Jimmy Stewart

#1In 1941, Jimmy Stewart was finally in the place Hollywood had once struggled to imagine for him.

#2A few years earlier, studios weren't quite sure what to do with this tall, skinny actor. He paused when he talked. His limbs looked awkward on camera. He didn't move or sound like a polished leading man.

#3Then those same qualities started working for him.

#4In "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Stewart played an inexperienced idealist dropped into a corrupt political system. He didn't look slick enough to belong there, and that was exactly why people believed him.

#5Then he won the Academy Award for Best Actor for "The Philadelphia Story."

#6He'd made it.

#7And that was when he stopped.

#8Stewart joined the military.

#9Plenty of Hollywood stars served during World War II. Clark Gable did. So did Stewart's longtime friend Henry Fonda. What made Stewart's case unusual wasn't simply that he enlisted.

#10It was what he kept asking for afterward.

#11The military had obvious uses for a famous actor. Stewart could train pilots, appear at public events, help with recruitment and war-bond campaigns. He did some of that.

#12But he wanted combat duty.

#13Not a publicity version of war. The real thing.

#14Why would a man who had just reached the top of Hollywood keep asking to be sent somewhere he might not come back from?

#15For that, you have to go back to a hardware store in Pennsylvania.

#16Stewart grew up in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his father, Alexander Stewart, ran the family hardware store.

#17Jimmy was the only son. His future looked pretty sensible.

#18Go to Princeton. Study something respectable. Build a career. Maybe stay connected to the family business.

#19He studied architecture, not acting.

#20He liked machines and airplanes and built model aircraft, but there wasn't some childhood plan to become a movie star.

#21Then he graduated into the Great Depression.

#22Architecture wasn't exactly overflowing with opportunities for young graduates, and around that time his Princeton friend Joshua Logan invited him to a summer theater company on Cape Cod.

#23The invitation wasn't glamorous. Stewart later remembered being told to bring his accordion along so he could play at parties.

#24That was how the architecture student ended up with the University Players.

#25And there he met people who were just as unknown as he was.

#26Henry Fonda. Margaret Sullavan.

#27By the end of the summer, Stewart had a choice.

#28Go back to the life everyone expected. Or keep acting.

#29He went home and told his family he was heading for Broadway.

#30Stewart later joked that everyone seemed to reach for a chair.

#31Their Princeton-educated only son had come back to tell them he wasn't settling down. He was going into show business.

#32So he left.

#33The trouble was, deciding to become an actor and actually becoming one were two very different things.

#34Stewart and Henry Fonda spent their early New York years as struggling actors. Jobs came and disappeared. Stewart later joked that plays seemed to close whenever he joined them.

#35Hollywood wasn't much kinder at first.

#36An early screen test went nowhere, and Stewart eventually ended up back in Pennsylvania, helping at his father's hardware store again.

#37Then the phone rang.

#38MGM wanted him back in Hollywood.

#39This time there was a contract.

#40That didn't mean there was a plan.

#41MGM tried Stewart in different roles and watched to see what might stick. Stewart wasn't impressed with what he saw either. Onscreen, he thought he looked impossibly thin, all long arms and legs with no idea what to do with them.

#42Then Margaret Sullavan came back into the story.

#43She wanted Stewart opposite her in "Next Time We Love." He was still adjusting from stage acting to the camera, and she helped him work through the smaller movements and quieter delivery film required.

#44She didn't invent Jimmy Stewart's acting style.

#45But she gave him an important opening before the studio had figured him out.

#46Then Frank Capra saw something else.

#47Maybe Stewart didn't need fixing.

#48Capra didn't try to polish away the pauses or the slightly gangly movement.

#49He used them.

#50Stewart could look like a man who hadn't rehearsed the perfect thing to say. When he got worked up, his voice climbed. He looked less like a movie hero and more like somebody who had somehow found himself in the middle of a movie.

#51That became powerful in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."

#52Jefferson Smith isn't a master politician. He's inexperienced and badly outmatched. So when he takes on a corrupt system, his lack of polish feels like sincerity.

#53The quality MGM had struggled to cast became the reason audiences trusted him.

#54And by 1941, Stewart had an Oscar for "The Philadelphia Story."

#55The hardware-store owner's son had reached the top of Hollywood.

#56Then he put on a uniform.

#57Stewart already knew how to fly. Before entering the military, he'd built up substantial experience as a civilian pilot.

