James Stewart

  • The FBI Story (1959)

    The FBI Story (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) National propaganda can take many forms, including a grandfatherly James Stewart narrating the officially approved story of the American national police force. So it is that The F.B.I. Story is one more Hollywoodian take on the FBI (also see the classic G Men), approved by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover himself. From the opening moment, we understand that it’s at least entertaining propaganda: As Stewart begins with the procedural details of how an airplane bomber (itself a then-new and disturbing concept) was caught through meticulous investigation, it sets up The FBI Story as a tale of how an organization can do no wrong. Stewart then plays an agent over the first few decades of the organization’s history, first in imposing some discipline over a lax and scattered organization, then in tackling progressively more difficult cases. In-passing, we get a look at the gallery of rogues that captured the American imagination from the 1930s to the 1950s —Ku Klux Klan, mobsters, Nazis and communists. Vera Miles plays the protagonist’s wife, providing enough domestic incidents to tie the episodic structure of the film together. It’s charming in an intensely paternalistic way — clearly outlining the FBI as a good, even infallible force for order, and their opponents as enemies of the state. (One wonders how the film would have been less amusing had it been completed even a decade later.)  Stewart is often too old to play his role, but he is Stewart and, as such, almost unassailable as the lead voice in the film. Some of the vignettes do represent a revealing look at episodes of American history, even as heavily fictionalized as they are — there’s something about its unspoken racist assumptions (just wait until it talks about Native Americans) that present history filtered through 1950s mainstream attitudes, and the dissonance with modern values can often be arresting. Despite its heavy-handed moral patronization, The FBI Story nonetheless remains a curiously involving film: the script can often be wryly funny, and Stewart’s charm does patch up a lot of issues. It certainly makes for a fascinating case study in media literacy, or how entertainment can serve the state’s interest in hyping its police as essential, righteous and all-powerful.

  • Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

    Ziegfeld Girl (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) In some ways, you can see Ziegfeld Girl as the second of an informal trilogy of MGM movies about Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. —or more specifically the Ziegfeld Follies revue productions that he created for Broadway. Their appeal could be summed up in a word: Girls. 1945’s Ziegfeld Follies was MGM’s attempt to re-create his shows with lavish means and the biggest stars in the business. Before that, 1936’s Academy-Award-winning biopic The Great Ziegfeld showed us the man’s life, and produced some of the most stunning musical numbers of 1930s American cinema along the way. Some of those set-pieces are reused in 1941’s Ziegfeld Girls, which foregoes the man himself to focus on the fictional story of three girls who become part of the show. That, in itself, would be a decent-enough backstage musical, but that’s before taking a look at the cast. Not only do you have James Stewart playing a vaguely disreputable truck driver getting annoyed at his girlfriend’s greater fame (a role somewhat less sympathetic than usual for Stewart, who doesn’t sing a line), you also have the girls themselves being played by none other than Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner — a ridiculously stacked cast, if you’ll pardon the expression. Garland is at her youthful best here, not yet showing the strains of studio life — her “Minnie From Trinidad” is the film’s standout number, as long as you put aside the unfortunate cultural issue of having her perform as a darker-skinned girl. Lamarr and Turner don’t sing, but their roles as still good showcases, and the combined impact of all three is not bad — and I’m saying this a someone who’s usually indifferent to Turner and often unimpressed with Garland. Ziegfeld Girl doesn’t manage to be a great musical, but it does have enough running for it to distinguish itself from the crowded arena of Broadway backstage musicals. Reusing some of the lavish numbers from The Great Ziegfeld must have been great for MGM’s bottom line, and it does add visual impact (as well as the gravitas associated with the earlier prestige production) to Ziegfeld Girl. It’s a nice-enough film, although I suspect that some modern viewers (as I nearly did) may run the risk of thinking they’ve seen it already due to its title being very similar to the two other films in MGM’s informal trilogy.

