It is a truth, though one not universally acknowledged, that when people die, their eulogists praise them for qualities they did not possess and ignore those qualities they did have. Thus, a man known for a cruel and biting wit will be posthumously transformed into a paragon of kindness; a formidable and distant woman becomes, in death, the unconditionally loving mother her children always wished she had been.
The same thing is happening in the wake of James Stewart’s death last week at the age of 89. He is being lionized because for representing America at its best, sunniest, and most optimistic — “the American Everyman,” more than one commentator has said. Stewart was by all accounts a decent, pleasant, and remarkably modest fellow in private life. But the notion that, as an actor, James Stewart was the embodiment of the American Everyman gets it almost entirely wrong.
Stewart’s particular skill was for playing exceptional men — men so quick- witted that their minds outraced their tongues, causing the trademark stammer that made Stewart sound as though he had never memorized a line and was simply speaking words that were coming into his head for the first time.
He was the only golden-age icon who could convincingly play characters at once intelligent, thoughtful, flawed, and angry — men who were disappointed, not satisfied, with the life they were leading. His ability to capture these qualities helps explain not only why he delivered so many great or near-great performances, but also why he was in so many great or near-great movies.
Stewart’s track record from 1938 to 1965 was unparalleled: He made more good films than anybody else in Hollywood. You Can’t Take It With You, Destry Rides Again, The Shop Around the Corner, The Philadelphia Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, Call Northside 777, Broken Arrow, Rear Window, and Anatomy of a Murder are all glorious pieces of work. Other Stewart films – – Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Harvey, Winchester ’73, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Man IV Shot Liberty Valance — have their passionate admirers. And he was wonderful in several films most people would agree are otherwise disposable: The Glenn Miller Story, The Stratton Story, and Shenandoah.
In The Philadelphia Story, Stewart plays Macaulay Connor, a promising young writer of fiction working undercover for a mass-market magazine to get dirt on Katharine Hepburn’s exclusive wedding. Through much of the movie, Stewart drips with contempt — for the Main Line upper class he is spying on, for Hepburn’s playboy ex-husband, for the Quaker gentility of a local librarian (having been addressed as “thee,” Stewart later asks, “Dost thou have a phone?”).
The Philadelphia Story is actually a portrait of two characters who change over the course of the wedding weekend — most obviously Hepburn’s Tracy Lord, who goes from being a “wrathful goddess” to an “ordinary human being,” but no less importantly Stewart’s Macaulay Connor. At a party the night before Hepburn’s wedding, the acerbic Connor turns reckless, almost desperately giddy, when he realizes he loves her. “You’re the golden girl, Tracy,” he tells Hepburn, turning his literary eloquence on her and winning her love as well, if only for one night. Liberated from his own intellectual snobbery, Connor turns some of his contempt on himself for having prostituted his talent to Spy magazine and gleefully betrays his employer and his paycheck for new-found principle.
Connor ought to have been an impossible character to play — he is simultaneously the audience’s representative, a witty and lively fellow, and an obnoxious jerk who needs to be taken down more than a few pegs. Stewart is nothing short of amazing in The Philadelphia Story, and he won an Oscar for it. It is part of Hollywood lore that the award was a consolation prize for Stewart’s loss the year before when his performance in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington was passed over. But even though Stewart does yeoman work in Mr. Smith, the part itself is so meretricious — a ridiculously naive Wisconsin scoutmaster who becomes a crusading U.S. senator after the worshipful teenage son of a political boss suggests he be appointed — that even Stewart cannot save it. Mr. Smith is the role that gave rise to the ” Jimmy Stewart as Everyman” myth, but even Jefferson Smith proves to be exceptional — though for no good reason except that the plot demands it. Disgusted by Senate corruption, he shuts the place down with a filibuster and delivers a speech about idealism so eloquent that it leads his chief tormentor to exit the chamber and immediately commit suicide. Mr. Smith is a populist superman; Macaulay Connor is a real, rounded, unforgettable man. And a virile man as well, a man who knows how to attract women and how to be attractive himself.
Stewart is the central figure in two of the sexiest movies ever made — movies that are sexy because the characters he plays find themselves torn between an alluring object of desire and their own wanderlust. In Rear Window, Stewart is a hotshot photojournalist with a broken leg trapped in a hot New York apartment where he cannot so easily get away from the impossibly beautiful socialite Grace Kelly. Like Macaulay Connor, he is a snob, a man so proud of his rugged individualism that he cannot hide his contempt for Kelly’s Vogue-magazine existence. He does everything he can to push her away — he calls her spoiled, makes fun of her tastes, and makes it clear he will never marry her. This, of course, only makes her more determined to snare him. He wants to resist her, but he can’t, at least not sexually.
Stewart’s character in Rear Window is, again, far from admirable, and though he had been a star for almost 20 years when he played the part, he assumed it without vanity. Unlike lesser performers, he never looked for an excuse to wink at the audience and let them know the real Jimmy Stewart would never do such things. There was nothing stylized about him, as was the case with almost every other icon of Hollywood’s golden age — think of Humphrey Bogart’s brooding way with a cigarette, Clark Gable’s rat-a-tat voice, the bizarre cadences of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, and almost everything about James Cagney and Cary Grant. At his best, James Stewart was the great American film actor the way Astaire was the great American dancer and Sinatra the great American singer: He had no visible technique. You never saw the work.
That is especially true in his sexiest scene, which may be the single sexiest scene on film. It is part of his greatest performance, which may be the greatest single performance by an American actor. The movie is It’s a Wonderful Life, and in the scene Stewart is standing next to Donna Reed as the two participate in a long-distance call on an old-fashioned phone.
Stewart is George Bailey, a banker who has wanted nothing since his childhood but to leave the small town where he was born and raised to explore the world. This night, for the third time in his adulthood, he has found himself trapped there by circumstances beyond his control; it is now clear to him that he will never get away. Depressed and despairing, angry and bitter, he finds himself in the parlor of the girl who has always loved him. She puts on a recording of a song they once sang together; he ignores her; she tells him to leave; he goes; she smashes the record; he comes back in, having forgotten his hat. The phone rings. It’s the town’s rich kid, who’s calling from New York to flirt with the girl and pass on a tip about a hot business venture. As they stand close together, listening, George breathes in her scent as she breathes in his. Finally the friend says he is giving them a chance to get in on the ground floor of what could be the chance of a lifetime. George, in a rage, throws the phone down, grabs her by the shoulders, and, almost sobbing, tells her he doesn’t want any ground floors, any big chances, and he doesn’t want to get married, ever; she bursts into tears, and he embraces her, kisses her passionately, and weeps himself, surrendering to his unwanted destiny.
George Bailey is the least ordinary character Stewart ever played. He is, as the movie’s villain says, “the smartest one in the bunch,” a clever and resourceful man with a generous nature. And for most of the movie, he is utterly miserable. He never gets to do what he wants. He is tormented by the thought that he is a failure, that his ambitions are greater than his abilities. Suffocated by a life he does not yet know is wonderful, he is on the verge of committing suicide when he is given a chance to see what the world would have been like without him.
And what he learns is not that he is ordinary, but that he is great. Because of him, hundreds of lives have been saved, his family kept from ruin, his wife kept from spinsterhood, his hometown kept from moral degradation. George Bailey is no American Everyman. He is a hero. What made James Stewart the most beloved of Hollywood icons is that, alone among them, he gave us an unvarnished image of a singularly American greatness.
John Podhoretz is deputy editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
