James Stewart was born 100 years ago, on May 20, 1908, the same week that Constantin Stanislavski published his “grammar” of acting at the Moscow Arts Theatre, essentially an effort to formulate a codified, systematic approach by which the actor psychologically wrenches himself into “becoming” his fictional character.  There is no doubt in my mind that it was Stewart, not Stanislavski, who got things right, and that Stewart’s unpretentious approach to his craft has made for the more enduring art.  However, Stanislavski’s reputation remains as great today as it was in the 1950’s, when performers such as Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, Vic Morrow, James Dean, and Paul Newman brought variations of the so-called method (routinely illustrated by the totemic ripped T-shirt) to American screens.  The idea of the tortured anti-hero has long since entered the culture, as has a critical disdain for the sort of picture even notionally family-friendly studios such as Disney refer to in their internal memos as brazenly playing to “the great average”—notably It’s a Wonderful Life (1946).  While allowing that some of its exponents may be very fine performers, I quail before the method and its many modern counterparts, which collectively seem to be a catch-all for everything that is labored and self-regarding and insufferable about contemporary film, or at least that part of it where the accent is on addressing the struggles of the time rather than the interests of the fee-paying public.  A while ago, in the course of researching a book, I was obliged to endure a two-day festival of brooding, stylized American, Polish, and French films of the period 1945-60, uniformly devoid of any conventional plot or sordidly commercial appeal of any kind, the whole ordeal culminating in a lecture entitled “The Collapse of Character in Postwar Narrative Art.”  To sit through this as I did followed by an emergency home screening of Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) was like drinking a glass of cold mineral water after gorging on heavily salted nuts.

He was born James Maitland Stewart (and never willingly answered to Jimmy) in Indiana, Pennsylvania, the son of Elizabeth Ruth (née Jackson) and Alexander Maitland Stewart, who owned a hardware store.  The family were Presbyterian and of Scottish origin, not traditionally a font of mass entertainment, though, as a boy, James was trusted with a magic kit and encouraged to play the accordion.  He made his acting debut at the age of eight, with his self-written production of Beat the Kaiser staged in the basement of the family home.  There was a one-cent charge, and no one was exempt.  Forty years later, Stewart was the first major Hollywood figure to negotiate a percentage of gross profits instead of a flat fee for a film, calmly informing the board of Universal Studios that it was stars such as himself, not they, who put fans in the seats.  That’s a principle that Tom Cruise applies today, every time he gets $25 million to appear on screen.

After graduating from Princeton in 1932 with a degree in architecture, Stewart was persuaded to audition for the University Players in West Falmouth, Massachusetts, whose members included a recent journalism-school dropout named Henry Fonda.  Stewart and Fonda pooled their resources when they moved to a walk-up apartment in New York later that year, and also when they first arrived in Hollywood in 1935.  Neither man was an overnight smash.  Stewart was later to estimate that he appeared in more than 500 screen tests over the next three years, as well as running shopping errands for his directors and in general enduring a studio system then at its corrosive peak.  It has become standard practice to denounce what Marlon Brando stigmatized just a few years later as the Hollywood “Auschwitz,” and, in particular, the monsters who ran it: for one, L.B. Mayer, whom Elizabeth Taylor characterized as “an old dwarf with a big nose,” and who routinely groped the breasts of the adolescent Judy Garland to ensure she was “adequately fed.”  Yet even from the far side of stardom, Stewart displayed the most flagrantly unfashionable sense of gratitude to those who had groomed him.  “You hear so much about the old movie moguls and the impersonal factories where there was no freedom,” he said.  “MGM was a wonderful place where decisions were made in my behalf by my superiors.  What’s wrong with that?”

