by Marc Eliot
Because DeMille was such a stickler for a kind of detail he believed brought a heightened reality to his movies, shooting didn’t actually begin until April. Before that, the director had several of his actors join up with Ringling Bro. and Barnum & Bailey to soak up some “real” circus atmosphere. During this stage of production, in the scenes where Jimmy’s presence was required for rehearsals, because he wasn’t as yet available, DeMille simply doubled him, using a tall, thin actor in clown white-face wearing the same fedora that Jimmy would don upon his arrival.
Many observers in the industry, some gossips, and even a few film critics wondered why Stewart, who had made a spectacular career recovery and was now back at the top of his game, would take such an odd little supporting role that buried him (without a face and no dialogue) inside a cast that included such fifties icons as Charlton Heston, leading the circus train across the country in what appears to be nothing so much as a warm-up for his leading the Hebrews out of Egypt, Betty Hutton at her smiling wackiest, a smoldering Cornel Wilde, an overacting Dorothy Lamour, and a thin-lipped, quivering Gloria Grahame (a good friend of Jimmy’s ever since they’d both appeared in It’s a Wonderful Life). In a movie cast so decidedly ensemble, with a director nowhere nearly as noir as Anthony Mann; as redemptive as Frank Capra; as compelling as Hitchcock; or even as clever about circuses as Chaplin (The Circus, 1928), or the Marx Brothers (Edward Buzzell’s At the Circus, 1939), no one could quite figure out exactly what the attraction was for Jimmy. Whenever asked why he had taken such a bizarre role, Jimmy always said the same thing, that he had been inspired by the great silent film star Lon Chaney’s ability to completely disguise his physical self with heavy makeup and colorful costumes while still letting the character he was playing emerge. Stewart insisted he had wanted to try that for the longest time and, to a certain extent, succeeded in his goal with The Greatest Show on Earth. To accurately capture the essence of a clown, Stewart had, on his own, hired the great circus clown Emmett Kelly to tutor him in the ways of great, silent circus entertainment.
The film opened on January 10, 1952, tellingly, after the big Christmas season was over. Most critics pounded the film, spraying uncomplimentary verbal buckshot that hit everyone, including Jimmy. Newsweek pulled no punches when it said, “Undoubtedly the most foolish aspect of the narrative casts James Stewart as a sweet, sad clown.” Variety, on the other hand, seemed to like his performance a bit more: “James Stewart is woven into the picture as an extraneous but appealing plot element.” And the New York Herald Tribune, taking the high, if bumpy, road, said: “James Stewart has a minor role as a clown with a dark past hiding his identity behind the grinning make-up which he never takes off in the picture. He is good enough in his make-believe job to tour with the circus this spring.” Faint praise, indeed—be a clown, be a clown, be a clown.
However, despite its cool critical reception, the film proved a big hit at the box office, displaying enough of the old DeMille grandiosity to pull in the crowds. Early in 1952, when the nominations for Academy Awards were announced, The Greatest Show on Earth picked up several, against such formidable competition for Best Picture as Fred Zinnemann’s towering High Noon, John Ford’s spectacular The Quiet Man, Richard Thorpe’s Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe, and John Huston’s Moulin Rouge. Although the overwhelming favorite (and far superior movie) was High Noon, due to writer/producer Carl Foreman’s ongoing problems with the blacklist (his name appears only as the writer in the film’s credit roll), and John Wayne’s public denunciation of it as “un-American,” the conservative Academy gave the trophy instead to ultra right-winger DeMille’s circus of a movie.1 Jimmy was not even nominated, for Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor, in what shaped up to be an unusually strong roster of Oscar-worthy performances.2
The Greatest Show on Earth would go on to be the top-grossing film of 1951.
Stewart, despite his newly enlarged family, remained immersed in the unreal world of filmmaking. Five weeks after The Greatest Show on Earth finished production, Jimmy was back at work to begin Bend of the River, his second Mann collaboration, and one in which Stewart again worked for a percentage, rather than a salary, this time a full 50 percent.
