James Stewart
Dewey, Donald
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "James Stewart" able human selfishness and malevolence." With the failure of these controls, "we are still groping for some kind of commonsense oversight." Like Bork, however, Shattuck can come up with nothing...
...That accordion, which someone had used as barter to settle a tab at Stewart Hardware, first led Stewart to the stage as a warm-up act for college plays...
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...04 father ran a hardware store the actor always mentioned in interviews...
...He spends the next few months stuffing himself andworking out with barbells...
...It seemed, Stewart recalls, Princeton, his father's alma mater, in the early thirties— a time when a guy could become a hit at college parties by bringing along his accordion...
...He was good-natured, cheerful, unassuming, and in most ways quite normal except for one mysterious thing inside that seemed to carry him along, with not much real planning, from boyhood on...
...It was a three-story structure full to the rafters with everything needed to build a house, hunt a deer, plant a garden and harvest it, repair a car, or make a scrapbook...
...Donald Dewey avoids the cheap sentimentality that often attaches to Stewart, but he doesn't quite have what it takes to lift the 88year-old actor's story above the level of Boy's Life fare...
...The best scene in the book comes when Stewart, having enlisted in the Army, gets rejected on account of his chronically low weight...
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...He thinks Harvey is about the "creative tension" involved in playing the "asexual" Elwood P. Dowd, or just playing a crazy person convincingly— completely missing the theme of purity of heart...
...He seems to assume that such emotional range could only have come from some inner turmoil...
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...And it captures better than any of Dewey's speculations the source of Stewart's greatness...
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...Goodbye, my dear...
...linaierhillse The American Spectator December 1996 79...
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...Then came a series of what Stewart always described as "accidents," which took him first to a Cape Cod acting troupe that included Henry Fonda, then to Broadway, and then, in the summer of 1935, on to Hollywood...
...In this respect, Shat-tuck's fascinating book is like Bork's— more convincing in diagnosis than in prescriptive remedy...
...Conservatives will find his proposal self-evident and sensible — as far as it goes...
...I much prefer Stewart's own description of his acting technique, in an interview about Harvey: "You've got to convince the audience that this big rabbit is your friend...
...At one time or another, he has decried television, long hair, and Jimmy Carter as undermining the social fabric...
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...Voluntary abstinence—setting limits for ourselves—is the other nostrum he vouchsafes...
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...Never does it occur to Dewey that the actor's "alchemical stuff" might be found in Stewart's convictions about life and America...
...I feel sure that God will lead you through this mad experience...
...From there on out, Stewart's life was so normal and wholesome that Dewey strains to find the source of the actor's talent...
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...Between the intensity of his preparations and that of his performance," Dewey writes, there still yawns the question of the specific contents of Stewart's resourcesNice Guys Finish First in the Hearts of Their Countrymen REVIEWED BY Matthew Scully eading Jimmy Stewart called to mind Edmund Morris, Reagan's iographer, who describes a heroic simplicity running through Reagan's life...
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...Stewart came from Indiana, Pennsylvania, where his Scottish Presbyterian MATTHEW SCULLY is a writer living in Virginia...
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...Even after I grew up and moved away and saw larger sights, the store remained with me...
...Shattuck has the noble confidence of an old-fashioned liberal in the power of reason and restraint to negotiate the surrounding darknesses...
...Dewey treats it as some sort of distasteful character flaw to be reconciled with Stewart's on-screen idealism...
...He brushes off The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance for inadequacies such as a simplistic premise and cheap-looking interior sets, missing the theme of self-sacrifice...
...It's a safe bet the actor himself never dwelt too long in these regions, preferring to let the "alchemical stuff" take care of itself...
...We're also told that his father, too shy to say so outright, slipped this note into his son's coat pocket before Stewart left for the war: My dear Jim boy, Soon after you read this letter, you will be on your way to the worst sort of danger...
...I am staking my faith in these words...
...I love you more than I can tell you...
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...I continue only to pray...
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...Dewey usually finds something noteworthy in Stewart's lesser films and misses the big things in his best work...
...In some circumstances the path of abstinence may be fully responsible and life-affirming," he ventures, in accents whose tentativeness suggests he thinks he's going to shock his audience...
...But Jim, I am banking on the enclosed copy of the 91st Psalm...
...He's right about the "darkness" of Capra's Wonderful Life, but his dismissal of it as a "seasonal bauble" merely because it's become "ritualized" Christmas fare —that is, a lot of people watch and enjoy it—brings to44 Jimmy Stewart's life was so normal and wholesome that Dewey strains to find the source of the actor's talent...
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...There's a "yawn" here, alright, but it comes from Dewey's labored attempts to locate the "specific contents" of Jimmy Stewart...
...Like Bork, however, Shattuck can come up with nothing better than warning labels, saying "we should label his [Sade's] writings carefully: potential poison, polluting to our moral and intellectual environment...
...Not much for books, Stewart nevertheless ended up at 78 December 19 9 6 The American Spectator the alchemical stuff in reserve to be transformed by somebody who, by his own bemused testimony, never felt any special inadequacy or superiority in growing up and who, to judge by his off-screen conversations, has preferred the approximate and the deflective for articulating his emotions...
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...And Shattuck, a scrupulous liberal gingerly eager to rehabilitate the idea of self-control, finds validation for abstinence in, surprisingly, Emily DickJames Stewart: A Biography Donald Dewey Turner /5n...
...just one thing about Stewart doesn't sit well with Dewey—the actor's lifelong conservatism...
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...I could conceive of no human need that could not be satisfied in this store...
...Even before his stepson was killed in Vietnam, he could denounce antiwar protesters as traitors...
...On the second try Stewart takes the Army doctor aside and says, "Why don't you re-run a whole test on me, and this time forget to weigh me...
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...The book is worth reading if only for passages like this...
...More than fifteen years after the House Un-American Activities Committee had finished his work in Hollywood, Stewart could still tell an interviewer that Communists were holding sway in the motion picture industry...
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...A walk through the woods will reveal birds, deer, squirrels and even little crawly things that you never would have known about otherwise...
...But then I realized that what was central to my life was not just the store but the man who presided over it—my father...
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...Stewart's life was much the same, a kind of anti-Hollywood fable: gifts not squandered, a career not wrecked by self-indulgence, wealth and fame not abused, a wife and children not abandoned...
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...He worked in the store, sang in the choir, plotted travel adventures, and had a dog named Bounce whom the actor would still be reminiscing about 6o years later...
...I can say no more...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
