Stewart: Never Afraid of the Dark

A Film Icon Who Dared to Explore the Sinister Side

Jimmy Stewart exemplifies a principle unacknowledged in our culture of late: It's possible, his life quietly argues, to be a movie star, a general, a pilot, a Republican, a millionaire and still a great artist. He was to movies what Wallace Stevens, the Hartford insurance executive, was to poetry.

That on the event of his death Wednesday he was seen on too many TV news shows as "beloved" instead of "brilliant" is a considerable injustice; it reduces what should not be reduced. He was not George Bailey of "It's a Wonderful Life": He was smarter, tougher, considerably more gifted. He was not Elwood P. Dowd of "Harvey": He was more incisive and wholly ungrounded in delusion. He was not the Mr. Smith who went to Washington, the naive, shuffling country boy of the aw-shucks demeanor, the shy glance, the unthreatening stutter. He was all of them and more, an actor of considerable depth, passion, complexity and facility. He contained multitudes. But in a way that's too easy to forget; he represents a more subtle tradition of acting that many critics are impatient with and tend to undervalue.

He was an auteur actor who managed to stamp his personality on every role he played, and combine himself, his own past and his gift with the characters he played, and thereby occupy them so totally that the line between performing and being seemed no longer to exist.

This is a purely American invention. The British actors, more revered in some sectors, are far more technical. They have studied. They have practiced. They know tricks. They have mastered breath discipline, iambic line reading, eyebrow angle and pupil dilation, stage body language. They understand lighting and will rip the bloody hell out of the poor guy who gives them a No. 4 bulb when they need a No. 3. This is not to reduce them to mere magicians of body, face and voice, but to point up a difference.

With their foundation of technique, they're particularly able to give special grace and power to the text-driven classical theater. When they bring those skills to the screen, they tend to create glorious artifices, confabulations whose very confabulationness is part of the pleasure. Their enslavement to and amplification of the text is the great thrill of their work.

When you see, say, Laurence Olivier's brilliant Hamlet, or Kenneth Branagh as Henry V, you are seeing greatness, but it is irrevocably linked to text. It is a performance of a written work. You love it as performance; you admire it, you treasure it, but in some subtle way, you see through it. You never forget the actor behind the costume, and the well-practiced tongue that never trips over those brilliant five-footed lines.

The Americans, particularly the first few generations of actors in sound films, came to their craft differently. Even when they had formal theatrical experience, they were not grounded in it like the Brits, and did not arrive before the cameras at 22 with seven seasons of Shakespearean repertory in the hinterlands behind them. They didn't know "Coriolanus" from "Timon of Athens."

In fact, one of their distinguishing features was that they all seemed to be somewhat embarrassed by acting, as if it somehow wasn't men's work. That gave them an enormous pool of masculine reserve, which the camera, in some way, felt and captured. There was a tension at the heart of the great male stars this country produced from the mid-'30s to the mid-'50s, with Stewart merely the prime example, but the same thing existed in John Wayne, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart and Stewart's great friend Henry Fonda.

In their best performances, they moved beyond imitation into being. They obliterated the text, made it go away. This narrowed their range considerably, but it may have deepened their emotional impact and conviction. When they read lines, the lines sounded like remarks. In fact, more formal theatrical rhetoric -- from Shakespeare to Ibsen -- sounded awful in their mouths. They looked good with guns, in hats, on horses, behind the wheel, out-of-doors. Who wanted to see them frozen in the No. 4 filter in sandals, tights and some foppish little tutu, trying desperately to remember whether it was "Et tu, Brute" or "Tu et Brute."

Jimmy Stewart, son of a hardware store owner, was trained in men's work and fully expected to go into it, with a degree in architecture from Princeton in 1932. But he never built an outhouse, much less a skyscraper. Instead he drifted into acting almost as a lark, on the foundation of some amateur theatrics at Princeton and a friend's suggestion that he enjoy a summer's pleasure with a group of handsome swells and classy coeds who had taken up residence at the University Players at Falmouth, Mass. The pal was the great-director-to-be Joshua Logan; on Cape Cod, Stewart met buddy-to-be Fonda, and as Fonda later recalled, "I saw him onstage and he was so good. He had no right to be so good." He just drifted onto Broadway and then, by 1935, three years out of school, to Hollywood. It was pretty easy, and raised on stern small-town values of hard work and endless application, he must have been embarrassed by that, too. But he didn't let it ruin him, as it did so many, and he applied himself with gusto and energy.

Some of it, to be sure, was luck. Some faces, not classically beautiful, light well and hold the camera's attention. His certainly did, projecting small-town decency, naivete and earnestness. He also arrived at the right time: Earlier he would have been dismissed as hopelessly plain-looking. But he became one of a generation of actors who were revising the silent-film image of the male face as icon of almost feminized beauty, with aristocratic features and delicate, artistic profile. As with his colleagues Bogart, Cagney, Fonda, Brian Donlevy, Pat O'Brien and some others, his was a people's face, an expressively American face, a face unclouded, freed of its narcissism. You could see him shaving, but never pomading his hair. He was too practical in appearance to be a pretty boy. His first roles were genial extensions of that look: plain-spoken men of decency. In type-crazed Hollywood, that was the type he played.

