A Film Legacy for All Generations

There were 46 members in the America Online movie chat room when I checked in Wednesday night, hours after learning of James Stewart’s death. Though these electronic forums are mainly the habitats of anonymous adolescents, it’s the best way I know to get immediate reactions to news events, without heading for a bar or a street corner.

Just last Sunday I watched a brawl in the sports chat room, where dozens of angry boxing fans were beating up on two or three die-hards defending Mike Tyson’s feral behavior in the ring the night before.

But during my few minutes in the movie room, there was no mention at all of Stewart. It was just a clutter of visual noise about the summer movies, a scene as eerie in its own way as the one from “It’s a Wonderful Life” in which George Bailey drops into a bar filled with his old friends and finds that none of them knows who he is.

Imagine, what if James Stewart had never lived! Who would have been George Bailey? Who would have had an invisible friend named Harvey, or solved a murder through his binoculars from a rear window? Who would have teamed with Marlene Dietrich in “Destry Rides Again,” or Katharine Hepburn in “The Philadelphia Story”? Who would have gone to Washington as Mr. Smith, or fallen in love with two Kim Novaks in “Vertigo,” or sung “Easy to Love”--with such irresistible incompetence--to Eleanor Powell in “Born to Dance”? Who in the world would have played Charles Lindbergh and Glenn Miller?

While watching the kids in the movie chat room pop off about “Batman & Robin” and “Speed 2” and “Con Air,” my sense of sadness quickly gave way to an overwhelming envy. I can watch James Stewart’s movies over and over, and will! But I can never again see one for the first time, and that joyous experience, in the scores, awaits a generation that barely knows he existed.

Not all of Stewart’s 79 features will astonish his new audience. As a studio contract player in the ‘30s and ‘40s, he was in a lot of mundane programmers. And late in his career, he took a few roles that he merely walked--or with that lanky frame, ambled--through in lazy self-parody. But few actors of any generation can match Stewart’s on-base percentage, and perhaps only one other--Cary Grant--has been so adored.

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Stewart, of course, is one of the last of a breed, a generation of actors carefully nurtured and wisely exploited by the old studio system. He came along in the mid-’30s when Hollywood peered at young actors through the lens of a screen-test camera, and spotted the raw stuff of stars. The studios kept their actors busy, discovered their strengths through the audience’s reaction and tailored films to suit them.

Even though Stewart started out playing heavies, his innate decency came through with audiences, and the strikingly handsome, awkwardly charming young actor quickly became a major leading man, mostly of romantic comedies. He won his lone Oscar in 1941 for such a role, in “The Philadelphia Story.”

Through his studio years, 1934-50, Stewart played multiple variations of the ideal boy-next-door American, a man of determined honesty in a world slightly out of kilter. He brought the invaluable quality of trustworthiness to every role, and studio executives and filmmakers knew how to use it. When Stewart went to war in 1942, as an Army Air Corps pilot, he seemed to represent every parent’s son, and his fate every parent’s fear or joy.

The five years away from Hollywood brought a new James Stewart home, one with most of the naivete knocked out of him, and the brooding dark side emerged in his first postwar role, as George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Stewart would go on to play other complicated heroes, most notably in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 psychological masterpiece, “Vertigo.” But there was evident in each of his characters bedrock traits from every other one, and virtually all who knew him say those traits were his.

It seems more suitable to celebrate rather than mourn Stewart’s death. He was 89, and had been saying he was ready to go ever since his wife, Gloria, to whom he’d been married for 45 years, died in 1994. He said he was looking forward to their reunion. In the end, he went in his sleep--all in all having lived a wonderful life--and we can hope he’s got his last wish.

George Bailey was the defining role of Stewart’s career, and that happy merger of actor and character leaves behind a fascinating legacy. Just as the lives of the citizens of Bedford Falls would have been diminished had George Bailey never lived, so would our lives have been impoverished without James Stewart.

As I told the people shooting the cyberspace breeze in the movie chat room Wednesday night, unaware of both Stewart’s life and passing: “Kids, you don’t know what pleasures await you.”