It’s Been a Successful Life : JAMES STEWART.<i> By Donald Dewey (Turner Publishing: $24.95, 512 pp.)</i>

Jimmy Stewart was not Hollywood’s finest actor, but at several points during his 45-year screen career he was the moviegoing public’s favorite. In the ‘30s and ‘40s he became identified with the quasi-populist, sentimental work of Frank Capra, starring in “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life” (although his best film from this period may have been “The Philadelphia Story”). In the ‘50s, as his skills matured, his resume included important films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” and “Vertigo.”

Meanwhile, through his collaboration with director Anthony Mann, Stewart took his place among the screen’s posse of outstanding Western stars, most notably in “The Man From Larramie” and “The Naked Spur.” Few actors, in fact, could be more identified with the movie factories that dominated American film during the first half of this century. Like the Hollywood studio system in which he worked, and which he served as one of its most loyal subjects, Stewart was versatile, giving both popular and critically acclaimed performances in genres as diverse as the screwball comedy, the Western and the suspense thriller.

As sketched by Donald Dewey in “James Stewart: A Biography,” the groundwork for Stewart’s success within the studio machine was laid during his youth in Indiana, as the son of a devout but eccentric Presbyterian father. Young James learned to respect patriarchal authority, inheriting from his father an emotional reserve and sense of civic obligation that he would hold onto the rest of his life. By the time Stewart followed his father’s path to Princeton, his youth had come to resemble something out of a Capra picture: a fascination with the circus, a devotion to Charles Lindbergh, a frugal attitude toward money and evenings spent playing the accordion in musical recital with his two sisters.

In Part 1 of this biography, the author smartly juxtaposes the small-town milieu and Scotch-Irish-English ancestry that nurtured the future movie star with the opening of the Jimmy Stewart Museum in Indiana, Pa., in May 1995. By alternating between past and present, he comments implicitly on the differences between his own project and that of the museum builders in search of tourist dollars and a boost to civic pride.

Dewey brings a subtle cynicism to his reporting on the opening day parade, at which the guest of honor is noticeably absent. He also fashions a vivid narrative of Stewart’s education, describing the path that led him from a local drama club to summer-stock performances on Cape Cod. It was at the end of the summer of 1932 that Stewart set the course for his career by foregoing a scholarship to study architecture and accompanying the production of “Carrie Nation” to Broadway.

By 1935, when Stewart arrived in California under contract with MGM, the young actor possessed both the self-confidence and accommodating character required for a comfortable fit with the institutional demands of Hollywood film production. Indeed, his ability to accept authority and thrive within an ordered framework would endure as a defining feature of his life, according to Dewey. He writes: “If anything, [Stewart] would show a readiness over the years to allow everything from Louis B. Mayer and Uncle Sam to an assortment of advisors and his wife to program his general time, just as long as he was able to work undisturbed on the specifics that he deemed important.”

Unfortunately, at just the point where Stewart’s film career begins, the momentum of Dewey’s narrative falters. He makes the mistake of offering brief plot summaries for every film in which Stewart appeared, almost all stripped of imagery and boiled down to their stories, as well as brief overviews of each film’s reception by newspaper reviewers. Even though Dewey devotes several pages to Stewart’s more significant films, his analysis is so cursory that it can’t compete with the critical dialogues that film scholars have initiated around them.

This wouldn’t be a problem if the book were less ambitious, but the author seems intent on addressing various portions of the popular and scholarly literature devoted to these films, in addition to writing a biography.

To be sure, Dewey captures the on-screen Stewart. He rightfully locates much of the actor’s appeal and an underlying principle of his persona in the idea of vulnerability. One need only think of Stewart’s desperately futile struggle with Raymond Burr at the end of “Rear Window” or his cowering before Lee Marvin in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” to see how Hitchcock and John Ford put this characteristic to expert use.

Dewey is also on target when he notes Stewart’s talent for playing people of questionable mental stability. He avoids gushing over the work with Capra, stressing instead the importance of the five Westerns with Mann to both Stewart’s popularity and achievements as an actor.

As for the popular, folksy image of Stewart as patriot and family man, Dewey suggests it obscured his identity as an extremely active bachelor in Hollywood during the 1930s. The author details thoroughly but not salaciously Stewart’s romances with a veritable montage of well-known actresses--Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, Norma Shearer and Olivia De Havilland--and those are only the marquee names. His greatest love may have been for Margaret Sullavan, who would marry both Stewart’s best friend, Henry Fonda, and later his talented and trusted agent, Leland Hayward.

World War II presented the actor with a chance to pursue another passion--flying. Following again in the path of his father, a veteran of the Spanish-American War and World War I, Stewart enlisted in the armed forces and took command of a squadron of B-24 bombers based in England in 1943. He would return from Europe more reflective and serious, his career and personal life seeming to move in opposite directions. Professionally, he left the security of MGM, venturing into productions at five studios. But emotionally he sought a stable relationship, ultimately finding it with Gloria Harrick, whom he would marry in 1949.

Dewey’s portrait of Harrick makes her about as appealing as a cold shower. It probably tells us a good deal about Stewart that he went from pre-war romances with Dietrich and Dinah Shore to a 45-year marriage to someone Dewey describes as an emotionally distant, chain-smoking woman whom one friend said has “considerably more feeling for animals than for human beings.” Indeed, she seems to have nourished Stewart’s small-town reserve into what one observer called a “friendly aloofness.” Little of this attitude seems to have carried over onto the set, however, where the actor is consistently described as supportive and professional.

What emerges toward the end of Dewey’s book--despite a rather incoherent epilogue that struggles to summarize Stewart’s craft--is a figure committed to traditional myths, increasingly out of step with the evolving culture. Stewart’s loyalty to the studio system’s production hierarchy was his most benign form of conservatism. Although the actor did not name names during the House UnAmerican Activity Committee’s trip to Hollywood in the late ‘40s, his connection, both ideological and personal, to those who supported the committee’s anti-communist crusade is clear, leaving Dewey only to speculate about Stewart’s possible role as a closed door witness.

By the ‘60s and ‘70s, the aging star brought his politics into the open, as it appeared to him that his old friends were passing away, along with the values he cherished most. Even after the death of his stepson in Vietnam, Stewart continued to support the war, actively campaigning for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. As a trustee to his alma mater, he opposed admitting women to Princeton until it became clear the university’s admission policy was going to change.

By the time Dewey discloses traces of race prejudice during his discussion of “The Jimmy Stewart Show,” a short-lived TV sitcom from 1971, one senses that even the biographer is pained by the Hollywood legend. “Blacks are bossing white people all over the country,” he quotes Stewart as telling the show’s producer-director. “A black is going to be lecturing me with millions of people watching? No way.”

As with his account of the young Stewart’s rise to adulthood, Dewey’s portrait of the man in old age battling depression is evocative. Without stumbling into sentiment, he captures Stewart’s despondency over his wife’s death and his increasing reclusiveness since. Like the guest of honor at the opening day parade in Pennsylvania, Dewey chooses not to revisit the Jimmy Stewart Museum at the end of his story. After a journey through his biography, it is probably best not to dwell too much on Stewart’s life off the set, either. Better we should think of him stammering, riding and revealing his handsome, reluctant smile via the cinematic image.