James Stewart's america

...The movie is It's a Wonderful Life, and in the scene Stewart is standing next to Donna Reed as the two participate in a long-distance call on an old-fashioned phone...

...he goes...

...Stewart's particular skill was for playing exceptional men—men so quick-witted that their minds out-raced their tongues, causing the trademark stammer that made Stewart sound as though he had never memorized a line and was simply speaking words that were coming into his head for the first time...

...This night, for the third time in his adulthood, he has found himself trapped there by circumstances beyond his control...

...At his best, James Stewart was the great American film actor the way Astaire was the great American dancer and Sinatra the great American singer: He had no visible technique...

...She puts on a recording of a song they once sang together...

...This, of course, only makes her more determined to snare him...

...Connor ought to have been an impossible character to play—he is simultaneously the audience's representative, a witty and lively fellow, and an obnoxious jerk who needs to be taken down more than a few pegs...

...Stewart's track record from 1938 to 1965 was unparalleled : He made more good films than anybody else in Hollywood...

...Because of him, hundreds of lives have been saved, his family kept from ruin, his wife kept from spinster-hood, his hometown kept from moral degradation...

...He wants to resist her, but he can't, at least not sexually...

...Suffocated by a life he does not yet know is wonderful, he is on the verge of committing suicide when he is given a chance to see what the world would have been like without him...

...It is part of Hollywood lore that the award was a consolation prize for Stewart's loss the year before when his performance in Mr...

...Smith is the role that gave rise to the "Jimmy Stewart as Everyman" myth, but even Jefferson Smith proves to be exceptional—though for no good reason except that the plot demands it...

...she smashes the record...

...As they stand close together, listening, George breathes in her scent as she breathes in his...

...capture these qualities helps explain not only why he delivered so many great or near-great performances, but also why he was in so many great or near-great movies...

...Thus, a man known for a cruel and biting wit will be posthumously transformed into a paragon of kindness...

...He is, as the movie's villain says, "the smartest one in the bunch," a clever and resourceful man with a generous nature...

...He is being lionized because for representing America at its best, sunniest, and most optimistic—"the American Everyman," more than one commentator has said...

...What made James Stewart the most beloved of Hollywood icons is that, alone among them, he gave us an unvarnished image of a singularly American greatness...

...Liberated from his own intellectual snobbery, Connor turns some of his contempt on himself for having prostituted his talent to Spy magazine and gleefully betrays his employer and his paycheck for new-found principle...

...James Stewart's America Hollywood's Most Beloved Icon Was No Everyman By John Podhoretz It is a truth, though one not universally acknowledged, that when people die, their eulogists praise them for qualities they did not possess and ignore those qualities they did have...

...a formidable and distant woman becomes, in death, the unconditionally loving mother her children always wished she had been...

...Smith Goes to Washington was passed over...

...Stewart's character in Rear Window is, again, far from admirable, and though he had been a star for almost 20 years when he played the part, he assumed it without vanity...

...George, in a rage, throws the phone down, grabs her by the shoulders, and, almost sobbing, tells her he doesn't want any ground floors, any big chances, and he doesn't want to get married, ever...

...But even though Stewart does yeoman work in Mr...

...And for most of the movie, he is utterly miserable...

...Stewart is nothing short of amazing in The Philadelphia Story, and he won an Oscar for it...

...There was nothing stylized about him, as was the case with almost every other icon of Hollywood's golden age—think of Humphrey Bogart's brooding way with a cigarette, Clark Gable's rat-a-tat voice, the bizarre cadences of John Wayne and Gary Cooper, and almost everything about James Cagney and Cary Grant...

...The phone rings...

...You Can't Take It With You, Destry Rides Again, The Shop Around the Corner, The Philadelphia Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Call North-side 777, Broken Arrow, Rear Window, and Anatomy of a Murder are all glorious pieces of work...

...senator after the worshipful teenage son of a political boss suggests he be appointed—that even Stewart cannot save it...

...You never saw the work...

...His ability to John Podhoretz is deputy editor of The Weekly Standard...

