Pre-War James Stewart: Dark Passages

By Johnny DiLoretto

Johnny DiLoretto is a film critic for Columbus, Ohio's The Other Paper

James Stewart has never quite been the all-American, shoulder-shrugging rube he's too often reduced to in recent assessments of his career. If his range was as limited as all that, he could never have sustained a 40-plus year career in the movies and worked with the likes of directors as accomplished and aesthetically diverse as Ernst Lubitsch, Frank Borzage, Frank Capra, George Cukor, Anthony Mann, Billy Wilder, William Wellman, John Ford, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Stewart's responsible for some of the most mesmerisingly nuanced performances given by a male star from 1934 to 1940, at which time he left Hollywood to fight in the war. In many of these pre-war films the young actor reveals an onscreen persona imploringly accessible dense with reserves of natural charm, but also deeply pocked with a dormant, seething anger and anxiety and a troublesome neurosis rooted in a complex construction of onscreen masculinity.

The general consensus is that these prewar films showcase his small-town American charm and little else, and that after WWII, in which he served and for which services he was decorated, directors like Hitchcock and Mann capitalized on and exploited audience preconceptions of Stewart to darken the palettes of their films.

In Hitchcock's Rope (1948), Stewart plays a smug professor who espouses Nietzchean theories of moral superiority, and apparently quite carelessly since two of his students take him to heart and off a friend of theirs on the grounds he's an inferior nudnik. Of course, when Stewart's scholar finds them out, he drops the cerebral pretenses and lets forth, in true quivering vibrato fashion, his outrage. But even so, his portrayal of the tweedy intellectual, all cool schooling and no heart, is the kind of perverse 'against-type' casting that marks his best post-war films.

Without retreading much trod ground, in Rear Window (1954) Hitch posits Stewart as a wheelchair-bound voyeur who can only find Grace Kelly sexually arousing when he sees her, through binoculars, cross the threshold of privacy and enter the lair of the killer. The director cast him four years later as an obsessed detective with a pronounced necrophiliac bent in Vertigo. In both films Stewart's characters are explicitly given some physical equivalent of the castration anxiety seething beneath his onscreen persona - the broken leg in Window, the nauseating fear of heights in Vertigo - and both films are resolved by a climactic engagement of the weakness. In Window his invalid photographer effectively occupies the killer until the authorities arrive, but he is dropped from his apartment ledge and breaks his other leg as a sort of phallic punishment. In the Vertigo climax the Stewart character's sexual rage blinds him to his sickness as he chases Kim Novak up the gothic bell tower. Only when the hysteria diverts his attention from his weakness can he solve the crime. Having so conquered the fear, Scottie becomes wholly sexual again and regains his prowess and power over Novak's femme fatale, who plummets to her death.

As for Mann, again I'll be brief. Stewart made five Westerns with the director each of them marking a progression in the genre from the morally upright (and therefore sexually and psychologically stable) hero to the morally uptight (and sexually, psychologically unstable) hero to the fluidly amoral (and altogether sexually, psychologically unreadable) anti-hero. I don't think you'd call Stewart's characters in these films an anti-hero - since his motives are usually clear and just he falls into the middle category - but his emotional fragility does foreshadow the laconic retreat, ten or so years later, of the Western figure into himself and into the silence of Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name. After Stewart's emotional collapse at the end of The Naked Spur in 1953 (I defy anyone to find another example of a leading man prior to this film shedding tears in a Western), the Western hero, having been broken by his own moral strictures (John Wayne began the insular psychotic retreat three years later in The Searchers), had nowhere else to go but inside of himself where he rotted.

Also characteristic of the postwar Stewart was his hair-trigger ability to snap out of the docile humility of his characters and resort to assured, often wild-eyed, violence. Dan Duryea's needling Winchester '73 villain gets his arm twisted back and his face slammed into the bar in an almost imperceptible flash after he deliberately spills Stewart's liquor. The reaction comes as a shock as much to Duryea as it does to the spectator. Heightening the voltage is Stewart's throat-curdling growl, pitched at a gruff scream. This isn't the typical glare and whisper or haughty bellow of a hero assured by cinematic propriety of his leading man authority over the supporting villain. This is a man who lives on the precipitous cuff of rage.

