Jimmy Stewart: Hollywood's All-American man

This is a tribute to Jimmy Stewart, the All-American man of Hollywood.  Throughout his career, he always played your classic protagonist.  Its hard not to love Jimmy Stewart because not only was he a great actor, but he played characters who it was often very hard to hate.  As an actor, he brought a great deal of Pathos to his roles and made them more sympathetic than they already were.  Its not by pure coincidence that his roles were always sympathetic, the passion and charisma he brought out in his roles just made you fall in love with every one of them. 

He worked with many directors but the director that maybe brought out the best in him was Frank Capra.  Frank Capra was the persona of The American Dream and expressed it on film.  His movies were idealistic and uplifting which creates a great vehicle for a sympathetic and heartwarming protagonist.  His first Capra film, mr Smith Goes to Washington was what catapulted him into fame.   In the movie, he played a starry-eyed new senator, Jefferson Smith, who is idealistic about the work that can be done but he is secretly a pawn of corrupt politicians who try to frame him.  In the end, Smith is shown to have made an impact on the hearts and minds of even some of the politicians who were involved in the Corruption.




Stewart was drafted into the Army shortly afterward, but wanted to serve as he was an excellent pilot. When they tried to keep him off the front lines because he was an actor, he wouldn't have it and he served in battle and eventually rose to Brigadier General (in the US Reserves after the war).

His first movie after the war was maybe my favorite he ever did, Its a Wonderful Life.  Here, he played a man on the edge who was about to commit suicide but his guardian angel shows how life would be different for everyone around him with him gone.  We don't realize how big of an impact the little things we do matter to other people.  George Bailey was a great protagonist. War hero, everyman, champion of the people, generous, his one (almost) fatal flaw was that he just couldn't see it all.  This was another Capra film and has gone down as the most inspirational film of all time.  

It wasn't just with Capra that he did so me of his great work (I just find those roles the most sympathetic and inspiring), he worked with some great directors like George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock, and Anthony mann.  He was in fact one of the primary leading men Hitchcock used, and was in some of Hitcock's greatest works such as Rope, Verigo, and Rear Window.  Any role he had, he could bring out the best in, even in a psychological thriller like Vertigo, far different from his Capra Films.  With Anthony mann, he ventured into yet another genre, that of Westerns.  Westerns are what he focused on in the late 50s and into the 60s through directors John Ford and Anthony mann.  


His roles and genres he acted in changed as Hollywood did.  To me, I will always remember him in the iconic roles that stuck with me like Jefferson Smith, George Bailey, Elwood Dowd, and L.B. Jeffries.