He didn't have X-ray vision, he couldn't fly, he wasn't particularly strong, he lacked the extraordinary powers that characterize supermen. James Stewart was a very normal guy, but he became the true American hero thanks to his honesty, his modesty and his smile. He fought against corrupt politicians and greedy bankers, uncovered murderers and uncovered criminal plots armed only with idealism, good principles, a certain naivety and a will to live. Stewart remained at the top for decades, smoothly moving through genres as disparate as suspense, comedy or western, he was one of the favorite actors of Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock and, always, the most loved by the public.
Stewart was not called to be an actor. His natural destiny was to inherit his father's hardware store in Indiana, but he went to college and studied architecture. When he finished his degree, with an excellent record, the United States had plunged into the Great Depression and young James could not find a job. So he switched gears and moved to New York with his good friend Henry Fonda to try his luck in the theater. The New York tables did not bring him great roles or gave him much joy, but Stewart had found a profession in which he would shine until the seventies.
Fonda jumped from New York to Hollywood and was soon calling Stewart. MGM hired him, but she didn't know what to do with him, he was too normal a guy. He just so happened that Capra needed a very normal guy to star in his optimistic comedies designed to lift an audience mired in the gloom left by the economic crisis. The collaboration between director and actor began in 1938 with Live As You Will in which Stewart was the son of a wealthy banker who falls in love with the delicious Jean Arthur whose wild family lives carefree in a building that is about to be demolished by real estate speculation. In the end, young James discovered that money does not bring happiness and the public, that you can enjoy life even if your wallet is half empty.
The film was so successful that the director and actors repeated in Knight Without a Sword (1939). Stewart on this occasion played a simple boy who wins a seat as a senator. When he arrives in Washington he discovers that all that glitters is not gold, but he does not let himself be pressured and helped by Arthur, his intelligent assistant, stops the approval of an unjust law with the technique of parliamentary filibustering, that is, talking and talking nonstop all night, without sitting down and without resting to buy time and get evidence to beat the bad guys.
At that point, James was already one of the most appreciated actors in Hollywood and another of the great directors of the moment, Ernst Lubitsch, called him to star in one of his unforgettable comedies, The Bazaar of Surprises (1940). The actor became a store clerk who corresponds with a girl he wants to fall in love with without knowing that she is her co-worker, Margaret Sullavan, whom he detests and with whom he constantly fights.
That same year, Stewart embarked on a classic, The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor) where he was again an ordinary man, a journalist, who has to write the chronicle of the second wedding of the very wealthy and worldly Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn). ). The reporter is blushed by the environment in which the girl lives and makes fun of her a little, but an inevitable chemistry emerges between the couple. One night, something happens between them and the wedding falls apart, but that impossible relationship is not consolidated and the frivolous, although charming, Tracy returns with her first husband, Cary Grant. Stewart got the only Oscar of his career for this unforgettable character.
The actor entered the 1940s as a star. A chronicle published at the time by La Vanguardia described him as "one of those gallants that we could call naive, who conquered popularity without preening, without acting like a don Juan and without worrying. James Stewart does not have an adventurous past like many other actors. Neither does he drives around Hollywood in a car that costs a fortune, nor does he dress like a mannequin. The secret of his sympathy is that he does not pretend, he shows himself as he is".
His career came to a halt during World War II when he enlisted as a corporal in the Air Force. At the end of the war he was a colonel. He returned decorated to Hollywood where two great events awaited him, his wedding and his most remembered film. Cary Cooper and his wife, Veronica, introduced him to Gloria Hatrick McLean, Stewart and Gloria fell in love, got married, had their twin girls, Judy and Kelly, and were together until Gloria's death in 1994 forming one of those close and loving couples. long lasting films so unusual in classic Hollywood.
In parallel, he resumed his collaboration with Capra. In How Beautiful It Is to Live!, Stewart is that normal man again, who lives in a small town, has a family he adores, and earns an honest living from his small business. But things start to go wrong and on Christmas Eve he considers committing suicide. His guardian angel appears and shows him what life would have been like for those around him if he had not been born and the protagonist understands that his existence has not been useless at all. Living is beautiful! It is the great classic of Christmas cinema. Televisions around the world broadcast it every December 25.
The collaboration between Capra and Stewart left a great cinematographic legacy. The actor's relationship with Alfred Hitchcock also bore great fruit. It started with The Rope (1948), recorded in a single sequence shot, where Stewart is a teacher who goes to a dinner invited by two students and unaware that the hosts have killed another boy and that his body is hidden in the dining room chest. .
In Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) James Stewart is a photographer who, after breaking his leg, is forced to remain immobilized and cloistered in his house during a hot summer. The man gets bored and spends his time looking at the neighbors in the inner courtyard of his apartment until he is convinced that one of them has killed his wife. Stewart has a girlfriend, Grace Kelly, who is a model and seems somewhat frivolous, but when he tells her about her suspicions, the girl helps him solve the crime. Although today it is considered a classic, La soga did not fully work at the box office, perhaps due to its theatrical tone, but Rear Window became an essential film from its first screening.
So Stewart and Hitchcock followed up with a charming film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), a remake of one of the director's English stage films. James was a normal man again, an American doctor traveling to Morocco with his wife, Doris Day, and his son. Vacations turn into a nightmare when the boy is kidnapped. The plot took the marriage to London. Day sang Que sera sera and the film enchanted the public.
The fourth collaboration of the Hitchcock-Stewart duo was much more disturbing, it brought awards for both at the 1958 San Sebastian Festival and is now an essential classic. Vertigo (Back from the dead) presents Stewart as a detective who suffers from acrophobia after the death of his partner. Already retired, he accepts a job that consists of keeping an eye on the wife of an acquaintance, Kim Novak. He follows her, meets her and falls in love with her, who dies in the same way as her partner. Some time later, the hapless detective meets by chance a woman identical to his beloved.
In addition to being one of the kings of comedy and having also established himself as a great actor in suspense films, Stewart was a star of Western films and starred in titles such as Broken Arrow (Delmer Daves, 1950), Winchester 73 (Anthony Mann, 1950), The Man from Laramie (Anthony Mann, 1955) or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford, 1962). And he also made some forays into musical film like Music and Tears (Anthony Mann, 1953), a biopic of Glenn Miller set to jazz, which was one of the biggest box office hits of the 1950s.
He spaced out his appearances on the big screen beginning in the 1970s, but unlike other big stars who fell for less than respectable B-series products, Stewart maintained the poise that had taken him to the top in choral films like Airport 77 ( Jerry Jameson, 1977), in westerns like The Last Gunslinger (Don Siegel, 1976) or in the remake of The Big Sleep (Michael Winner, 1978) which featured Robert Mitchum in the role of Philip Marlowe.
The actor retired from public life after the death of his wife in 1994. Stewart fell into a state of melancholy after the loss of his partner and died three years later, in July 1997 at the age of 89. The La Vanguardia chronicle defined him as the "symbol of idealistic America", he had been even more than that, the true American hero, the boy who managed to fight great battles from the most absolute normality.
