stewart could have become given a different set of roles to play.

Photos courtesy of Photofest.

1940 was a good year for Jimmy Stewart. He appeared in two movies with Margaret Sullavan, (and Frank Morgan) both outstanding, and one, The Shop Around the Corner directed by Ernst Lubitsch, is considered a masterpiece. Here Jimmy plays a shop clerk in an antagonistic relationship with a female store employee. She was Margaret Sullavan, who also happens to be his secret romantic pen-pal in this model for several film remakes. Yet the other movie is no less a masterpiece. The Mortal Storm was directed by Frank Borsage and is set in Bavaria during the rise of Hitler. It shows the rising effect of peer-pressure in compromising people's beliefs and the consequences. Here  Stewart plays a German farmer with anti-Hitler beliefs. The movie infuriated Hitler at the time, where all MGM films were subsequently banned.

Jimmy was then cast as a down-and-out author roped into a marriage of convenience with Hedy Lamarr in Come Live with Me, in 1941. In this light romantic comedy, Jimmy seems natural as a mate for Hedy. She was billed as the most beautiful woman in the world, and he was handsome enough to balance out the pairing.

When the U.S entered World War II, Jimmy Stewart enlisted as a private. Since he was already a civilian pilot, he went through extensive training to fly bombers. He was promoted and became a major and Group Operations Officer, flying with his squadrons in German bombing missions and earning a Distinguished Flying Cross and later promotion to colonel. He ended the war as Chief of Staff for the Second Combat Wing of the Eighth Air Force.

The brutal realities of WW II and its aftermath led to new kinds of movies being made in Hollywood. Realistic movies and film noir became popular. Jimmy doubted his own value as an actor given all the sacrifices and suffering endured by so many during the war. But when Jimmy returned to Hollywood he decided that he had enjoyed working with Frank Capra the most and wanted to work with him again. Capra meanwhile had started an independent production company along with William Wyler and George Stevens, Liberty Films. His first big project was to be It's a Wonderful Life in 1946. It has  since gone on to be a true classic and one of the most beloved films ever made, though initially is was not as well received and considered too fantastical in those hard-boiled times. But even Humphry Bogart played it every year for Christmas, crying at every showing.

It's uplifting message has won it a huge fan base. For Jimmy Stewart, it also showed his dark side as a film character as well as his good. It also had another sublime Jimmy Stewart scene - this where he talks on the phone while Donna Reed stands close to him as he realizes before our very eyes that he loves her, and consequently, won't leave Bedford Falls.

In 1950 Jimmy  went back on stage to play an alcoholic who imagines his companion to be a giant white rabbit. He went on to star in the movie version of Harvey in 1950. Also in 1950 Stewart began a new phase in his film career, playing in gritty Westerns directed by Anthony Mann, and later with John Ford. Winchester 73 was the first in 1950, followed by Bend of the River, pictured below. In these films he played reluctant and often compromised heroes. His western cycle actually began with Broken Arrow, directed by Delmer Daves, about a scout who befriends Cochise, and thus works against the viewpoint of the "whites." More westerns were made in this terrific partnership with Anthony Mann: Naked Spur in 1953; Far Country in 1954; and Man from Laramie in 1956. Mann credited Stewart for his dogged determination and attention to every detail in helping make the film a success. One example was in finding just the right cowboy hat for Jimmy to wear in the Winchester 73 - a process that took two months of trial and error.

Besides Jimmy's successful work with directors Frank Capra and Anthony Mann, his films with Alfred Hitchcock brought him true immortality. The first was the dramatic, dark, and under-rated Rope in 1948. Then followed the classic Rear Window in 1954, The Man Who Knew too Much, in 1956, and the enigmatic, psychological thriller Vertigo, in 1958. In Jimmy Stewart, Hitchcock found the perfect foil for his movies - the "Everyman" caught in the web of twisted plots and sinister characters. And with Jimmy there was that extra dimension - the "trusted" and well known actor who was himself capable of acting out his own obsessions, selfish needs, and psychological issues within a film's role. 

With Hitchcock's two films of Rear Window and Vertigo, we see Jimmy playing the role of two physically and psychologically challenged characters. In one he is bound to a wheel chair after falling from a building, in the other he is nearly paralyzed from his fear of heights, at one point wearing a corset from his injury and in the other confined to a mental ward. But both films provide Stewart with the opportunity to dramatize his anguish, his obsessions, and his every emotion including ecstasy through his every facial expression. In the tortured soul of Scottie in Vertigo, Jimmy Stewart reached the pinnacle of his career.

Jimmy Stewart went on to bring more characters to life in films such as Spirit of St. Louis, Bell Book and Candle, Anatomy of a Murder, How the West was Won, and Shenandoah, among many others. He won one Oscar for Best Actor for The Philadelphia Story, and after fifty years of acting won an honorary Oscar in 1985 for the body of his work. Among male actors his work is unsurpassed. This can only be fully appreciated by seeing the gamut of his work over that period. But Vertigo is not a bad place to start - or to end up.