I mention these above films only to establish that the examples contained within them are well documented. Yes, Stewart returned to Hollywood after WWII a different man, a few years older, toughened and matured by battle, but the darker side of his onscreen persona was not mined of those experiences alone. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that these proclivities were budding, if not firmly rooted, in many of the films he made before the war.

Stewart made his uncredited debut in the 1934 Shemp Howard short Art Trouble. Only a year later he was costarring with Spencer Tracy in The Murder Man. From the moment we first see him in that picture, climbing awkwardly from the cramped backseat of a convertible grinning ingenuously, he etched in stone the persona for which he would forever be remembered - that of the gangling, self-effacing rube, the swell, aw-shucks kinda guy.

In the next few years he would quickly establish himself as a versatile young star. In 1936 he both crooned (and half-warbled) Cole Porter's 'Easy to Love' in Born to Dance and played the killer found out by William Powell and Myrna Loy in After the Thin Man.

At about this same time, old college pal and certified movie star Margaret Sullavan pushed for Stewart to star opposite her in a few of her weepie romances, thereby establishing him as a viable romantic lead. They made several notable pictures together, including The Shopworn Angel, a three-hankie tearjerker that nevertheless showcases Stewart's considerable comic deftness. But perhaps they reached the pinnacle of their collaborations in Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner.

That was 1938, a year that would propel him to stardom. Opposite Ginger Rogers in the screwball comedy-romance Vivacious Lady he proved he could sell a line soaked in vinegar and set hearts to swooning. George Stevens' camera adores Stewart and here we can see a perfect example of what, in his book Acting Male, Dennis Bingham, recalling Laura Mulvey's seminal essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and its assessment of the 'male gaze,' identifies as Stewart's own patented 'enraptured gaze.'

Standard practice at the time regarding a man looking at a woman called for him to be shot in crisp focus and her in a soft haze, the suggestion being, if one can extrapolate a poeticism here, that the woman is melting under the lamp of the male stare. A bit florid perhaps, but apt. The male star has always had the power of the camera behind his eyeline. But here it is Stewart who seems to be shot in soft-focus. His openmouthed gaze doesn't objectify or otherwise force Rogers into a receptive state for the spectator. It is Stewart who, by projecting his vulnerability in the moment traditionally reserved for the male to impart the power of his glance, becomes feminized.

The Vivacious script coincidentally takes note of this vulnerability. As professor Peter Morgan, an enamored Stewart tells showgirl Francey (Rogers) a story about his father having run him over as a child with the family car. "Well, that's just about how I feel right now." Stewart's gaze doesn't inflict a sense of ownership or proactive sexuality but a vulnerability to pain, an admission of romantic defenselessness. He might well have been one of the only male stars capable of projecting such an open, afflicted gaze. Certainly, he was the only one willing to show it. In the coming years, this would define him as a unique star of the day, a quality that would set him apart from other leading men.

It was also the quality that perhaps gave vent to, what I call, the masculine hysteria of the Stewart persona - the driving force behind his sudden bursts of physical or emotional violence, moments in his films that always come as a shock coiled as they are beneath the star's fragile carapace. It is his unconscious retreat to the feminine that is often at the source of his anxiety and that propels his characters, like the ones of Hitchcock and Mann mentioned above, into crises of masculinity that can only be solved by reasserting that masculinity.

To be surprised by Stewart's early work take a look at his performance in After the Thin Man. It isn't difficult to see how unique a male presence he is and his frightening ability to register in a seamless crescendo notes of compassion, guilt, melancholy, madness and hatred.