  • Two Rode Together (1961)

    Two Rode Together (1961)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2021) Considering my lack of affection for westerns and my Canadian citizenship, it’s probably no accident if I don’t have much fascination for director John Ford, nor his seemingly endless list of westerns. But I do like James Stewart, and his starring role in Two Rode Together was worth a look. The story is immediately reminiscent of the much superior The Searchers, as the protagonist goes looking for settlers “kidnapped” by Native Americans. Of course, there’s little heroism here, as the revisionist westerns take hold over a new decade (after Hollywood’s severe overdose of westerns in the 1950s) and Stewart seems only too happy to keep going in the same misanthropic streak he enjoyed in the films he shot with Anthony Mann. His mercenary lawman isn’t admirable, although he does get the girl (against all odds) and the happy-ish ending. I didn’t like much of Two Rode Together: the script is an ambitious mess going in far too many directions than strictly necessary, and the film (despite being shot in colour) is a somewhat downbeat carnival of dashed expectations and overturned presumptions. Whatever humour remains seems curiously glum or immediately dashed by far more sombre material. Even the relatively complex treatment of its Native American character seems hampered by the director’s old-fashioned shooting techniques. While Two Rode Together is worth a look if you’re interested in Stewart’s western oeuvre, or Ford’s touch on material he didn’t believe in (he famously directed the film for money and a personal favour, believing that the material strayed too close to The Searchers). The best scene, amazingly enough, is just Stewart and Richard Widmark chatting away about various things while the camera remains locked on them — it does suggest a far more avant-garde western made entirely of casual conversations and static camera shots à la early Kevin Smith. But not really. Two Rode Together ends up being an unwieldy collection of elements that don’t necessarily fit together, indifferently directed albeit with capable actors and the saving grace of a half-optimistic ending. That’s not much, though… even for Stewart fans.

  • Pot o’ Gold (1941)

    Pot o’ Gold (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) James Stewart’s filmography is vast, and not all of his movies are equally good or as well known to modern viewers. By 1941, he was already well known—The Philadelphia Story had earned critical acclaim, and you could see his screen persona coalescing around his specific strengths. These strengths did not necessarily include singing and dancing, making him a curious choice for Pot o’ Gold, a musical comedy teaming him with Paulette Goddard along with feuding families, obscured identities and a radio program distributing cash prizes. There’s singing, dancing, romance and comedy—but the sum of it is less successful than you’d expect. Stewart himself wasn’t a fan of the film, and contemporary reviews were harsh. Nowadays, Pot o’ Gold can be mildly interesting for the incongruous spectacle of Stewart in a musical comedy role, or as another film to feature the beautiful Goddard. Still, it’s not much of a success, and there are plenty of better films to see.

  • Shenandoah (1965)

    Shenandoah (1965)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2021) It’s interesting that you could (erroneously) pinpoint Civil-War drama Shenandoah as being from the early seventies just by paying attention to its politics. Featuring James Stewart as a Virginian farmer with a less-than-enthusiastic opinion of the war coming to claim his sons, it’s a film with a far more muddled portrayal of Confederates and Union forces than previous eras. Perhaps the most amazing thing about the film is how it seems to operate with a very 1970s antiwar attitude despite being from the mid-1960s—There’s a clear war-is-hell attitude here that would extend to WW2 dramas five years later. The point here is the toll that the war takes on families—the multiple strands of the plot are all about personal loss for abstract political reasons, and the film is merciless in what it ends up taking from the lead character. I don’t think the film would have been nearly as interesting without Stewart in the lead, leaning on his mild persona, his drawled spoken mannerisms and his dogged facial expressions to earn so much sympathy from audiences. (It’s also Katharine Ross’s screen debut.) I’m not going to overhype Shenandoah: it’s often long, repetitive and perhaps too insistent on its themes, although that last may be forgiven considering how it struck in unfamiliar directions for mid-1960s movie audiences. But it’s also unusual in how it’s a Civil War film that avoids big battles (and burns down Union trains!), heartfelt in portraying the senseless toll of war on decent families and a good late-career showcase for Stewart. There have been many much duller Civil War dramas in Hollywood history.

