THE JIMMY STEWART TRIBUTE AT THE
MOTION PICTURE ACADEMYÂ
JUNE 12,
2008
by Mike Thomas
“When you get someone like Jimmy
Stewart, who’s a director’s dream, you don’t really direct an actor like Jimmy.
You just stand back and watch him do his thing.â€Â - Frank
Capra
The Academy of Motion Pictures is having a great
year celebrating anniversaries - the 100th birthday of Bette Davis, the 40th
anniversary of “2001†and last night, a centennial tribute to Jimmy Stewart, the
man Cary Grant once called the most influential actor of his
generation.
The first Academy Awards I ever attended was in
1985 and it was quite an event, one of the last hurrahs of the Golden Age of
Hollywood. Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, Kirk Douglas, David Lean mingled
alongside such talented whippersnappers as Steven Spielberg, Jeff Bridges,
Jessica Lange and a hooded Prince, draped in purple, of course. That Oscarcast
is probably best remembered for Sally Field’s “You like me, you really like
me!,†acceptance speech but the thing that stands out in my mind was the
honorary Oscar awarded to Jimmy Stewart by Cary Grant.
Now, Cary Grant was one of the greatest stars in
Hollywood history, but one of the most underrated actors in history because he
made it look so easy. Yet, as one who attended several of his “An Evening with
Cary Grant,†one man shows, Grant confessed he worked like the devil to make all
his hard work seem effortless. He would talk about the myriad details that would
go into even the simplest shot - how an actor needed to focus on such things as
the camera’s placement in relation to the actors’ eyeline, for example, the
positioning of the actors, the physical blocking of a scene, making sure that
the actor is in focus within the frame while all the time trying to deliver the
lines naturally as if for the first time. Grant was a master at this, of course,
but that night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion he paid tribute to a man he
considered to be the defining actor of his generation - James
Stewart.
Grant recalled making “The Philadelphia Storyâ€
with Stewart and spoke of the legendary scene where the two of them discuss the
spoiled heiress Katharine Hepburn’s Tracy, the former wife of Grant and the
current heartthrob of Stewart. Stewart’s character was drunk in the scene, and I
can still recall Grant’s amazement at how inventive Jimmy Stewart was in the
scene. There is a moment when Stewart improvised a burp, and Grant, just as fast
as his fellow actor, ad-libbed the response, “Excuse me,†and then almost ruins
the take by laughing out loud at Stewart’s original ad-lib. He doesn’t, of
course, but when watching the clip at the Academy tribute, the joy of watching
those two in the scene was analogous to hearing two jazz greats riffing back and
forth - Stewart’s improvisations and Cary Grant, stifling a smile, in amazement
at his fellow actor’s improvisatory skills. Grant made the point that long
before Marlon Brando came along with his revolutionary “naturalism†Jimmy
Stewart had been there, done that. And as the masterfully chosen film clips
amply demonstrated, Jimmy Stewart was the master of his invisible craft, nobody
ever caught him acting, he simply was.
Long-time friend Robert Wagner smoothly emceed the
event and one of the most entertaining interviews he conducted was with Shirley
Jones, who did two westerns with Jimmy Stewart. She recounted an incident when
she forgot her lines and he said to her, “Wallll, now, uh, Shirley, you don’t
need to uh, worry about that. You just need to talk to me!†And perhaps,
in that simple, illuminating phrase, is the key to Jimmy Stewart’s genius. In
his movies, he was simply one human being talking to another and that’s why they
are so effective and timeless.
And a perfect example of that was to be found in
John Ford’s “Two Ride Together,†an uninspired re-working of Ford’s “The
Searchersâ€Â that contains one moment of pure transcendence. Sheriff Stewart and
Army captain Richard Widmark, in pursuit of Indians who have kidnapped some
white settlers pause at a river to have a moment that has nothing to do with
exposition but is the most memorable scene in the film. These two old pros, the
camera facing them head-on without a single cut during the duration of the
scene, simply talk to one another for five minutes. It was the kind of thing
that Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard were always being hailed for but there
were two old hands in a forgettable western doing that same kind of
revolutionary long take without fuss or bother, just trying to put some life
into a scene, as simple as that. The actors hardly even bother to look at each
other as Widmark unties his scarf and dips in the river while Stewart does some
funny business lighting a cigar as the two men talk about women problems, money
problems, with Widmark mooching a cigar from Stewart; and it is the most natural
and relaxed piece of acting you’ll ever see. As Miss Jones later confirmed, the
scene wasn’t improvised, it just seems that way on the screen.
