August 21st | 10 Movies
Over his long career, James Stewart delivered so many great performances and appeared in so many genuine masterpieces that to represent him with just 12 films is a challenge. Yet these 12 do provide a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of his screen persona, with four in particular marking distinct stages of his career.
At age 27, Stewart was signed by MGM. Like many new stars, he was placed into films of various genres to see where his talent would best come out. His film debut came in The Murder Man (1935), a brisk B movie starring Spencer Tracy as a rugged newspaper reporter who specializes in homicide cases—and who now plans the perfect crime of his own. Stewart plays an enthusiastic cub reporter named Shorty, and his casting was purposefully tongue-in-cheek since Stewart was actually 6’3” and weighed 138 pounds.
Stewart was shocked when he first saw himself onscreen. “I was all arms and legs,” he said. “I didn’t seem to know what to do with them.” However, at least one critic, from The New York Herald Tribune, noticed the talent and remembered Stewart from his Broadway stage work, writing, “That admirable stage juvenile, James Stewart, who was so fine in Yellow Jack, is wasted in a bit that he handles with characteristically engaging skill.”
Stewart later recalled, “I signed a contract with MGM without even looking at it—it was impossible to read. The contract was for three months. I found out later that it was one of those contracts with an option for a further three months and so on. In other words, they got you for life. Mine was terminated by the war. Not that I wanted to get away. It was great fun.” (In truth, the maximum length of the contract was for seven years.)
On the set, Spencer Tracy offered Stewart his first screen-acting advice. “I told him to forget the camera was there,” Tracy recounted. “That was all he needed. In his very first scene he showed he had all the good things.” The two became lifelong friends.
It would be three months before Stewart was assigned another film at MGM. To fill the time, the studio had him hit the gym. Stewart also found time to take flying lessons, and eventually came to enjoy routinely flying home to visit family in Pennsylvania, following railroad tracks as navigation.
By the time he made Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) for Columbia Pictures, Stewart had racked up 19 credits. On one of the most recent, You Can’t Take It with You (1938), director Frank Capra had started to shape the familiar Stewart persona: an awkward, bumbling, but endearing and decent guy. With Mr. Smith, Capra would hone it further and Stewart would shoot to superstardom, earning his first of five Oscar nominations.
Capra initially intended the film as a sequel to Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), which had starred Gary Cooper. But after rival producer Samuel Goldwyn declined to loan Cooper out to reprise the role, Capra realized Stewart would be perfect to play this all-American, comically awkward idealist who is suddenly propelled to the U.S. Senate. Capra secured Stewart from MGM, changed the name of his protagonist from Longfellow Deeds to Jefferson Smith, and adjusted the title to match.
Jefferson Smith was an outstanding role, allowing for a wide range of emotions from quiet moments to intense outbursts. Stewart portrays complete exuberance when arriving in Washington; comic, voice-cracking nervousness when introducing his bill; shy awkwardness when talking to the senator’s daughter; total despair at the Lincoln Memorial; and great conviction when defending American principles on the Senate floor. Throughout, he comes off as utterly sincere, embodying a boyish honesty and decency that would forever remain the core of his screen image. It’s no accident that the film is full of visual and verbal references to another honest American: Abe Lincoln. Even the physical casting of the tall, skinny Stewart helps put across the connection.
Stewart is beautifully matched by Jean Arthur as the sarcastic and cynical secretary, Saunders. Already a bona fide star—she’s billed first here—Arthur was one of Capra’s favorite leading ladies, having starred in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and You Can’t Take It with You. Saunders is a typical Capra working woman, intelligent and resourceful, yet Arthur brings something extra-special to the role with her moving transition from world-weary skeptic to newly invigorated believer. Without her convincing evolution, Jefferson Smith’s own transformation and heartfelt filibuster simply wouldn’t be possible.
The filibuster, one of the great sequences in American cinema, is a tour de force for all involved. Audiences tend to remember it for its climax, with Stewart at his most emotional as he fights for his “lost cause,” scorns the crooked political machine of Jim Taylor (Edward Arnold) and clutches the telegrams before fainting. But the entire sequence lasts about half an hour. During Stewart’s speech, Capra cuts away often—to the press room, to Taylor getting his machine rolling, to the cloakroom where senators discuss strategy, to a radio announcer describing the proceedings, to Boy Rangers back home printing their newspaper and to scenes of the boys being roughed up by Taylor’s goons. The result is an astonishing blend of kinetic action, shocking violence, grave drama, light comedy, broad comedy, warmth and romance. Imagine the filibuster without all these elements—it would have less momentum, weaker stakes and be almost impossible to construct in a satisfying way, since a scene solely of one character talking eventually feels tedious.