Here, obviously, was a man with a firm intuitive grasp of how to succeed.  Technically, too, Stewart distinguished himself from the start as a versatile performer who married a distinctly masculine charm, as it was still defined in the 1930’s, with the sort of nervous energy and fluttering mannerisms more associated with the likes of Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn.  Disappointingly to some in the modern film-studies industry, he was not a closet homosexual.  Off-screen, Stewart led a freewheeling bachelor lifestyle that included affairs with Norma Shearer, MGM production chief Irving Thalberg’s middle-aged widow, and a host of pliable starlets.  One nonagenarian lady assures me that he had been a smooth operator, but that “he also had this little lost boy thing going on as well.  You always wanted to pat down his hair.”  The 23-year-old Ginger Rogers was to inform the press shortly after his arrival in Hollywood that Stewart ranked with the very best as a ballroom dancer, high praise from one who had already partnered Fred Astaire in Top Hat.

Stewart had an acting playbook of his own, such as breaking up his sentences with an inserted caesura or the iconic stammer, typical of the shy, country-boy manner he sometimes adopted on screen but also a pretty effective way to ensure the audience hangs on your every word.  The German-born director Henry Koster, a former reporter and film critic, considered Stewart “the most eloquent man in America” and finally got a chance to work with him in Harvey (1950), the fable about a lush whose companion is a six-foot invisible rabbit.  Koster believed the way he paused in his climactic speech between “back” and “but” (“The same people seldom come back; but that’s envy, my dear”) made the film.  At a time when the likes of Gary Cooper and John Wayne had made an art form out of being laconic, Stewart liked nothing better than to launch into a page-long disquisition on anything from astronomy to the correct way to mix a martini.  Clearly, monologue was somewhere he felt very much at home.  When asked toward the end of his life what he hoped his artistic legacy might be, Stewart recalled a day in 1953 during the filming of The Far Country when, eschewing the practice of today’s stars, he had sat down for lunch at a picnic table in a public park.  Not long into the meal, he was approached by an elderly man who apparently wasn’t quite sure who he was.  In the actor’s words:

‘”You Stewart?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“You did a thing in a picture once,” he said.  “Can’t remember the name of it, but you were in a room and you said a poem or something about fireflies.  That was good.”

In March 1941, nine months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, Stewart joined the Army and eventually became a pilot flying bombing missions over Germany.  Rising from the rank of private to full colonel in two years, he would command the 445th Bomber Group based in Tibenham, England, a notably different experience from the behind-the-lines regimen of USO Revues and War Bond drives favored by John Wayne, for one.  Some estimates have put the 445th’s overall casualties at 87 percent.  Stewart flew 20 low-altitude raids and won the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Air Medal, and the French Croix de Guerre.  He refused all the publicity the military wanted to pour on him, though in 1955, aged 47, he somewhat optimistically appeared as a professional baseball player who goes to war in Strategic Air Command.

As if being both a patriot and a Republican isn’t bad enough to today’s average film critic, Stewart was also shamelessly proud of his small-town roots.  For his 75th birthday in 1983, Indiana, Pennsylvania, threw a party attended by some 40,000 fans—well subscribed, for a community of just 15,000—at which the actor unveiled a statue in his likeness.  “This is where I made up my mind about certain things—about the importance of hard work and community spirit, the value of family, church and God,” Stewart told the crowd.  He and his wife, Gloria, were married for 45 years before her death in 1994, three years ahead of his own.

The final phase of Stewart’s career saw some of his most complex roles, notably his four films for Alfred Hitchcock: Rope, Rear Window, The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Vertigo.  These performances are uniformly riveting, shot through with humor, anguish, toughness, and neurotic indecision—at once gawky and hard-boiled, full of self-doubt and as gritty as a half-completed road.  This heady mixture of contradictions and thrilling acting compensates for the scripts’ sometimes only adequate dialogue and questionable subject matter.  In its original incarnation, 1954’s Rear Window, in which a photojournalist laid up with a broken leg passes the time by spying on his neighbors, becomes both an absorbing character study and a passable thriller.  The ill-advised 1998 remake starring Christopher Reeve is a mere exercise in voyeurism.  Some actors are defeated by their material.  Stewart gloriously transcended it.