The unbreakable golden rules that shaped James Stewart’s career: “Simple but inflexible”
Few actors have ever been able to convey anything as potent as James Stewart‘s inherent sense of decency. Often considered cinema’s greatest everyman, he made a career out of playing characters who had the conviction and moral certitude that most Americans aspired to in their lives. To this day, cinephiles will still point to his classic performances in Mr Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life as the quintessential ‘Jimmy’ Stewart roles, and that honest, hardworking screen persona stuck with him like glue for the rest of his career.
Fascinatingly, the actor had already zeroed in on what he believed made for an archetypical Stewart movie as early as 1939, only a year after he starred in his breakthrough role in You Can’t Take it With You, and a year before he won his first ‘Best Actor’ Oscar for the romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story. In a press release, he implored the American public to understand that there was little difference between his real-life nature and his acting persona, and it meant he had two rules he abided by when choosing which films to make.
“I have my own rules and adhere to them,” Stewart stated in no uncertain terms. “The rule is simple but inflexible. A James Stewart picture must have two vital ingredients: it will be clean, and it will involve the triumph of the underdog over the bully.”
To most fans of the iconic star, his subsequent five decades in the movie business saw him stick to this rigid set of criteria. He died in 1997 at 89, and was remembered in this mould, with the Jimmy Stewart Museum in his hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania being a tangible tribute to his “legacy of honesty, hard work, and strong values”. The museum’s Janie McKirgan once told The Independent, “He took a little bit of himself into every role, and that is why he seemed so authentic.”
However, if you scratch beneath the surface of Stewart’s squeaky clean image, something that doesn’t quite align with this enduring persona begins to emerge. You see, while he may have defined his non-negotiables regarding film choices in 1939, that was before he went to war and saw 15 months of combat as a bomber pilot. When he returned from the war and picked up his movie career, he continued to play characters that fit within his principles – but he also made far more detours than people tend to remember.
Indeed, in Robert Matzen’s Mission: Jimmy Stewart and the Fight for Europe, the author argued that the war changed Stewart “down to the molecular level” and that he could never articulate the toll that trauma had taken on his soul. However, “one thing he could do was continue to express a bit of it on screen.”
The Stewart who starred in hard-hitting, violent westerns like Winchester ’73 and The Naked Spur, or a quartet of movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock, was not the same Stewart who only wanted to make clean movies in which bullies are vanquished. In The Naked Spur, he played a bounty hunter whose propensity for violence would explode in ways that shocked even the star himself. “It was like he was possessed,” he noted. “He had a demon that drove him. He had a violence that was driving him mad.”
In Rope, Vertigo, Rear Window, and The Man Who Knew Too Much, Hitchcock allowed Stewart to display some of his usual charm on the surface. Still, it belied his characters’ warped personalities and often tragic backstories. These characters tended to be defined by fear, a feeling Stewart knew all too well thanks to the war. “Fear is an insidious and deadly thing,” he gravely warned. “It can warp judgment, freeze reflexes, breed mistakes. And worse, it’s contagious.”
Obviously, none of this is to say that Stewart didn’t stick to his guns regarding the films he wanted to make and the characters he wanted to play. Largely, he did, but he also left himself space to explore darker, more complex characters when the material called for it, and this made him an even more well-rounded movie idol.