And credit must be paid to Frank Capra, who saw
something in that lanky MGM contract player and gave him two of his greatest
early roles - the idealistic senator in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington†and the
suicidal George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.†What can one say about “Mr.
Smith� It is a film and a performance that is so much a part of the American
consciousness that it seems like it has existed from the very founding of the
country. And no less a critic than Orson Welles has praised Stewart’s
performance as being beyond praise. To see him alone on the Senate floor, his
voice gone, sleep deprived, beaten by the corrupt Taylor machine, is to have
your broken - no, shattered into a thousand piece - in a performance that Orson
Welles once said was beyond all praise.And in “It’s a Wonderful Life,†the most unlikely
Christmas perennial imaginable, the darkness of suicide that hangs over the film
allowed Stewart to tap uncharted emotions for the role of George Bailey. Only
Capra could have pulled off such an audacious film and yet even he wasn't sure
how he did it. “There’s something in that movie that I didn’t put in, it has a
life of it’s own.†I submit that the unexplained something of which Mr. Capra
spoke, was none other than the towering performance of James Maitland
Stewart.
The early clips of Jimmy Stewart in his salad days
show that his gift was there, even at the beginning, if not quite fully formed.
Although his warbling of “Easy to Love†might not hint at future greatness (“Why
did Cole Porter have to make it so damn high?†Stewart reputedly asked), in his
supporting role as the All-American boy who commits murder in “After the Thin
Man†we see hints of that dark side that Frank Capra, Anthony Mann and Alfred
Hitchcock would so successfully. Capra and Hitchcock were the first two
directors who understood that by having having Jimmy Stewart the Everyman crack
up, it was far more dramatic and terrifying. The crazed look in his eyes when he
contemplates suicide in “It’s a Wonderful Life,†or the obsessive gaze when Kim
Novak reveals herself transformed as his dead love in “Vertigo†are so
disturbing not just because of the brilliance of his acting but also because, if
Jimmy Stewart can go crazy, what hope is there for the rest of us? That dark
side was also put to great use by director Anthony Mann, who brought a
Shakespearean sensibility to his Westerns with Stewart which invariably centered
on obsessive vengeance.
I had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Stewart in 1986
at the AFI Awards for Billy Wilder and we talked about what I consider his two
greatest performances, “Vertigo†and “It’s a Wonderful Life.†He pointed out
that the stories for both those films were, shall we say, a tad far-fetched, so
maybe he had to work a little harder to pull them off. While talking to the man,
listening to him analyze the seemingly disparate characters of George Bailey and
Scotty Ferguson I realized this was a man of this was a person with a razor
sharp intellect, the bumbling guy reciting poetry on “The Tonight Show†may have
been a part of him, too, but as he stood there on the floor of the Beverly
Hilton talking about Hitchcock and Capra, I nearly trembled in awe of his keen
insights and the revealing glimpses into his strategies as a performer. He may
have tried to pretend like acting was something he effortlessly pulled off but
there was far greater effort than he ever let on. But then the greats always
make it look easy.
Peter Bogdanovich, a fine director, pioneering
film historian and gifted mimic opened the evening with several spot on
impressions of Stewart and afterwards was overheard telling Jimmy’s daughter
Kelly that he’d seen her dad in London onstage in “Harvey†and it was one of the
greatest stage performances he’d ever seen. Apparently, Stewart felt his film
performance was lacking something and yet I’d be hard pressed to find anything
wrong with it. I always thought his Elwood P. Dowd was less a dipsomaniac than a
wonderful romantic, a dreamer of great things stuck in a small, petty town that
could not appreciate the grandeur of his visions. It was a role not unlike
George Bailey, another small-town dreamer of great things, and if “Harveyâ€
didn’t mine the tragic depths of “It’s a Wonderful Life,†it had its own gentle
charms  as well as an underlying sense of the quiet desperation that lies
beneath the surface of broken dreams.Â
On behalf of all of those whose reality may have
fallen short of their dreams, Jimmy Stewart took his dreams and made them ours
as well, that was his gift to the world, and in the process he became the finest
actor in the history of motion pictures.
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