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An unassuming genius

Peter Hoskin

Wednesday, 7th May 2008

Pete Hoskin on the Hollywood actor James Stewart, who was born 100 years ago

Of these, The Naked Spur is the finest, and the greatest film that Stewart ever made. In it he plays a ruthless bounty hunter, who, as the film progresses, wanders ever closer to the edge of psychosis. Stewart’s performance is hysterical, brooding and terrifying. Had his involvement in the war left scars that needed to be flaunted on the screen? As always, it’s hard to second-guess an actor’s psychology. But, as the critic David Thomson puts it, Stewart increasingly took on roles that were ‘against his accepted character’.

Hitchcock seized on Stewart’s new screen persona, and dragged it to ever more ambivalent depths. In Rear Window (1954), Stewart’s Jeff is confined to a wheelchair, while a never-more-beautiful Grace Kelly flops around on his bed. It’s sexual frustration writ large across the silver screen — and one suspects his subsequent descent into voyeurism is nothing more than a form of release. This was followed by Hitchcock’s sinister masterpiece, Vertigo (1958). Again, there’s more than an undercurrent of sexual obsession, as Stewart’s character becomes bewitched by the ethereal Kim Novak. Both films make for sadistic but compelling viewing.

The films mentioned above are essential cinema; all among the greatest ever made. And two more of that calibre were to follow — Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). But, despite his considerable success, Stewart remained the humble, down-to-earth character who had left Indiana all those years before. He maintained close friendships with many of the people he worked with through the years — including John Wayne, Ronald Reagan and Henry Fonda — but was never seduced by the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood scene. It’s perhaps the loveliest detail of Stewart’s life that he and Fonda used to sit silently together, painting model airplanes.

The film career eventually fizzled out, but the friendships — and the public affection for Stewart — remained. He died on 2 July 1997. Some years before, he had made a typically straightforward plea: ‘I’d like people to remember me as someone who was good at his job, and seemed to mean what he said.’ Well, Jimmy, 100 years after your birth, you’ve succeeded on both counts.