James Stewart, 1908-1997

by Steve Vineberg

Among the classic male romantic icons Hollywood offered up in the '30s, Jimmy Stewart, who died last week at the age of 89, had the largest capacity for surprising us. The foursquare Clark Gable had a small (if beloved) range; John Wayne, distinctive but not imaginative, tended toward self-parody; Gary Cooper peaked early. Cary Grant and Fred Astaire were sui generis and built extraordinary careers around the unique gifts they demonstrated almost at the outset. Stewart and his pal Henry Fonda were the only movie heroes to emerge in this era who were also great actors; what made Stewart singular was that, over and over, he did work that undermined -- or at least complicated -- the image that grew up around him: Jimmy Stewart the archetypal down-home American, the overgrown backwoods schoolboy stumbling over his own feet, the drawling idealist, the king of Middle America. In his best movies, he could be sharp-witted and bantering (The Philadelphia Story), or sexually vibrant and fraught with intriguing contradictions (The Shop Around the Corner). His romantic convictions could be tragic (Broken Arrow) or neurotic and doomed (Vertigo). His adventurousness could be foolhardy, as when he initiates a murder investigation from his wheelchair in Rear Window. His air of reliability and efficiency could be dark and unsettling, as in the creepy moment when he administers a sedative to Doris Day in The Man Who Knew Too Much before informing her that their son has been kidnapped.

It's too simple to say that Frank Capra created the Jimmy Stewart persona and Alfred Hitchcock (who directed him in the three last-mentioned pictures) devastated it. In the first Capra movie he appeared in, You Can't Take It with You (1938), the director circumscribed as much romantic space around Stewart and his leading lady, Jean Arthur, as other filmmakers had in his pairings with Margaret Sullavan and Ginger Rogers. (The love scenes are the only parts of this movie that don't feel fraudulent.) And when Capra did come up with a role that seemed to define Stewart, the farm boy/senator in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington whose awestruck belief in American government melts the cynicism of the hardbitten Pentagon crowd, Stewart wasn't handicapped by it the way Gary Cooper had been by Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. In It's a Wonderful Life, the third and last Capra-Stewart collaboration, Stewart delivered a frightening portrayal of a man unmoored by his own idealism. The movie's point of view about how human beings ought to live in the world is idiotic and Capra's way of blackmailing the audience emotionally is repugnant, but Stewart's acting transcends the movie -- and especially its stupefying ending, which is rather like gift-wrapping the fragments of a bomb once it's detonated. When Stewart's George Bailey staggers home to his wife and children after his bank has collapsed, you feel you're looking in the eyes of a man who's about to kill his whole family and then turn the shotgun on himself.

American actors rarely make themselves as vulnerable as Stewart did in It's a Wonderful Life, or in the heartfelt 1950 Western Broken Arrow when he mourns his murdered Indian bride. That's the kind of high-risk emotional commitment Hitchcock needed for Scottie Ferguson, the detective who's hired to trail a beautiful woman and falls in love with his fantasy of her, in Vertigo. Stewart gives a performance of operatic intensity; you could say that the entire movie is an extension of what he got to do in his three finest minutes in Broken Arrow. But I think my favorite moment in the picture is one of his quietest. Scottie's friend Madge (Barbara Bel Geddes), working out of an unrequited love for him that is, like everything else in the movie, out of control, paints a mock portrait of herself costumed to resemble a woman who figures in the obsession of the mysterious woman Scottie himself is obsessed with. In this knockout of a scene, where the romantic fixations of the three main characters swirl into one another like the crazy colors in a Munch painting, Stewart's explanation to Madge that her joke isn't funny is shattering. It's woebegone and final; he looks at her as if she were at the other end of the solar system. You know she'll never get him back.

In a way, what Stewart does in Vertigo completes the romantic arc he began two decades earlier in movies like Next Time We Love, Vivacious Lady, Shopworn Angel, You Can't Take It with You, Destry Rides Again, and -- especially -- The Shop Around the Corner, which came at the end of this series, in 1940. The Ernst Lubitsch-Samson Raphaelson Shop Around the Corner, maybe the most enchanting of all American romantic comedies, is a study in sexual tension, like Much Ado About Nothing. The boy and the girl (Margaret Sullavan; she and Stewart were always magic together) love each other but don't realize it, so they act as if they hated each other. Like Shakespeare, the filmmakers resolve the tensions in an open-ended way, by dooming the hero and heroine to a lifetime of negotiation. The bitter joke on Scottie in Vertigo is that he's left trying to negotiate with a corpse; what makes the film so scary is how hard he tries to. If you watch these two astonishing performances back to back, you'll see both the full spectrum of Jimmy Stewart's acting and the theme that unifies it.