Cornered into a confession by Powell's deviously insistent (and charming) detective Nick Charles, Stewart, who until this point is all soft-featured compassion, lets his face, wide-eyed (but not too) with incredulity, go slack for just a second before winding it up again in a tightly screwed countenance of criminality. It's a powerful moment for a young supporting actor and one that a lesser performer might have played, at this point in his career, too safely, or toughly, perhaps in an attempt to secure a path to leading roles. But Stewart lets himself go with natural zeal, tossing machismo to the wings. "That's right," he confesses, "I wanted to see her hang, I wanted to see her die." No other role in his career would encapsulate, in so little screen time, the range of his powers. The moment is so powerful that it nearly upends the light comic tone of the film, not because it's melodramatic but because Stewart is so frighteningly real, so obviously enveloped in the energy of his performance that he steals the authority of the picture right out from under Powell. Perhaps, sensing the preternatural force of the young Stewart, director W.S Van Dyke shoots Powell from Stewart's POV, an almost unheard of usurpation of the camera from a supporting player from an established star especially when the height of the actor demands that the lead be dwarfed in the shot looking up into the towering camera. Powell of course has the presence to pull it off - he doesn't lose control of the scene - but still Stewart's physical presence takes command, briefly, of the camera.

When the police converge on him, after a hat is thrown in his face, it's as though he collapses from the weight of his confession - there's something inevitable about it, something in the slumping melt of the character that provokes a lump of unexpected sympathy despite the character's surprising change of heart. Not unlike the vicious roundabout of Stewart's Scottie in the climax of Vertigo. Back in the happy Hollywood heyday of 1936 and the uncomplicated male figures of the period (already the dour, brine-knuckled gangster that James Cagney personified was turning good guy G-man) here was a male actor capable of projecting the humane and the inhumane in one or two fell swoops and still never lose the audience's rooting interest. Surely it was this quality Van Dyke was looking for or what he capitalized on when Stewart was cast three years later in 1939 opposite Claudette Colbert in the screwball farce It's a Wonderful World which calls for him to not only fall in love with his leading lady (and his top-billed costar) but punch her out at one point.

Of course, it is exactly this kind of emotional range, this ability of his to play comedy when called to and slide up and down the continuum registering notes of rage, rapture, and the miseries of drama, that landed him, one might say the role of a lifetime, in Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

When looking at his performance as the naïve junior senator in Smith, clips are often shown of the climactic monologues, the throat-rasping pleas for compassion that go unheard until he collapses of exhaustion on the Senate floor. Almost never referenced is the rampage Smith embarks on after his arrival when he finds the press boys have made a fool out of him. Suddenly poisoned by venality, Smith hunts them all down one by one and gives them all a sound punch in the nose. The montage arguably might be played for uncomfortable laughs but Stewart barrels through it menacingly foreshadowing his similar revenge-hunt in Mann's Bend of the River (1952).

But it was his other big film of 1939, the flipside of Mr. Smith that mines the depths of his psychology and lays bare the castration anxiety at the heart of his 'enraptured gaze.'
While John Ford and his soon-to-be superstar John Wayne were busy defining the Western with Stagecoach (1939), James Stewart and frequent comedy director George Marshall were turning the genre on its ear in Destry Rides Again. No other film before or after would so explicitly in its narrative attempt to negotiate the paradoxes of the Stewart figure, the gentle tough guy, the effeminate but guileless heterosexuality, and again the turmoil seething an inch beneath his soft, placid features and peaceful demeanor.

Probably more relevant now than it was then, Destry is part-comedy, part-action, and all gun fetishizing western. Tom Destry (Stewart) is the nephew of a famed lawman recruited to re-tame the very town his dead father had cleaned up years before. When he arrives, a professed anti-firearm peacenik, the townswomen gawk and the townsmen, of both moral persuasions, regard him as though he had just ridden into town wearing a pink smock. Now, the reactions seem barefacedly homophobic since Destry's gunlessness is read as a sign of penislessness, a faulty assumption that equates lack with femininity and femininity with homosexuality.