In Bend of the River, Stewart plays the role of Glyn McLyntock, a wagon-train leader with a dark and hidden past. The rest of the cast included the sultry Julie Adams, an up-and-coming Universal contract player, and Arthur Kennedy, fresh from his Tony-award-winning role on Broadway as Biff in Arthur Miller’s searing Death of a Salesman. The film was made on location at Mount Hood National Forest, in the north-central rugged terrain of Oregon, and proved an extremely difficult, physically challenging shoot.
Filmed in magnificent Technicolor, Bend of the River tells the story of two ex-mercenaries, McLyntock and Cole (Kennedy), looking to start fresh in the years following the Civil War. After they realize they have been swindled, they employ an extra gunslinger, Trey Wilson (Rock Hudson), and steal back their own goods. On their way to their new settlement, McLyntock realizes that Cole intends to keep all the goods for himself and sell them to the highest bidder. He confronts Cole, who beats him bloody and leaves him for dead. From that point on, the film turns into a manhunt, with McLyntock knocking off the members of Cole’s gang one by one, until he finally confronts Cole by a riverside in a climactic, brutal battle, after which a victorious McLyntock, along with Wilson, Laura (Adams), and Baile (Jay C. Flippen), Laura’s father, move on to the promised settlement.
It is easy to see the attraction in this film for Stewart, as it seems to recall so clearly the pioneering and warrior spirit of the Maitland/Stewart clan. Increasingly rugged in his visage, Stewart exhibited the new toughness that Mann had instilled in him with Winchester ’73. And with the stylistic and thematic echoes of Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) and Zinnemann’s High Noon (1951), the film contained all the crucial elements of a box-office smash, which it became. It is Bend of the River that led Howard Teichmann to declare, in his collaborative biography of Henry Fonda, that “Fonda, his long-time friend Jimmy Stewart, and Gary Cooper…played cowboys better than any other actors.”
Upon the film’s completion, Stewart went immediately into Richard Thorpe’s Carbine Williams, the biography of the inventor of the rifle that played a crucial role in the Allied victory in World War Two. Marsh Williams (Stewart) is a Prohibition-era North Carolina metalworker who doubles as a moonshiner. When he is busted by the government, one of the federal agents is killed. Wracked with guilt, although it is unclear who did the actual killing, Williams gives himself up and is sent to prison for thirty years. While incarcerated, he invents the M-1 carbine rifle. Eventually he is pardoned, after serving eight years in jail, a reward for his help in creating a weapon that saved millions of Allies’ lives.
The film was the inspiration of Dore Schary, who discovered the story as part of the ongoing series in Reader’s Digest, “The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met.” Schary, now the sole head of MGM, chose Thorpe to work with Stewart because of the good relationship they had had making Malaya. Jimmy, for his part, was hesitant to make the movie for two reasons: he didn’t want to violate his pledge to himself not to do anything that glorified war, no matter how indirectly, and he didn’t want to play a true-life ex-con. However, the latter seemed to cancel out the former when the real Williams was brought in as a technical advisor, Stewart found in him something ultimately redemptive. The film did moderately well.
Carbine Williams was immediately followed by yet another Mann Western, The Naked Spur. In this one, Howie Kemp (Stewart) is a bounty hunter tracking killer Ben Vandergroat, played by veteran actor Robert Ryan, a master of the twisted personality (and one of the most overlooked leading men of the forties and fifties). There is a suggestion in the course of the manhunt that the two used to be friends. Traveling with Vandergroat and apparently unaware that he is a killer is Lina Patch (Janet Leigh, luscious and lovely in her early studio-contract-player period). What follows is a roundup of good guys and bad guys,
good girls and bad girls, with no one ever sure which is which, supplemented by Mann’s dizzyingly sharp camera angulation to help us understand who is who and which is which. The film’s climax involves an incredibly well-staged fight between Kemp and Vandergroat. Mann’s camera makes sure the audience knows it is really Stewart and Ryan, not doubles, doing the action. After a near-maniacal Kemp decides to abandon the reward and accept instead a true and higher reward from Lina, her hand in love (and presumably marriage), the two ride off into the sunset to start a new life.