Capra used six cameras in the meticulously recreated Senate chamber, shooting angles of Stewart and reactions of other actors at the same time. This paid off with greater fluidity in a scene where Stewart’s performance crescendos carefully and emotionally. Thanks to art director Lionel Banks and cinematographer Joseph Walker, Stewart is often framed at an angle that shows a corner of the chamber directly behind him—literally depicting Jefferson Smith as backed into a corner. For the latter stages of the filibuster, Stewart got a doctor to swab his throat with a mercury chloride solution so that his vocal cords would swell and his voice would sound hoarse.
In 1939 there was arguably no director in Hollywood better able to blend so many tones and emotions as convincingly as Frank Capra. Among those qualities are anger and obsession, which Stewart depicts at important moments. In hindsight, this was an inkling of things to come for the actor, as he would explore ever darker emotions in the years ahead, from It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), again directed by Capra, to the five intense westerns he made for director Anthony Mann in the 1950s.
The first of these, Winchester ’73, was an enormous box office hit and marked a key turning point in Stewart and Mann’s careers. With this film, Mann graduated from a series of claustrophobic, brilliant film noirs and noir westerns to a full-fledged western set predominantly in wide-open landscapes. Suddenly this most visual of directors had a wider, deeper canvas to work with. For Stewart, the turning point came in the sharp shift towards violence and obsessiveness in his character. Winchester ’73 forced audiences to question their assumption that a western hero was all noble, all good, or even more stable than the villain.
Ironically for such an impactful movie, it came together almost as an afterthought. Stewart only agreed to make it because that was Universal’s condition for accepting Stewart’s request to next make Harvey (1950), adapted from the play he had starred in on Broadway. When Stewart signed on, Fritz Lang was already attached as director. But Lang departed close to the start of production, and Stewart suggested Anthony Mann as a replacement.
The film’s device of a rifle passing from character to character allowed Mann to stage many kinds of western vignettes and take the audience on a journey through the western genre itself. Stewart rose to the challenges of his role. “I had to toughen up,” he later recounted, “and I found that in westerns I could do it and still retain what I was.” In other words, the idealistic, aw-shucks Stewart in still there in the character, but it’s layered with a new, darker dimension. Winchester ’73 put Stewart onto the industry’s list of the top 10 moneymaking stars for the first time in his career, and he would stay on that list through the decade, at the end of which he would play the ultimate in obsessive characters, in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
In the 1960s, Stewart transitioned into a gentler, less intense, final career stage. The scripts he had to work with were generally not as good as on earlier films, but Stewart’s craft and professionalism made many of them quite watchable. Shenandoah (1965) is a fine case in point. It is an otherwise ordinary film made compelling and interesting entirely due to its star.
The story concerns a prosperous Virginian who has raised six sons and a daughter on his sprawling farm since his wife died in childbirth. It’s 1864 and the Civil War is taking place all around him, but Stewart maintains a neutral stance. Morally opposed to slavery, he wants no part of a war based on it—as long as the conflict does not touch him personally. But the war inevitably does take a toll. Stewart’s new son-in-law is called into Confederate service on his wedding day, and then Stewart’s youngest son is captured by the North and suspected of being a Confederate soldier. Showing some of the determination and sense of purpose that marked his earlier Anthony Mann westerns, Stewart sets out to find him, taking most of his other sons with him on the journey.
Shot on lush, pretty locations near Eugene, Oregon, Shenandoah nonetheless has a flat visual look that resembles television shows of the period. However, there are two set-pieces that are particularly cinematic and well-staged, one involving a cow on a battlefield and the other a shocking rape/murder sequence which relies on the power of suggestion. Director Andrew McLaglen went on to direct three more features with Stewart, but this was by far the highest grossing, perhaps partly due to the fact that its antiwar tone touched a chord as America agonized over Vietnam.
Stewart’s charismatic performance, however, was surely another reason. Grizzled and tough, his teeth clenched on a cigar stub, Stewart totally dominates the movie. He is convincing as the strict patriarch who rules his family with a stern hand, but his tender side peaks through as well, revealing a soft heart. (He is still, after all, James Stewart.) In one priceless scene, Stewart advises his son-in-law in the ways of women. “They expect things they never ask for,” says Stewart. “And when they don’t get them, they ask why. Sometimes they don’t ask. And then they just go ahead and punish you for not doing what you didn’t know you were supposed to do in the first place.”
And only Stewart could pull off, with such poignance and sensitivity, two scenes in which he must speak to his wife’s grave. One of his speeches well sums up Shenandoah’s attitude toward war: “I don’t even know what to say to you, Martha. There’s nothing much I can tell you about this war. It’s like all wars, I suppose. The undertakers are winning it. Politicians talk a lot about the glory of it. The soldiers, they just want to go home.”
