Oscar Profile #4: James Stewart

Hollywood’s “boy next door”, James Stewart had a mercurial rise to the top in films of the late 1930s. Still in bit roles in 1936, by 1938 he was starring in that year’s Best Picture Oscar winner, You Can’t Take It With You. The following year he won his first Oscar nomination for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and the year after that won the Oscar for The Philadelphia Story.

Born in 1908, the arch conservative Stewart met the arch liberal Henry Fonda in acting camp and despite their political differences, the two became best friends for life.

No actor has ever excelled at as many different types of roles as Stewart – from the shy but resolute heroes of Destry Rides Again, The Shop Around the Corner and The Mortal Storm to the small town everyman of It’s a Wonderful Life to the tough, grizzled western heroes and anti-heroes of The Naked Spur, The Man From Laramie, Two Rode Together and Shenandoah to the morally conflicted protagonists of Hitchcock’s Rear Window and Vertigo to the comic star of Harvey and Mr. Hobbs Takes a Vacation – he was always the guy you rooted for.

A decorated World War II airman who rose to Brigadier General, the highest ranking military office ever held by an active actor, he hated most war movies, considering them totally unrealistic and made only two in his long career. Hard of hearing in his later years, his last major starring role was in 1965’s The Flight of the Phoenix, although he continued to play small roles, usually in ensemble casts. He came out of his self-imposed semi-retirement to star opposite Bette Davis in the 1983 TV movie, Right of Way. He died in 1997 at 89.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

MR. SMITH GOES TO WASHININGTON (1939), directed by Frank Capra

The pinnacle of Stewart’s early career, Stewart plays Jefferson Smith, the idealistic young boy scout leader picked by his state’s political machine to fill the seat of a recently deceased senator. No one but Stewart could have played the naïve young pup who quickly learns the ropes and beats the crooks, including his mentor, his state’s senior senator – Claude Rains in an equally brilliant performance.

Stewart used a throat spray he purchased himself for the climactic filibuster scene in which he almost loses his voice from talking all night.

The film won him his first New York Film Critics Award and his first Oscar nomination. He lost to Robert Donat in Goodbye, Mr. Chips.

IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1950), directed by Frank Capra

Frank Capra famously forgot to renew the copyright on his and Stewart’s first post-World War II film, thus freeing it for repeated showings by local television stations after 1973. The heretofore only modest hit became a phenomenon. Stewart’s portrayal of the suicidal small town banker who is shown what life would have been like without him is now the most popular Christmas movie ever made. It was Capra and Stewart’s favorite film and Stewart’s performance is quite possibly the best of his long career. He’s backed by a marvelous supporting cast including Donna Reed as his wife, Lionel Barrymore as the town miser and Henry Travers as Clarence, his guardian angel.

REAR WINDOW (1954), directed by Alfred Hitchcock

After re-inventing his persona as the tough hero, sometimes anti-hero, of a series of westerns directed by Anthony Mann, Stewart rejoined his Rope director to make three more films, all of them major successes.

The first of these was the brilliantly conceived Rear Window in which Stewart is a photographer with time on his hands while recovering from a broken leg. He uses the time to spy on his neighbors with binoculars. Since this is Hitchcock, Stewart is not just a voyeur, but a witness to murder. Alternately funny and scary as well as suspenseful, the film also benefits from the contributions of Grace Kelly as Stewart’s high fashion model fiancé and Thelma Ritter as his wisecracking nurse.

This was the most productive era of Stewart’s career. For the next few years he would alternate making hard-hitting, realistic westerns and intricately conceived Hitchcockian thrillers with an occasional comedy thrown in to relieve the tension. He also made three of his best remembered biographical films – The Glenn Miller Story, Strategic Air Command (as Lt. Col. Robert “Dutch” Holland) and The Spirit of St. Louis (as Charles Lindbergh).

VERTIGO (1958), directed by Alfred Hitchcock

An exercise in paranoia, the third of three films Stewart made with Hitchcock in five years – The Man Who Knew Too Much was the second – Vertigo is the best of them.

Stewart is a San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia (fear of heights). He becomes obsessed with the woman he is assigned to follow, and because of his fear is unable to save her when she leaps to her death from the bell tower of a mission. Then while still recovering from the shock, he sees her again. This is Hitchcock at his most macabre, and Stewart makes the perfect Hitchockian foil. The film’s San Francisco and other Bay Area locations have never been used to better effect and the pairing of Stewart and Kim Novak absolutely sizzles.

ANATOMY OF A MURDER (1959), directed by Otto Preminger

A shocker in its day, Anatomy of a Murder is about the murder of a man accused of rape. Notable for its frank, now routine, language in describing the events leading to the murder, the film is an acting showcase for Stewart as the small-town lawyer hired to defend the soldier married to a woman of questionable morals played by Lee Remick. Remick, Ben Gazzara as the soldier, George C. Scott as the prosecutor, Joseph N. Welch as the judge and Arthur O’Connell and Eve Arden as Stewart’s assistants are all memorable, but Stewart anchors it.

The performance won him second New York Film Critics Award and his fifth Oscar nomination. He lost to Charlton Heston in Ben-Hur.