By Stuart Mitchner
One fine Princeton Saturday afternoon in June 1982 we were part of the crowd on Prospect Avenue watching the P-rade when someone yelled “Jimmy!” and there he was, towering over the rest of the marchers in the Class of 1932 contingent, waving and smiling. That moment when movie life and real life coalesced put a glow on the rest of the day and had us thinking of the onetime campus presence who played the accordion and partied on Prospect and acted at Theatre Intime and went on to become George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) and the “lucky winner” Bill Lawrence in The Jackpot (1950).
Wait. Bill who? No, Bill Lawrence is not a household name and The Jackpot has been buried in obscurity for 75 years while Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is a holiday classic. Yet James Stewart gives a remarkably physical performance as the winner of a $24,000 jackpot (twice falling down a flight of stairs), the difference being that while George Bailey emerges as a triumphant hero, Bill Lawrence goes from joyful bewilderment to jail in a Swiftian satire exposing the surreal essence of American materialism embodied by game shows. The New Yorker’s John McCarten found Stewart “utterly persuasive as a distracted citizen never quite certain what to do with a palomino pony, a land yacht, an interior decorator, a quarter ton of beef, a couple of thousand cans of Campbell’s soups, and a lady portrait painter of appetizing proportions.” Over and over again, Bill has to explain that “it won’t be quite $24,000, I’m afraid. That’s a radio figure, you know. And don’t forget, those tax boys will be after me.”
“Hi, Jimmy!”
Today is James Stewart’s birthday. Like most people who grew up with his films, I’ve never been comfortable calling him “James,” and if I’d ever run into him in Bloomington, Indiana, I’d have shouted, “Hi, Jimmy!” Probably the first movie of his I ever saw was Harvey (1950), in which he plays a character named Elwood P. Dowd, whose best friend is an invisible white rabbit. A few years later, I wandered innocently into an afternoon showing of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope. I should have known what was in store from the image of Stewart on the billboard, with a rope in his hand, his name in big letters under the stark, red-lettered title. He looked grim, as if he were complicit in the evil in that New York apartment where two prep-school psychopaths host a dinner party after strangling a fellow student, stowing the body in a fancy chest, and “serving food from his grave” as Stewart’s character says in a vehemently accusatory speech at the end. I was too young to realize it at the time, but I’d just had a glimpse of the hell’s kitchen of Stewart’s genius.
His “Darker Side”
In A Biographical Dictionary of Film (Knopf 1994), David Thomson describes Stewart as “one of the most intriguing examples of a star cast increasingly against his accepted character.” After pointing out “the contradiction in Stewart himself, between hardness and vulnerability,” Thomson refers to the emergence of his “darker side” in the “frenzy and gloom” of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a decade before the “surprise” of Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958): “A masterpiece by any terms, Stewart’s portrayal of the detective who loses his nerve and then becomes entranced by the two forms of a mythic Kim Novak is frightening in its intensity: a far cry from a man who talked to rabbits.”
Intimate Lightning
Of all the great Hollywood stars, none has been so consistently and shortsightedly oversimplified — Mr. Nice Guy, the quintessential “ordinary man,” a gawky, drawling, aw-shucks decent, noble American male, who, to quote Michiko Kakutani, “radiated a quality of unadorned decency … that made him the ideal hero.”
The essence of Stewart’s art, however, has nothing decent or ordinary about it. Although he says that his secret is to “try not to make the acting show,” he’s a deeply emotional actor who can touch you with a whisper or a look and can generate enough intimate lightning to make your hair stand on end.
In a scene with Katherine Hepburn in George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940), where the two of them have been trading gibes, he grabs her by the shoulders and assaults her with a rhapsody (“There’s a magnificence in you, Tracy! You’re lit from within!”). He’s so wild and wonder-struck, beaming at her like a mad scientist who has just discovered the elixir of life, that it has them both trembling; the revelation he’s seized by simply overwhelms her, dissolves her (“Keep talking,” she begs, she’s swooning, “my insteps are melting … put me in your pocket!”). Few, if any, of his peers could have done that scene with the power required to convince us that a mere speech could have such a devastating impact on the rich girl who had baited him with a taunt that apparently inspired the outburst (“So much thought, so little feeling”).
It’s often been noted, including by Stewart himself, that the 1940 Best Actor Oscar he won for The Philadelphia Story was a consolation prize from the Academy to make up for overlooking his bravura performance the previous year in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The filibuster scene in Mr. Smith, which stands as one of the supreme examples of virtuoso acting in American film, is stoked by the same emotional fire, from its hushed, hoarse, against-all-odds relentlessness to the final prayerful invocation to decency. What Stewart accomplishes in that scene is just a more layered and extended version of what he’s doing when he dazzles and disarms Hepburn.
Moments
“In films, what everyone is striving for is to produce moments,” Stewart told an audience at the British Film Theatre in 1972. “Not a performance, not a characterization, not something where you get into the part — you produce moments.” He recalled shooting a western (The Far Country) on location in British Columbia when a grizzled stranger “came out of the mist … and looked at me and said, ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. I recognize ya. Well, I heard you was here, and I thought I’d come up and say hello. I’ve seen a lot of your picture shows, but I think the one I liked best — you were in this room. And your girlfriend was in the next room and there were fireflies outside, and you recited a piece of poetry to her.”
The girlfriend was Hedy Lamarr and the picture was Come Live With Me, released in 1941. As Stewart told Peter Bogdanovich on another occasion, “That little … tiny thing — didn’t last even a minute — he’d remembered all those years…. And that’s the thing — that’s the great thing about the movies.”