  • The Rare Breed (1966)

    The Rare Breed (1966)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) It takes some audacity to even think about making a western about livestock, but that’s what The Rare Breed goes for. James Stewart here plays an adventurer hired to ensure the safety of a lovely widow (Maureen O’Hara in her red-headed glory) as she brings a prized British heifer out west for breeding purposes. There are a few complications, including a lustful rancher, competing clans, budding romance and intergenerational tensions. It all culminates in a happy ending tempered with a little bit of sadness. Steward here has a tough outdoorsman role more akin to his many 1950s westerns, albeit tempered by age and a slightly softer attitude toward women and cattle: If you’re lived this long without seeing Stewart carry a calf in his arms, then this is the film for you. The focus on cattle warms my former farmhand’s heart, and still feels unusual for the western genre, despite cattle being such an important part of the wild west. (But cattle don’t carry guns, so that doesn’t make them as interesting to filmmakers.) Otherwise, I’m somewhat muted in my appreciation for The Rare Breed—I like Stewart, the bull, the ending and O’Hara, but the rest of the film feels a bit inert to me compared to the high points. Ah well—at least it concludes with cute calves galloping around.

  • Broken Arrow (1950)

    Broken Arrow (1950)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) There are movies that play well both on a surface and a metatextual level, and The Rare Breed feels like one of them if you’ve been paying attention to the history of the representation of Native American culture in Hollywood. I don’t have the knowledge to say for sure that Broken Arrow was the first film to portray a reconciliation between white settlers and Native Americans. But in the grand sweep of the western genre, it feels like a front-runner to the changing attitudes toward Native Americans during the 1950s and even more so the 1960s—often used by Classic Hollywood as caricatural villains and nothing more, it took a long time for Native Americans to establish themselves as real characters. With Broken Arrow, Hollywood takes a big step toward better representation. Here we have the all-American everyman James Stewart playing the part of a man seeking peace with Cochise—first, by learning the language, then by negotiating a carefully worded agreement to leave the mail carriers alone. It’s not a painless process for him—white people regard him with suspicion, as do most of the Native Americans. Romance blooms, and tragedy strikes—this is a dramatic western, after all, and great sacrifice make for great drama. Still, the film feels like a tentative reconciliation by itself: it would take many more decades before getting to a sufficiently accurate depiction of Native Americans in westerns (some say we’re not even there yet) but intermediate steps are important. Broken Arrow still stars a white actor as Cochise (although Geronimo is portrayed by a Mohawk actor) and fictionalizes quite a bit of material, but the Native American characters are developed; they speak in conversational English (as highlighted by the film’s opening narration) and are seen as people with valid grievances. As a result, it’s a film that has aged far better than contemporary knee-jerk depictions of Natives as pure antagonists that still filled up most of the pre-1950s westerns.

  • It’s a Wonderful World (1939)

    It’s a Wonderful World (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, November 2020) As far as 1930s screwball comedies go, It’s a Wonderful World is a competent but not particularly striking example of the form. The crime shenanigans propelling the plot have less to do with a rich businessman and a private eye being framed for murder than they do with getting James Stewart playing alongside Claudette Colbert for much of the film. The ever-cute Colbert is up to her usual standard here, a curly blonde haircut acting complementing some good banter back and forth. Stewart is a bit off-persona here, playing his PI character with a bit more roughness than usual, less drawling and with more cutting remarks. Still, it’s a decent-enough romantic caper, as both run from the law in order to establish the protagonists’ innocence. The comic convolutions get a bit overdone by the end—especially as Stewart goes undercover in an actor’s troupe, all to justify a third act with theatrical jokes. Still, there’s real fun to be had watching Colbert and Stewart play off each other, each of them bringing a different style to it. If you’re a fan of the form, It’s a Wonderful World should be fun enough.