#58That made him useful.

#59So did being Jimmy Stewart.

#60He trained pilots and took part in publicity work. Those weren't meaningless assignments. A country at war needed instructors, recruitment, and public support.

#61Stewart still wanted something else.

#62He kept pushing for an operational assignment.

#63Eventually, in 1943, he went to Britain and took command responsibilities in a unit flying B-24 Liberator bombers.

#64Now there were no retakes.

#65Bombing crews flew into antiaircraft fire and enemy fighters. Aircraft left and sometimes didn't return.

#66On a mission against Gotha, Stewart's B-24 was hit by flak. The aircraft was damaged, and the attack tore into the floor near his feet.

#67They still had to get home.

#68And Stewart wasn't responsible only for himself. He was a commander. Every bomber in the formation carried a crew, which meant every missing aircraft meant missing men.

#69He eventually flew 20 combat missions.

#70Then the war ended, and Stewart came home alive.

#71From the outside, the next part should have been easy.

#72Go back to Hollywood. Pick up where he left off.

#73It wasn't.

#74Before the war, Stewart had been an Oscar-winning star. Now he'd been away for years, and Hollywood hadn't stopped moving while he was gone.

#75He wasn't even sure he still had an audience.

#76He also remembered questioning what acting meant after living through work where the consequences had been very different from anything on a film set.

#77One of the people still beside him was Henry Fonda.

#78They'd known each other before either one was famous. Both became stars. Both went to war. Both came home.

#79And when they spent time together afterward, they didn't need to turn it into a grand conversation about what had happened.

#80They flew kites. They built model airplanes. They hung out.

#81Stewart later remembered that Fonda would sometimes reassure him about his ability as an actor.

#82Then Frank Capra brought him a new film.

#83It was "It's a Wonderful Life."

#84George Bailey spends his life postponing the future he wants.

#85He wants to leave town. He stays. He wants adventure. Responsibility keeps pulling him back.

#86Then one night the whole structure collapses. Money is missing. Scandal is closing in. George lashes out at his family and starts to believe everyone might have been better off without him.

#87At a bar, he prays.

#88Stewart later said that while shooting the scene, real emotion came over him unexpectedly.

#89It's tempting to draw a straight line from there to the war: Stewart had been through combat, so that's where George Bailey's despair came from.

#90The evidence doesn't take us that far.

#91But George Bailey did ask Stewart to go somewhere different from the earnest idealists of his prewar career. This decent man could also panic, rage, resent his life, and collapse.

#92Today, "It's a Wonderful Life" looks like the obvious triumphant return.

#93In 1946, it didn't.

#94The movie didn't perform strongly enough to match its cost and expectations. It wasn't an unseen catastrophe, but it didn't give Stewart the clean answer he wanted either.

#95He worried that maybe he'd lost his audience.

#96So the movie we now remember as proof that Jimmy Stewart was back didn't feel like proof at the time.

#97Then something else changed.

#98Hollywood itself.

#99Before the war, Stewart had worked inside the classic studio system. Companies like MGM signed actors to long contracts, assigned the films, and shaped the careers.

#100After the war, that structure was weakening.

#101Stewart wasn't simply an MGM contract player anymore, and his agent, Lew Wasserman, found a way to use that.

#102Universal couldn't just hand Stewart whatever fixed salary a major star might demand. So Wasserman helped structure a different kind of deal.

#103Stewart would share in the profits if the movie succeeded.

#104One of the key films in that new phase was "Winchester '73."

#105This wasn't the first profit-participation deal Hollywood had ever seen. There were precedents.

#106What mattered was what it did for Stewart.

#107The film succeeded, and he made serious money from the arrangement. But the bigger shift was control.

#108He was moving from being the actor a studio placed into a movie to a star with more power over which movies he made and who he made them with.

#109Years earlier, MGM had wondered what kind of role Jimmy Stewart fit into.

#110Now Stewart had more room to decide what kind of Jimmy Stewart people would see.

#111That helped bring him to Anthony Mann.

#112And Mann noticed something in that familiar face that other filmmakers hadn't used very much.

#113Anger.

#114In "Winchester '73," Stewart plays Lin McAdam.

#115Lin isn't Jefferson Smith.

#116He's hunting a man. He's driven by revenge. He gets violent.

#117And yet he still looks and sounds like Jimmy Stewart.

#118That's what makes it hit.