The film premiered at Loew’s State on March 25, 1953, and while Jimmy received great reviews—“One of the best roles of his career” according to the New York Herald Tribune—the film was lost among the more overtly psychological Westerns of the day. Despite a tight structure, great performances, razor-sharp direction, and an edgily redemptive story, it was soon forgotten.
In the midst of Jimmy’s energetic early fifties burst, a strange and menacing real-life incident occurred when a fifty-five-year-old Los Angeles truck driver named Clyde Davis tried to extort a thousand dollars from Stewart. Davis, a disgruntled ex–MGM employee, had been driving through Pittsburgh, Kansas, and happened to see a poster on the highway for one of Stewart’s movies. He pulled over to the side of the road and wrote a note threatening to harm Stewart and his family unless a thousand dollars in cash was sent to J. B. Small at Carthage, Missouri. Stewart promptly turned over the note to the FBI and hired a private security team to guard his house until the extortionist was captured. Before that happened, however, Davis gave himself up, confessed that he never intended to harm anyone, and was just looking to get himself arrested so he could have a permanent home in a federal penitentiary.
Afterward, Jimmy sent Davis a note thanking him for sparing him, and the family, any further unwanted fear and anxiety.
In late August 1952, Stewart reported for a month of required duty with the Air Force Reserve. He was still not cleared for piloting (something that did not bother him in the least) and was assigned instead to the Pentagon, where he reported to Andy Low, a good friend who had been his assistant during the war. Upon the end of his brief tour, instead of returning to Southern California, he flew directly to Morgan City, a small fishing community in southern, Cajun, Louisiana, to begin production on his next film, Thunder Bay, his fourth collaboration with Anthony Mann.
Both Jimmy and the studio had agreed that after the lack of box office for The Naked Spur, another Western wasn’t in Jimmy’s best interest, and instead decided that he and Mann should next tackle the world of oil drillers, a “new” subject for Hollywood, although three years later George Stevens’s Giant would do it bigger and better (with Rock Hudson in the Stewart-type role, and the explosive James Dean in his final screen performance before his sudden, early, and tragic death in a car accident just prior to the film’s release).
It had become clear to the studio that Mann’s Westerns were of the highest quality, comparable to anything coming out of Hollywood, they were not able to sustain an audience. With each progressive pairing of Jimmy and Mann, the box-office returns were less than the previous collaboration. At least one of the reasons was a virtual blizzard of Westerns being cranked out at Universal, so many that the studio had a permanent Western set built on its back lot, to 11×12 scale, meaning everything was one inch smaller per foot than actual size, to make all the performers seem all that much bigger, heroes more heroic, villains more formidable. They were made on minuscule budgets with mostly B actor casts, and almost always played as the second film on a double feature.
Shot on location in the Louisiana bayou town of Morgan City, in Technicolor (by the great color cinematographer William Daniels), Thunder Bay came off as a modern-dress Western, less cow, more boy.
Thunder Bay opened in August 1953, a time usually reserved for the third, and least important, tier of summer films, following the Memorial Day blitz and the July 4 weekend. It was a wise move. Audiences were increasingly turned off as well by the escalating violence in Mann’s oeuvre and by the notion of Jimmy playing grizzled, wild-eyed maniacs in ever more stylized landscapes of a metaphorical moral wasteland.
Part of film’s uniqueness is that actors grow old in real life and must always and forever compete with their younger selves in the minds and the imaginations of their loyal followings. Inevitably, the reflection of mortality begins as a speck in the distance and continues to grow relentlessly larger, much to the displeasure of moviegoers forever in search of the allure, if not the illusion, of immortality through the evergreen images of their favorite movie stars. Unquestionably, while working with Mann, Jimmy had turned a generational corner. Once the eternal, pure youth who could survive anything in the name of eternal fill-in-the-blank—love of life, American democracy, family, baseball, the right woman, a good horse, etc.,—now, in Mann’s incarnation, the older man was being pursued by his own past, ultimately by his own ravaged youth, and death loomed ever larger against a backdrop of longing and limbo.
Interestingly, it was Henry Fonda, having not made a movie in years, who observed during Jimmy’s Mann period how awkward the young/old persona was that he had developed. “When Jim stops pretending to be so young,” Fonda said, “he’ll become an artist.”
