Summer of Stars is a MovieJawn celebration of actors that have shined on the silver screen. Follow along as we count down some of our favorite players from various eras in the magical cosmos of cinema

Don’t Call Me Jimmy

by Kevin Bresnahan, Contributor

The first thing to know about Jimmy Stewart is he didn’t like to be called Jimmy. His friends called him Jim, and to the world at large he preferred to be James, or Mr Stewart, or General Stewart. He was a rock-ribbed Republican out of Indiana, Pennsylvania and he believed in dignity and distance. Why such a person should choose show business is anybody’s guess. 

Nevertheless, after catching the acting bug at Princeton in the 1920s, Stewart stormed Hollywood in a series of screwballs and rom coms as a reliable leading man, peaking when he played Mr Kralik in The Shop Around the Corner opposite his longtime friend Margaret Sullavan (James credited her with teaching him how to act) and then on to one of his truly great movies. 

The Philadelphia Story, directed by George Cukor for MGM, has aged poorly in some ways. Katherine Hepburn plays Tracy Lord – the 80s porn star Tracy Lords took her nom d'écran from this picture – but our Tracy is the daughter of vast old Main Line wealth. She has divorced fellow aristocrat C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) and is contemplating remarriage to a “nouveau riche” businessman (John Howard as George Kittredge, not that it matters) whose only flaw is that he made his own money instead of inheriting it; and also that he is not Cary Grant. To make matters worse, Tracy’s father, an obsessive fornicator, blames his philandering on the fact that his daughter was not “devoted” to him uncritically, “and without her he might be inclined to go out in search of his youth.” If he cheats on your mother it’s your fault, in other words. How did John Halliday deliver this bullshit line with a straight face, even eighty years ago? 

That said, the script is hilarious and tight as a drum and the three leads, Hepburn, Grant, and Stewart as the journalist Macaulay “Mike” Connor deliver the acid sharp lines with joy. Hepburn is beautiful and full of life, Cary Grant is at his most debonair. But if it weren’t for Stewart’s hilarious turn as Connor, this film might have been the cinematic version of the kind of celebrity puff piece his bosses want Connor to write. Mike is a serious writer, but the Depression’s the Depression and bills must be paid, so he’s taken a job at Look Magazine as a reluctant celebrity spy.

Much of the humor evolves out of Stewart’s everyman being bemused by the “eccentricities” of the super-rich, some of which are staged for his benefit, and for laughs, by Tracy and her goofy kid sister.  By this point Stewart’s been a working actor for more than a decade and he’s already a pro. He has so many tools, as when confronted with a Quaker librarian who seems to have stepped out of the pages of one of the books in the stacks. The way he plays off the other two movie stars is a lesson in what basketball fans call working away from the ball. The truth is the three leads, each at the top of their game, appear to be having a blast making this movie. 

The eventful night before the problematic wedding leans hard into farce and slapstick, and Stewart is up to it, delivering one of the funniest drunk scenes you will find. But the best part of the whole picture, the one that does most to refute the ample layers of snobbery, is the way Haven and Connor, each wanting to despise the other, come to size each other up, weigh each other, and in the end the Main Line aristo and the middle-class Irish kid from Notre Dame realize that they see in the other the only other worthy man around. 

Stewart left Hollywood for a while in the 40s to fight in the Second World War. They tried to make him a propaganda star, like Ron Reagan, but Stewart was a qualified pilot and insisted on driving B-24s in the bombing campaign against Germany. 

After the war Stewart pivots to westerns, like much of Hollywood. He made plenty of them, and continued to do until the 70s, long after they had gone out of favor. Winchester ’73 and Broken Arrow stand as two performances of classic leading tough guys, each of whom Stewart imbues with such controlled passion, such conflicted hearts, that they verge into anti-hero territory. 

But it was The Man Who Liberty Valance that he turned the role of Western hero on its ear, and left us even wondering if there was any such thing. 

James Taylor wrote a song about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “the greatest man of all.” But who was the man who shot Liberty Valance?

Director John Ford made fourteen westerns in the sound era. The three best, Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance all starred John Wayne. But only the last had Stewart. Stewart and Ford kept their distance. They each recognized the other’s strength and talent, but Jim Stewart had no brief for Ford’s boorish behavior. Stewart’s best friend in the business, Henry Fonda, made a number of great pictures with Ford, but finally had to punch him in the nose on the set of Mr Roberts (1955). John Ford insisted in humiliating his talent for some reason, and Stewart wouldn’t have it. 

Still when they got together on Liberty Valance, they produced a fantastic Western that was also a deconstruction of the Western. 

Stewart is Ransom Stoddard, a peaceable Northeastern lawyer who goes west to help bring civility and rule of law to the dry southwestern territory about to become a state. “A pilgrim,” he’s called by John Wayne’s Tom Doniphon, who both pities and is impressed by him. Rance Stoddard is the definition of a greenhorn – and Old West term which comes, as it happens, from the Yiddish: America, go figure – and he has no idea how things work in this dry hardscrabble town. 

This picture, like all of Ford’s westerns, is about imposing order, civilization and democracy on a wilderness and also what is lost when that happens. Liberty Valance, a perfect outlaw, played by the great Lee Marvin, a WWII South Pacific Marine who’d seen the worst there is of us, represents chaos, might making right, the Old West, the chaotic free for all.

Stoddard is the opposite, the face of law and order, of civilization. As always in Ford, civilization is a feminine virtue, violence a masculine one. At one point the villain comes across Rance in an apron and will never let him forget it. But when is it time to take off the apron? Must peace be protected through violence?  

I don’t care how old this film is, I’m not spoiling the ending, but suffice it to say that if you’re looking for an easy lesson from the literal showdown between these too contending forces of human nature you’ve come to wrong shop. 

The pictures James Stewart made with Alfred Hitchcock are among his best, and Hitch’s best, too. Vertigo has a perennial spot near the top of most Best 100 Films lists. The way Stewart twists and distorts the hero persona, inflicting cruelties on Kim Novak and revealing the fear within his Detective (Ret) Scottie Ferguson, is the kind of thing older American actors rarely did in that era. 

Rear Window doesn’t carry the same psychological punch, but it’s more fun and super suspenseful, much of the tension wrought by having Stewart’s Jeffries, world traveling photographer and adventurer, confined to a wheel chair. He is forced to watch as his lover Lisa. Carol. Fremont. (Grace Kelly at her peak, which is a high peak indeed) takes on the masculine role, the action hero. As Lisa gamely tries to solve a crime and Stewart physically squirms in his chair, able only to watch, the picture revels in the terror of powerlessness, and the predicament of being a viewer. 

Hitchcock, being Hitchcock, is commenting on the meaning of film here, of watching. What is the difference between art and voyeurism? Where does porn factor in? 

In the end, Jeff Jeffries has only one weapon to defend himself and his gal: the camera. 

James Stewart’s career can be used to map the progress/decline of American men, from wisecracking but fundamentally innocent screwball, to the war, to the dried husks of men who came home from the war. How those of us who seem most typical of average American maledom are the most twisted inside. 

At the same time, Stewart offered a way out of that trap. His men were not tough guys, and did not seek out a fight, but they knew how to handle themselves if it came down to it. Stewart was loved by ladies and liked by men, a gentleman and a good egg. He was the soul of affability, right until the moment it was time to stop being affable.