Word: stewart
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Fortunately, Capra, over at Columbia, found in Stewart "the uncommon common man": as a lion tamer of the wild Vanderhof clan in You Can't Take It with You and as Jefferson Smith, patron saint of patriotic lost causes, nurser of noble grudges, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. David O. Selznick saw Stewart as a worthy partner for Carole Lombard in the intelligent soaper Made for Each Other. Somebody at Universal made him the unlikely western hero of Destry Rides Again, opposite an amused Marlene Dietrich. These moguls may have undervalued Stewart as an appealing young actor who wouldn...
...could pay him the usual backhand compliment directed at an enduring Hollywood icon and say that he played--brilliantly played--Jimmy Stewart. But that ignores the pioneering vocal eccentricity, the stammer that miraculously made every line seem as if it had just occurred to him; he was Method before Method was cool. And to say Stewart played himself hardly does justice to the near Shakespearean breadth of his characters and performances. The mannerisms evolved; the man grew...
Back then it took Hollywood a while to realize what kind of acting Stewart was capable of. MGM director W.S. Van Dyke II pegged him as "unusually usual." To the brass at Metro, who signed Stewart in 1935, the label meant he was a sensitive fellow with zero sex appeal--not the stuff of celebrity. So he was made to sob through After the Thin Man (pssst: he dunnit), shuffle through Born to Dance (he wasn't), swivel on skates in Ice Follies...
Which Jimmy Stewart do you mean? The hometown boy of romantic comedy, goshing and gollying his way into Margaret Sullavan's heart in The Shop Around the Corner? Or the tortured Capra hero whose trust in American values was tested past all endurance, till he tumbled close to madness? Or the pixilated Elwood P. Dowd of Harvey, his best friend an invisible rabbit? Or the vengeful loner of the Anthony Mann westerns of the '50s--taut epics like Bend of the River and The Man from Laramie--in which Stewart often played a bitter Moses leading settlers...
Similarly, to praise Stewart as the embodiment of the aw-shucks American hero is really to patronize him. His true achievement is to have reflected the changing, aging, increasingly troubled face of America, from its early days as the new big likable kid on the block of world power to the questioning twilight between World War II and Vietnam...