...she tells him to leave...

...He never gets to do what he wants...

...But the notion that, as an actor, James Stewart was the embodiment of the American Everyman gets it almost entirely wrong...

...Macaulay Connor is a real, rounded, unforgettable man...

...And he was wonderful in several films most people would agree are otherwise disposable: The Glenn Miller Story, The Stratton Story, and Shenandoah...

...Stewart was by all accounts a decent, pleasant, and remarkably modest fellow in private life...

...And what he learns is not that he is ordinary, but that he is great...

...He does everything he can to push her away— he calls her spoiled, makes fun of her tastes, and makes it clear he will never marry her...

...In Rear Window, Stewart is a hotshot photojournalist with a broken leg trapped in a hot New York apartment where he cannot so easily get away from the impossibly beautiful socialite Grace Kelly...

...Smith, the part itself is so meretricious—a ridiculously naive Wisconsin scoutmaster who becomes a crusading U.S...

...That is especially true in his sexiest scene, which may be the single sexiest scene on film...

...George Bailey is no American Everyman...

...He is a hero...

...she bursts into tears, and he embraces her, kisses her passionately, and weeps himself, surrendering to his unwanted destiny...

...Disgusted by Senate corruption, he shuts the place down with a filibuster and delivers a speech about idealism so eloquent that it leads his chief tormentor to exit the chamber and immediately commit suicide...

...At a party the night before Hepburn's wedding, the acerbic Connor turns reckless, almost desperately giddy, when he realizes he loves her...

...Depressed and despairing, angry and bitter, he finds himself in the parlor of the girl who has always loved him...

...The same thing is happening in the wake of James Stewart's death last week at the age of 89...

...You're the golden girl, Tracy," he tells Hepburn, turning his literary eloquence on her and winning her love as well, if only for one night...

...Through much of the movie, Stewart drips with contempt—for the Main Line upper class he is spying on, for Hepburn's playboy ex-husband, for the Quaker gentility of a local librarian (having been addressed as "thee," Stewart later asks, "Dost thou have a phone...

...In The Philadelphia Story, Stewart plays Macaulay Connor, a promising young writer of fiction working undercover for a mass-market magazine to get dirt on Katharine Hepburn's exclusive wedding...

...Stewart is George Bailey, a banker who has wanted nothing since his childhood but to leave the small town where he was born and raised to explore the world...

...it is now clear to him that he will never get away...

...Unlike lesser performers, he never looked for an excuse to wink at the audience and let them know the real Jimmy Stewart would never do such things...

...Smith Goes to Washington, Harvey, Winchester '73, Vertigo, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance—have their passionate admirers...

...It is part of his greatest performance, which may be the greatest single performance by an American actor...

...Other Stewart films—Mr...

...George Bailey is the least ordinary character Stewart ever played...

...The Philadelphia Story is actually a portrait of two characters who change over the course of the wedding weekend—most obviously Hepburn's Tracy Lord, who goes from being a "wrathful goddess" to an "ordinary human being," but no less importantly Stewart's Macaulay Connor...

...he comes back in, having forgotten his hat...

...He is tormented by the thought that he is a failure, that his ambitions are greater than his abilities...

...He was the only golden-age icon who could convincingly play characters at once intelligent, thoughtful, flawed, and angry—men who were disappointed, not satisfied, with the life they were leading...

...Finally the friend says he is giving them a chance to get in on the ground floor of what could be the chance of a lifetime...

...It's the town's rich kid, who's calling from New York to flirt with the girl and pass on a tip about a hot business venture...

...And a virile man as well, a man who knows how to attract women and how to be attractive himself...

...he ignores her...

...Stewart is the central figure in two of the sexiest movies ever made— movies that are sexy because the characters he plays find themselves torn between an alluring object of desire and their own wanderlust...

...Smith is a populist superman...

...Like Macaulay Connor, he is a snob, a man so proud of his rugged individualism that he cannot hide his contempt for Kelly's Vogue-magazine existence...