The awful film James Stewart called his worst: “I couldn’t bring myself to watch that picture”
After spending most of his career as Hollywood’s quintessential everyman and earning a reputation for being one of the nicest guys in the business, it was rare for James Stewart to be caught saying anything that flew in the face of his status as an all-around top bloke.
Of course, rules tend to have exceptions, and the Academy Award winner had a few. As much as audiences identified him with the upstanding American gentleman who’d never get on anyone’s bad side, Stewart had several run-ins with the mafia that even saw him subjected to death threats.
That was incredibly un-Stewart-like behaviour, and so was his declaration that he’d never work with Donna Reed again after he held her personally responsible for It’s a Wonderful Life bombing so hard at the box office it killed a studio, with his anger intensified by the beloved classic’s position as his much-heralded big screen return following World War II.
For the most part, Stewart played to type on-camera and off and very rarely spoke ill of his work. From his perspective, a lot of people worked hard to make a picture, and criticising it only served to undermine the graft they put in. However, 1941’s Pot o’ Gold was an entirely different story.
His penultimate credit before enlisting in the armed forces and becoming a decorated veteran who flew dozens of daring missions during the war, the musical rom-com starred Stewart as James Hamilton Haskell, who closes his struggling record shop to join his uncle’s health food business.
In typical odd couple fashion, his uncle can’t stand listening to music, which forces Haskell into the formulaic position of sheltering his appreciation of song-and-dance from Charles Winninger’s CJ while also falling for Paulette Goddard’s Molly McCorkle, who plays in a band and lives across the street.
It sounds like sentimental tripe, and that’s exactly what Stewart thought. Reflecting on his filmic highs and lows, he called Pot o’ Gold “easily the worst film I ever made.” In fact, in Michael Munn’s Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend, it’s revealed that he spent the better part of a decade trying to avoid it at all costs.
“I just couldn’t bring myself to watch that picture until 1950, when I was staying at a hotel in New York,” he said. “I turned on the television, and there was this awful film.” If there’s one guaranteed way to erase a bad movie from memory, then being drafted by the military less than a month before it premiered in cinemas for training before being deployed overseas is probably high up on the list.
Stewart didn’t appreciate it with some distance either, with his first time revisiting Pot o’ Gold confirming his suspicions that it was, in fact, the single worst movie of his career.