But even as he was one with the actors of his generation, he was also different. He had much more courage than most of them did, not merely the physical courage to keep a B-24 level through the German flak and the smoke from burning oil plants at 800 feet, but the artistic courage to play against his persona and reveal aspects of his character that went against the beloved image. John Wayne got close, in "Red River" and "The Searchers," but never surrendered macho stature, as Stewart was willing to do in "It's a Wonderful Life" and Alfred Hitchcock's great "Vertigo."

I chose these two performances not merely because they are so fine but also because they are illustrative of the man's nerve. But one could add others as well, including "The Far Country" and "The Man From Laramie," intense psychological westerns he made with director Anthony Mann; the splendid "Anatomy of a Murder," for Otto Preminger; "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," with Wayne, for John Ford; and "The Shootist," again with Wayne. But "It's a Wonderful Life" (1946) and "Vertigo" (1958) will certainly do.

The first has entered legend on the basis of its adoration of small-town values and its endorsement of family and friendship over material greed. But it's a far more sophisticated film in reality than it is in memory. It's not very warmhearted at all; it's really about the dark and usually untouched mental state of self-hatred unto suicide, and Stewart, far from being a lovable feller, is really close to a monster.

It simply won't work dramatically otherwise; that's what gives the arc of redemption its meaning. A small-town credit union executive whose institution is about to go under and who is about to be arrested by authorities through no fault of his own -- that's George Bailey: schlump, victim, a Job for our times. His question is "Why me?" and his response is human, not heroic: "It's not my fault. It's his fault." The his, in this case, is his mildly retarded Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell).

I love the scene in this movie where George, who has been all forbearance and long-suffering dignity and muted bitterness (yet somehow annoyingly smug and rather blind), turns in savage fury upon poor old Billy and screams, "You stupid, silly old fool, where's the money? Do you realize what this means? It means bankruptcy and scandal, and prison! That's what it means! One of us is going to jail! Well, it's not going to be me!" The despair is like a black tide from the id, and the bully's explosive bray ("Well, it's not going to be me!") completely destroys the man's benighted claim to greatness. What a fabulous American movie scene, nearly as great as John Wayne's Ethan Edwards being shut out by the door of civilization and community at the end of "The Searchers" 10 years later. But Stewart was there first: George is pure middle-class rage, and he cannot accept the fact that in playing by the rules and accepting unrigorously a view of himself as good, he has still blundered into the abyss and is about to be obliterated by what he fears most -- not death but scandal, loss of respect in the community, failure in the eyes of his children. Death is stingless compared to that!

Hitchcock, as many have pointed out, also saw the darkness in the middle-age Stewart, and in "Vertigo" the two collaborated on another extraordinary voyage to the far side. As John "Scottie" Ferguson, Stewart plays a heights-fearing retired detective who is hired to watch a wealthy school chum's suicidal wife. Eventually he falls in love with her but, because of his phobia, cannot prevent her suicide. Later he finds a shopgirl with a similar bone structure and guides her into cosmetically becoming his lost love, and then makes -- you haven't seen it yet? I then blur the conclusion -- an astonishing discovery.

It's fine to have Stewart play an obsessed man -- he brought similar psychological intensity to the Anthony Mann westerns -- but there's a point at which Scottie goes beyond obsession into utter creepdom. In fact, viewed from another perspective, he could easily be the villain, not the hero, of the story. He's easily as nuts as Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates in "Psycho."

His control over Kim Novak's character -- Judy -- is truly terrifying. He simply rips and shreds the young woman's personality from her, playing on his class superiority, physical strength, policeman's rectitude and, beneath it, pure madness. Having destroyed one personality, he inserts a new one. There's nothing funny and there's nothing loving in it. He's become a twisted exaggeration of one of his true selves, the bomber pilot whose mastery of the vehicle and command over its crew must be terrifyingly absolute in order for the mission to succeed. He loses all grip, all perspective. The passion is hopelessly misaimed: It's a sick love, Scottie's for a lost woman, that turns him truly monstrous. I can't recall a star of such genially positive image who allowed himself to be portrayed so viciously and so perverted his image, and who got away with it!

When he appeared on talk shows in the '60s and '70s, Stewart took to playing a much simpler version of his first movie self, the beloved, avuncular, slightly aphasic small-town gentleman. He almost became Uncle Billy, in fact. Not meaning to or not having enough vanity to care, he may have sullied his own legacy, and possibly that, as much as anything, is why our tendency is to remember only his least challenging aspect.

But like very few actors of his generation, he could take you to a dark place and turn your sweat cold and your breath harsh. There's a name for that: It's genius.