Raw Deal for James Stewart, Dismal Biographer's Victim
11/13/06
Either click the headline in bold or follow the link to the article here.
*
The first article I'm going to highlight is from The Observer contributor Scott Eyman, whose "Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. Demille" I would heartily recommend to anyone. Eyman's book review of Marc Eliot's "James Stewart: A Biography" is one of those articles I've saved to my computer some time ago. I'm always interested in discovering and saving for posterity reviews and analysis of my favorite stars and their work. In this case, the article I'm highlighting is a none too impressed review of a biography of James Stewart.
My plan is to focus on a few excerpts. The full review can be read by clicking one of the links above to The Observer's website.
Eyman makes a point, one which has certainly stuck with me when he writes...
"He [Stewart] certainly had a far greater emotional range than any of the
competition. To name only the films that seem to me to contain his most
innovative work, Stewart convincingly played a sly voyeur in Rear Window (1954), a seething necrophiliac in Vertigo (1958), a worldly circus clown in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), tenacious, driven cowboys in Bend of the River (1952), The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955). He also successfully played a Mitteleuropean clerk in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a middle-class banker driven to the edge of suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a swozzled fantasist in Harvey (1950), a grizzled old pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), a crafty small-town lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), a cynical reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and an idealistic Congressman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).
Even Grant partisans will have to admit that these are the credits of
an actor without fear, willing to try nearly anything. Stewart’s
credits make the man who was born Archie Leach look pathologically
cautious by comparison. And what’s more, Stewart was laboring manfully
beneath a burden unusual for a movie star: After he outgrew his boyishly
attractive pre–World War II gawkiness, he wasn’t sexy at all."
The key point to me is that Stewart continued to be a force in Hollywood, actually becoming the country's biggest box office draw for the first time in 1955. He was a forty-seven-year-old family man at that point, two pictures (Rope (1948) and Rear Window (1955)) into his four-picture collaboration with director Alfred Hitchcock. Eyman astutely argues that by this point Stewart had completely grown out of his boy next door attractiveness. In fact, he'd rarely play romantic leads after this point.
Stewart would charmingly deflect questions in interviews about his transition from lighter pre-WW2 fare like It's a Wonderful World (1939) and The Philadelphia Story (1940) into more complex roles playing darker characters like Scottie in Vertigo (1958) and Howard Kemp in The Naked Spur (1953) by saying he tried to come back after the war and play the same kind of parts he'd had pre-war, but the audience wouldn't have it.
The lanky, farm-raised Pennsylvania actor had it right when he said...
"Never treat your audience as customers, always as partners."
Another reason I so enjoy Eyman's review of "James Stewart: A Biography" has to be his saucy remarks. Eyman pulls no punches. Read these quotes from the article...
"His judgments are often ridiculous, as in this, about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
(1962): 'The art of this film, then, lay in its literal vision of God,
while its mise-en-scène is a description of deception, Hollywood style,
the truth defined as not what actually happens, but as how the camera
sees it from where the director has placed it.'"
"When Mr. Eliot isn’t slaughtering the English language or flaunting his
vulgarity (Gary Cooper, he writes, “talked softly and carried a big
dick”), he’s mangling film history..."
"If that doesn’t stop him, he should, like Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson, have his fingers broken."
Eyman sums his review up at the end...
"There is no—repeat, no—excuse for a book this badly written, this reportorially suspect. Does no one edit anymore? Does no one care?"
It's mentioned in the review, and I do wish we can read sometime a well-researched, smartly-written biography on Mr. Stewart. I think his body of work demands it.
