Jimmy Stewart: Friendly Persona - And A Dark Side

James Stewart, who died yesterday at 89, wasn't just a great American film actor.

His early screen persona - amiable, quirky, idealistic, somehow quintessentially American - inspired more than one generation to identify with and trust him.

After joining the war effort in 1941, he flew 20 combat missions, rose to the rank of colonel and remained active in the Air Force Reserve. His screen achievements were almost surpassed by his fame as a patriot.

At the same time, Stewart was the key to the most durable and challenging movies of several first-rate filmmakers. Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, Ernst Lubitsch, Otto Preminger, George Cukor and Anthony Mann are all in his debt.

It's possible to assemble an all-time 10-best list just from the movies he made in this country from 1935 to 1991. His versatility and ability to project the dark side of his characters often contradicted the family-friendly persona.

In the words of one of his biographers, Jonathan Coe, much of the love that Americans feel for Stewart "continues to center upon a myth - upon the figure of the incorruptible American patriot, a part that Stewart in fact played only a handful of times. . . . many of Stewart's key performances - whether he likes it or not - are subversive of this image."

His range was considerable, yet he was somehow always "Jimmy Stewart." Andrew Sarris called him "the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema."

He could plumb the depths of romantic obsession in Hitchcock's most personal film, "Vertigo" (1958), and play with the role of a shameless voyeur in another Hitchcock masterpiece, "Rear Window" (1954).

He could lend conviction to both the lone idealist in Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939) and the embittered family man in Capra's post-war classic, "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946), which is a far darker film than its reputation suggests.

He was a dazzling romantic lead in Lubitsch's "The Shop Around the Corner" (1940) and a memorably sly small-town lawyer in Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder" (1959), which may be the finest courtroom drama ever filmed.

When he teamed up with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in Cukor's most fondly remembered comedy, "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), Stewart received the best-actor Oscar - the only one he ever won in competition.

The director-star partnership that lasted longest began with Mann's "Winchester '73" (1950), and continued through the 1950s with a series of classic Westerns - "The Naked Spur" (1953), "The Man From Laramie" (1955) - and included one of the best-loved musical biographies, "The Glenn Miller Story" (1954).

He was also Charles Lindbergh in Billy Wilder's "The Spirit of St. Louis" (1957), a would-be peacemaker counseling Indians in Delmer Daves' "Broken Arrow" (1950), a crusading reporter in Henry Hathaway's "Call Northside 777" (1947), a politician with a secret in John Ford's "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" (1962) and a clown with a secret in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Greatest Show on Earth" (1952).

He demonstrated surprising chemistry with Marlene Dietrich in "Destry Rides Again" (1939) and again in "No Highway in the Sky" (1951). He was a wonderful match with Jean Arthur in "Mr. Smith" and another Capra film, "You Can't Take It With You" (1938) - yet some actresses who did their best work opposite him never repeated the experience.

Doris Day was never more believable than as his frightened wife in Hitchcock's "The Man Who Knew Too Much" (1956). Grace Kelly may have won her Oscar for "The Country Girl" (1954), but her claim to immortality rests largely on her playful performance as Stewart's girlfriend in "Rear Window."

In 1980, Stewart received the American Film Institute's Life Achievement Award, and in 1985 an honorary Oscar. In addition to the Academy Award he won for "The Philadelphia Story," he was nominated for "Mr. Smith," "Wonderful Life," "Anatomy" and "Harvey" (1950), in which he played Elwood P. Dowd, a lovable boozer who stayed sane by communing with a large rabbit who appeared to be invisible to others. He became identified with the role, also playing it on Broadway and television.

Here is the Stewart contradiction in a nutshell: Dowd seems the most reasonable character in the film, he's wry and witty, the most amiable of companions. And he's an incorrigible drunk. (When the film was made, the Production Code didn't allow Stewart to drink on-camera. He's only shown ordering drinks for others.)

His last movie credit was the voice of a droll, tired sheriff, Wylie Burp, in the 1991 cartoon sequel, "An American Tail: Fievel Goes West," in which he claims to be "so far over the hill I'm on the bottom of the other side." It was a parody of his parody of Wyatt Earp in John Ford's "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964).

Stewart could be a severe critic of his own work. He once said that "I never thought that much of my work in `The Philadelphia Story,' " and he claimed that "It's a Wonderful Life" seemed like just another movie while he was shooting it. He had no idea it would become his favorite film.

"That's one of the wonderful things about the picture business," he said.

The Capra classic was produced while the actor was going through a post-war depression, worried that filmmaking wasn't a decent profession. His co-star, Lionel Barrymore, challenged him, asking him if he thought it was "more `decent' to drop bombs on people" than to inspire them with his acting talent. According to Capra, "this argument hit home."

Born May 20, 1908, in Indiana, Pa., Stewart staged plays and acted as a teenager, though he studied architecture at Princeton University.

More stage work during college led to his 1932 Broadway debut and movie stardom with his roommate, Henry Fonda. He was a bachelor until 1949, when he married Gloria Hatrick McLean, who was still married to him when she died of lung cancer three years ago.

In 1983, he returned to Indiana for a 75th-birthday bash that celebrated the wholesome Stewart myth. But there's always been another side to the actor, whose idealized public persona threatened to eclipse the probing qualities of his best work. The artist in him kept complicating things.