Stewart, Mitchum: Defining America in Light and Dark

July came in with a bang, leaving movie lovers whimpering. Because Robert Mitchum died on the first day of the month, and Jimmy Stewart died on the second.

It is the end of something. William Shakespeare said, “The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”--and these were princes. Jimmy the gent, and Bobby the rounder. They seemed to reflect the two sides of the American character, one sunny, one dark.

Stewart was the optimist. When he grew up, the Depression hadn’t happened yet and people around him believed their country’s possibilities were endless. A decade younger than Stewart, Mitchum was an anti-establishment rebel. His lazy insolence--today it would be called attitude--made him the perfect film noir hero for the ‘40s and ‘50s. Because Americans were growing disillusioned. Soldiers had come back from the war and discovered they weren’t doing all that well. Citizens wrestled with the problems of racism and McCarthyism--and many felt a new anger. Where had all the flowers gone? And why were commies hiding under the bed?

If Stewart’s George Bailey, in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” was an ordinary man who tried to do good for everyone, though it almost killed him; Mitchum’s psycho preacher in “The Night of the Hunter,” was born to be bad. Not only did he try to murder two little kids, he terrorized Lillian Gish who was 1) an old lady, and 2) the good girl of all time. In the movies, Mitchum’s lovers were always bad girls and he was always playing the angles--a noir guy is never on the up and up.

Both Stewart and Mitchum were adored by the public, and both were examples of what the critic Vincent Canby called “great behavioral actors”--actors who didn’t create characters that were “physically and emotionally separate from themselves,” but who used their own mannerisms and intelligence to absorb the roles they played.

Their early lives were as dissimilar as their later images. Stewart was born in 1908, his beloved father had a hardware store, his mother sang “in a clear sweet voice,” the family had pets, took vacations together and when President Warren G. Harding’s funeral train was about to pass through a nearby town, Mr. Stewart took Jim down to the tracks, shoved two pennies into his hand and said, “Run, put them on the rails!” For years, Stewart said, “Dad and I carried those coins flattened by the weight of history. And the knowledge that what was in my pocket was also in his made me feel very close to him.”

Mitchum, in 1917, had it rougher. His father was a railroad worker who was crushed to death between two freight cars when Mitchum was a year and a half old. The fatherless boy grew up angry, a brawler. Before he ever got to high school, he’d had his nose broken in a fight.

Stewart went to Princeton, Mitchum went to jail. At 14, he ran away from home. He dug ditches, worked on a ship and was charged with robbery (or vagrancy, depending on what you read) and sentenced to a chain gang in Georgia.

He claimed to have escaped, and made his way to California and, in 1940, he married Dorothy Spence, his childhood sweetheart, and got a job at Lockheed aircraft, where he was hugely bored.

So what do you do if you’re a good-looking young guy bored in California? You try getting into the movies, where at least you can be bored for more money. He started as an extra in low-budget Westerns, and by 1945, he’d played an army captain in “The Story of G.I. Joe,” a role that won him an Oscar nomination.

Stewart never had to do menial labor. He went straight from college to Broadway to Hollywood--where he became a star in the ‘30s, making “You Can’t Take It With You,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “Destry Rides Again”--all destined to become movie classics.

But in 1941, Stewart abandoned the movies. At age 33, he became a combat pilot, the first big star to give up $3,000 a week to serve his country for $21 a month. At first rejected by his draft board because he was underweight, he went on a diet to gain 10 pounds, and later spent five years piloting combat planes. He came home, a much-decorated hero, and, in 1949, he married Gloria Hatrick McLean, who had two little boys by an earlier marriage.

Mitchum, too, went into the army, where he spent eight months before he went back to making movies. He said, “It sure beats working,” but his self-mockery stopped at the studio gates. He showed up on time, knew his lines and there was no kind of role he was unwilling to try. “I think when producers have a part that’s hard to cast, they say, ‘Send for Mitchum; he’ll do anything,’ ” he joked. “I’ll play Polish gays, women, midgets, anything.”

Off-screen, he was equally willing to experiment. Unlike Stewart, whose marriage was a model of family values--he and Gloria had twin girls, and Stewart was as devoted to her sons as he was to his own birth children--Mitchum was a party boy. He drank, he fooled around, and in 1948, he was arrested--for marijuana possession--at the home of a starlet named Lila Leeds. “This is the end of everything,” he predicted. “My career, my marriage, everything.”

That prediction was wrong. Dorothy left him a couple of times, but always came home. And after a few months at a work camp, Mitchum came home to find he was a bigger star than he’d been before. Crowds circled the block for his movies, most of them, somebody said, curious to see “the dope addict.”

Mitchum reveled in his bad boy reputation, he drank, smoked, had affairs--and he was reckless, considering that he wanted to go on working in the film industry. Mitchum was, of course, a brilliant delineator of psychos, but even when he played a hero, there was a ruthlessness under the surface--like a rattlesnake waiting to strike.

Stewart was your friendly uncle, a guy who would help you find a solution to your problem. And though he had many colors--in “Vertigo,” there was what Canby called “a dark subtext” to his work--the public still saw him as gentle, unstained, honest. To us, he’ll always be George Bailey in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” Or Elwood P. Dowd, in “Harvey,” who says, “For 40 years, I struggled with reality. I’m happy to say I overcame it.”

Mitchum was combative, in your face. His on-screen persona conveyed sex and menace, which titillated and fascinated audiences. Stewart was mild, slow to anger except in a cause so just that he had no other option. His on-screen persona conveyed accommodation and an idealism that made viewers feel hopeful.

Sunny or dark, Stewart and Mitchum were more complicated than we, in our fantasies, permitted them to be. Both had presence, power, grace, talent and a sense of merriment. Both knew about sadness, and both spoke to audiences across the world for more than 50 years. But in the end, it’s all about perception and reality. Stewart was the idealized figure Americans like to think they are; Mitchum, the movies’ prince of darkness, may be closer to what we really are.

In any case, they’re gone now, the rascal and the boy scout, and we’re poorer without them.

Listen, this July will go down in history as a bummer.