The villainous constituency (led by Brian Donlevy) sizes up Destry as an impotent, ineffectual and easily pushed-around ponce. His game, easygoing smile only cements their perception of him. When the well-meaning but misguided lug Jack Tyndall (played by the great character actor Jack Carson) tries to usurp Destry's authority (simultaneously slipping in an insult), the unarmed sheriff lays him out with one of the most authentic looking haymakers ever caught on film. Not only that but it's lightening fast. If anyone in the audience had their doubts about Destry (or Stewart for that matter) the punch he throws should put them straight.

Marshall frames his actors in a tight shot under a saloon awning and like his explosion in Winchester '73 this one seems to erupt at twice the speed of light and come from a hitherto unnoticed wellspring of rage. I hate to explicate Stewart's complexity by enumerating his onscreen punches, but these can't be so easily contextualized as the by-the-numbers brawls required by the genre. Furthermore, the violence is meant to be read against the subtext of the film, which clearly concerns itself with the mystery of Destry's manhood.

The Stewart character also undergoes a prolonged humiliation at the jibes and taunts of the townsfolk, amounting to what might be considered a subtextual rape. He suffers a similar metaphoric fate in The Man from Laramie in which he's lassoed, dragged through a fire and shot in the hand.

Only a demonstration of his prowess with a six-shooter in the streets quiets the insulting ridicule. Stewart's taking the guns from a couple of rowdies and shooting up the sign of a saloon (knocking off one by one the tiny little knobs that festoon it) is laced with a menace that specifically addresses the prurience of the insults. His glare isn't meant to prove them wrong about his ability to shoot, it's meant to rub their faces in his masculinity. Marshall might have directed the scenes for laughs, but Stewart plays it with a straight-faced chill.

In a stroke of casting brilliance, Stewart, as the unarmed title sheriff, stars opposite the legendarily androgynous (and sexually omnivorous) Marlene Dietrich as Frenchy the morally compromised chanteuse of Bottleneck. Dietrich is such a dynamic presence, her assured sexuality so effusive, that she brings the subtext of Stewart's gunlessness right to the fore. One withering glance from her and the spectator is left wondering about the possible void between Destry's holsters. That is until Destry pays Frenchy an unannounced visit and turns the tables on her in an aggressive gambit. Dietrich always, despite her uberous love life offscreen, played a tough independent woman who could nevertheless be tamed by the likes of Gary Cooper. But here, as the object of Stewart's gaze (decidedly unrapt in this instance), she's never seemed quite so vulnerable sexually. The scene, albeit romantic, is charged with a rare eroticism for 1939 Hollywood, allowing however briefly to surface the explicit heterosexual desire that often lay obscured behind the ambiguities of both stars onscreen personae.

The banner Hollywood year of 1939 also proved to be one for Stewart - the one-two punch of Smith and Destry catapulted him to the A-list. Katharine Hepburn specifically requested Stewart to costar in her comeback project The Philadelphia Story for which Stewart won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar of 1940. (More likely it was for the two performances of '39.) Also in 1940 he paired with Rosalind Russell for perhaps the most bizarre (and underrated) film of his career, No Time For Comedy. His bumptious, idealistic, small town playwright in that film hits it big on Broadway and is transformed into an urbane, tippling sophisticate scarred by self-doubt and cynicism, yet another instance of a prewar film's attempt to resolve the conundrum of his paradoxical screen presence.

Later that year he would volunteer for service and enter the war and when he came out in 1946 a decorated pilot, his first project was It's a Wonderful Life with old pal Capra at the helm. A great many movie fans hold that film and Stewart's performance in it sacrosanct, I myself one of them. But I can't help seeing in it, not just the spiritual triumph of a plundered man who remains devoted to his community and his family, but of one embittered, frustrated soul's descent into madness. Only a figure as receptive to an audience's psychological contradictions as Stewart's could make us forget, or divert our attentions from our darkest selves. Perhaps because he's so adored an American icon moviegoers tend to whitewash what they see of him onscreen. But reevaluating his work is really just a matter of not turning away from what he shows us of ourselves.