Fonda was right and Jimmy knew it. Even before he finished shooting Thunder Bay, it was clear to him that a change of directors and direction had to be made. He thought he was on to something when he came up with the novel idea of acknowledging the maturation of his image by appearing on live TV. In May 1953, Stewart and Gloria appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, a cultural mainstay of fifties variety television, as part of a tribute to Josh Logan in which Jimmy filmed a recreation of his bit in the Triangle Club’s 1930’s production of The Tiger Smiles.3 In December of that same year, he showed up on, of all things, the Jack Benny Program, the popular half-hour show-within-a-show format that the great comedian had devised, one of the early, classic achievements of television before the medium ceased being a stage-based technological marvel that yielded such a wealth of highly original comedy. In that episode, Jimmy and Gloria’s Beverly Hills neighbor, Benny (also their neighbor in real life) inadvertently ruins the Stewarts’ plans for a quiet New Year’s Eve at home. As a “middle-aged couple” Jimmy and Gloria (who played herself) enjoyed the experience so much that they consented to appear once a year on the show, essentially doing the same skit over and over.
Early that July, Stewart agreed to make one more movie with Mann, as long as it wasn’t Western. He had long admired the work and the life of bandleader Glenn Miller, whose plane disappeared somewhere over the English Channel on December 15, 1943. Miller’s death shocked the nation, put a belovedly human face on the countless military dead, and plunged America into the type of mourning usually reserved for heads of state. Miller, like Stewart, had been a part of the Army Air Force, and, although he was supposed to be protected from seeing real action nonetheless died in the service of his country, something Jimmy could well identify with. Miller, an off-the-farm Iowa boy, happily married and altogether altruistic, was someone Stewart had wanted to make a movie about for some time. Now, when the opportunity finally came, he jumped at it. It came as close as any film he would ever make to dealing with the American military heroics of World War Two.
Although Mann was going to direct, the film had little to do with his brand of filmmaking. The studio insisted it be music heavy, featuring original Miller recordings and “real-life” cameos by Frances Langford, Gene Krupa, the Modernaires, and Louis Armstrong. To implement and slightly update the arrangements, Universal hired a then-unknown Henry Mancini to work on the score. To play Miller’s wife, the studio once more called upon June Allyson, whose role in the film was, essentially, to gush at her husband’s talent, encourage him when things were rough before the high tide of fame came in, and to mourn in place of America when he, at the peak of his popularity, dies.
And then, on August 2, 1953, one day after production on The Glenn Miller Story wrapp
ed, real-life tragedy visited the life of Jimmy Stewart, when seventy-eight-year-old Elizabeth was stricken with a heart attack. As soon as the news reached Jimmy, he and Gloria flew to Indiana, where he sat by his mother’s side until she slipped quietly into eternity.
That night, cloaked in the shroud of irreplaceable loss, he wept like a baby in his wife’s arms.
PART SIX
Venus, Veritas, Vertigo
Hanging on by his fingertips. Jimmy Stewart as John “Scottie” Ferguson in a studio publicity shot for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958).
20
“Hitchcock saw in Stewart an American different from the George Bailey of It’s a Wonderful Life…his was not the dark opposite of Stewart’s usual character, as some critics have written, but a much more complex figure—a George Bailey whose guilt and confusion were uniquely Hitchcock’s creation. The Hitchcock male was complex—the hero, yet reluctant; the lover, yet confused and restrained; the innocent, yet menaced as if guilty. They were men drawn reluctantly to women—Cary Grant in Notorious and To Catch a Thief and Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window and Vertigo.”
—DAN AUILER
The Glenn Miller Story opened on February 11, 1954, to rave reviews, especially for Jimmy’s performance in the title role. It would go on to become the third highest-grossing film of that year, just behind Michael Curtiz’s musical White Christmas, starring Bing Crosby; and Edward Dmytryk’s The Caine Mutiny, based on the Herman Wouk novel, starring Humphrey Bogart, yet another postwar ’50s film that reflected with dark uncertainty on military and political authority.