#119Audiences already knew the friendly face. So when that face turned furious, the anger had extra force behind it.

#120Mann and Stewart kept going.

#121"Bend of the River." "The Naked Spur." "The Far Country." "The Man from Laramie."

#122Across those westerns, Stewart could be suspicious, bitter, greedy, vengeful, violent.

#123But the old Stewart hadn't disappeared.

#124In the very same year as "Winchester '73," he also appeared in "Harvey," playing the wonderfully gentle Elwood P. Dowd, a man whose best friend happens to be an enormous rabbit nobody else can see.

#125A revenge-driven gunman in one movie. A man politely talking about an invisible rabbit in another.

#126Both worked.

#127Stewart hadn't traded his wholesome image for a dark one.

#128He'd simply become much harder to contain.

#129Then Alfred Hitchcock found an even more uncomfortable use for the face audiences trusted.

#130In "Rear Window," Stewart plays a photographer stuck at home with a broken leg.

#131He starts watching the neighbors across the courtyard.

#132At first he's bored. Then he's curious. Then he becomes convinced one of the men across the way has murdered his wife.

#133The thing is, Jeff's behavior is uncomfortable before we even know whether he's right.

#134He's spying on people.

#135And we're spying with him.

#136Hitchcock had a huge advantage here: the man doing the looking was Jimmy Stewart.

#137Audiences had spent years learning to trust that face. So when he looks across the courtyard, we look too.

#138Hitchcock didn't remove Stewart's likability.

#139He used it against us.

#140Then "Vertigo" pushed the idea further.

#141Stewart plays Scottie, a former detective who becomes obsessed with a woman named Madeleine. After she dies, he meets Judy, a woman who looks remarkably like her.

#142Scottie doesn't simply fall in love with Judy.

#143He starts changing her.

#144The clothes. The hair. The color.

#145He pressures a living woman to become the image of the dead woman he can't let go.

#146The same face that once embodied political innocence in "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" was now attached to obsession and control.

#147And it still felt familiar.

#148That was the unsettling part.

#149Stewart's great screen advantage had never really changed.

#150People trusted him.

#151What changed was how far a filmmaker could take that trust.

#152Some of Stewart's biggest films weren't finished changing when he finished acting in them.

#153"It's a Wonderful Life" is the clearest example.

#154It hadn't been the commercial triumph people might assume from its reputation today. But decades later, complicated copyright circumstances created a period when television stations could air it much more freely.

#155So they did.

#156Again and again. Christmas after Christmas.

#157Repeated exposure helped turn George Bailey from the hero of an old movie into part of the American holiday ritual.

#158"Vertigo" took another route.

#159It had admirers when it came out in 1958, but it didn't immediately hold the position it has now.

#160Critics kept returning to it.

#161Its reputation climbed over decades until, in 2012, it reached the top of Sight and Sound's major international critics' poll.

#162Stewart could finish a performance.

#163He couldn't finish what time would do to it.

#164By then, "Jimmy Stewart" had become shorthand for a certain kind of American screen presence: decent, modest, trustworthy.

#165But that's only half the story.

#166His darker roles worked because people already believed in the good man underneath them.

#167The trust didn't disappear.

#168It made the anger, voyeurism, violence, and obsession more disturbing.

#169Stewart died in 1997.

#170Afterward, his family found their way back into a part of his life he had barely talked about at home.

#171The war.

#172His daughter Kelly Stewart-Harcourt has said that her father rarely discussed World War II with the family. But after his death, they found handwritten wartime material, including a journal and flight records.

#173There were fears in those pages. Uncertainty. The strain of what he was living through.

#174And there was someone else.

#175His father.

#176Kelly has described the journal as showing Stewart still wanting to please him.

#177That takes the story all the way back to Pennsylvania.

#178Alexander Stewart once expected his Princeton-educated only son to come home.

#179Jimmy did come home.

#180Then he told the family he was leaving to become an actor.

#181He went to Broadway. Then Hollywood. He won an Oscar. He left for war. He commanded bombers. He survived. He came back unsure whether acting still had a place for him.

#182Then he returned to the screen and found out how many different people could live behind that familiar face.

#183Years later, some of those movies became bigger than they'd ever been when he made them.

#184And after all of that was over, his family opened an old wartime record and found someone who had been there before the Oscars, the bombers, and the famous face.

#185The son who had left his father's hardware store.

#186Still hoping to make his father proud.