  • The Naked Spur (1953)

    The Naked Spur (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I’m somewhat familiar with James Stewart’s filmography of the 1930s and 1940s, but not so much about the movies he did during the 1950s, a time when he consciously sought to remake his image away from the young romantic premiers or everymen characters that made his success in previous decades. By the 1950s, he sought to reinvent himself in darker, more rugged roles, often in western settings. The Naked Spur does seem like a rather good introduction to that era, as he plays a bounty hunter who heads into the wilderness to track down a man with whom he has a very personal grudge. A mere handful of characters populate The Naked Spur, giving a quasi-theatrical focus on the story even as the film is set against expansive western landscapes. The story itself gets darker as it evolves, with the characters eventually working against each other in order to secure the reward or their vengeance. Stewart himself plays a harsher character this time around, obsessed with revenge and definitely not amiable as usual. Janet Leigh is there as a possibly unreliable love interest, with director Anthony Mann completing one of his many collaborations with Stewart. The result is a cut above most westerns—a close-knit, rather short character drama set against the grandeur of the Rockies.

  • Rose-Marie (1936)

    Rose-Marie (1936)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) If I was in a cheeky mood, I could try to use the 1936 version of Rose-Marie to make a point about American cultural appropriation of Canadian iconography, and there are quite a few howlers in there. Rose-Marie (second of three versions of the same story, following a 1924 silent version and prior to a colour version in 1954) is about a singer searching for her criminal brother in the Canadian wilds, accompanied by a tall and handsome Mountie. It’s a musical, but musically, it draws its inspiration more from opera than Broadway musicals—the protagonist, like Jeanette MacDonald, is a soprano, and most of the songs (including the signature “Indian Love Call”) are very much tailored to classical singers. That means that the lighthearted comic tone that we often associate with musicals of the period is sorely toned down here—it’s a romance first, and a comedy merely by virtue of not ending horribly. It does satisfy, I suppose, but then there’s my maple-leaf emblazoned axe to grind. Playing with “Canadian references” as shoddily as any other non-Californian culture, Rose-Marie quickly accumulates howlers. The opening sequence has the protagonist being greeted warmly by the Premier of Québec, with the language question being almost completely absent in their exchange. (Well, she does sing Romeo and Juliet in phonetic French, but that’s it.) The English-French language question remains almost completely removed from the rest of the film, but there are more visual absurdities to take care of, including our protagonist travelling to “Northern Québec,” which has the backdrop of the Rockies mountains. The musical montage “The Mounties” is oddly affectionate in singing about how they always get their men, but we’re clearly playing with a bunch of Canadian clichés thrown in a blender at this point. It gets much, much worse once the native characters are introduced, with Eastern tribes wearing Prairies-type headgear and dancing around Western totems. My brain, normally adept at ignoring such cultural absurdities, basically broke down at this point and I’m not sure if I remember much more of the rest of the film than an early (and somewhat atypical) role for a young James Stewart as the protagonist’s criminal brother. (There’s also David Niven as a suitor, but he’s barely in the film.) Although I definitely remember the numerous howlings of “Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo When I’m calling you Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo Will you answer too? Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo, Oo-Oo-Oo-Oo.” I won’t even discuss the Metis character (or, for that matter, the Mountie) to spare you some harsh language. But let’s acknowledge one thing—Rose-Marie itself is somewhat innocuous: we know where it’s going, and it’s not because the film was shot in the Sierra Nevada’s Lake Tahoe passing itself for “Lake Chibougam” (an obvious bastardization of Chibougamau) that the rest of the film has to be thrown away. If you’re willing to be amused at its absurdities, it’s even charming in its own quaint way. Heck, it’s kind of interesting to feel first-hand the same kind of cultural indignation that other cultures must feel every time Hollywood comes playing in their cultural backyard: It does recalibrate the debate.

  • Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

    Take Her, She’s Mine (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) By the early 1960s, James Stewart was long past his young premier roles of the 1930s, his everyday men of the 1940s or his attempt to redefine himself in a darker, more rugged persona in the 1950s—he was now fit to portray a stereotypically likable dad dealing with sending his daughter to college. Adapted from a Broadway comedy that was, amazingly enough, based on the experiences of eventually famous writer-director Norah Ephron as a younger girl, Take Her, She’s Mine has Stewart as the kind of dad that everyone would like to have—bumbling and overprotective, but also intensely likable and able to support his daughter (played by iconic teenybopper Sandra Dee) whenever she needs help. The framing device has Stewart’s character explaining an increasingly ludicrous series of embarrassing newspaper articles before we go back in time and see how each one of them came to be. It all plays against a California-based couple sending their daughter to an east-coast college where she is swept up in the burgeoning social protest movements. As a look in the turmoil that was developing within 1960s America, Take Her, She’s Mine is a fun romp—at least in its first two thirds, because the film loses quite a bit of comic steam in the later third as the action moves to Paris and stops being as relatable. Still, Stewart can’t be topped as the well-intentioned, stammering dad who ends up participating in a sit-in against obscenity laws on behalf of his daughter, or tries to muddle through a deficient knowledge of French while tracking down his daughter in quasi-bohemian Paris. (Some of the French is quite good, some of it almost unintelligible.) It’s all good fun, and even the exhausted third act (reportedly a product of studio interference) can’t quite erase the superb period piece humour of the rest of the film as handled by director Henry Koster. Then, of course, you’ve got Stewart in a minor but highly enjoyable role—and sometimes, that’s really all you need.

  • The Far Country (1954)

    The Far Country (1954)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) Never mind the western, here is the northern: The Far Country is distinctive in how it is set in Alaska (but shot in Alberta), featuring an adventurer bringing order to the north. There are numerous points of comparison between this and Thunder Bay in semi-awkwardly featuring James Stewart as an outdoorsy adventurer, and that was before I discovered that both movies shared the same director Anthony Mann, who made many other 1950s films (especially westerns) with Steward. The ingredients are similar, what with an adventure story made distinctive by its procedural description of a slightly unusual setting. The Far Country is not that distinctive nor that good, but it’s watchable enough in how it transposes familiar Western themes to an underused environment. There’s a little bit of Canadian and French-Canadian content in here (largely due to the location and to Corinne Calvet’s performance). Still, the film is not all that memorable, and there are better choices out there for Stewart fans looking at his 1950s filmography.

  • Thunder Bay (1953)

    Thunder Bay (1953)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, October 2020) For a born-and-bred Ontarian, “Thunder Bay” carries an entirely different meaning than the title of a James Steward adventure film imagining the construction of the first offshore oil platform in the Gulf of Mexico. But here we are with Thunder Bay. This comparatively minor entry in the Stewart filmography has him as a genius (but broke) oilman with the vision and know-how to propose building an oil drilling platform off the shore of Louisiana. The film gets us from the initial pitch to oil gushing out of the derrick, with clashes with the fishing locals and some thunderous romance along the way. Filmed in very nice Technicolor, it’s an interesting procedural, even if Stewart isn’t always the best fit for a rugged oilman character—his urbane screen persona is not necessarily serving him well here, even though Stewart spent much of the 1950s pursuing more outdoorsy roles, as his time as a romantic lead was running out. The result is easy enough to watch, although twenty-first century viewers may not be entirely convinced by the film’s pro-oil stance, clearly stating that oil was central to the survival of the United States (a sentiment echoed in the near-contemporary and almost complementary Tulsa, for instance) and pretending that fishermen and oilmen could co-exist, especially after the Deepwater Horizon ecological disaster. But you have to get into the spirit of the 1950s to appreciate the film, especially when it resorts to the romantic tropes of an overbearing father deciding would-be suitors for their daughter, or the coarse poverty of the Louisiana town that acts as a base of operation for the enterprise, or even the saloon scene that brings to mind other Stewart westerns such as Destry Rides Again. I rather enjoyed Thunder Bay with the engineering-friendly portion of my brain, as an oil-drilling procedural with then-new technology—the first offshore deployment in the Gulf of Mexico dates from 1947, if I’ve got my notes right, and Thunder Bay was filmed on this Kerr-McGee site while a political fight erupted in Washington over legislating this new oil rush. I also enjoyed seeing Stewart at work, obviously, even if I’m not sure about the cast: at least he’s got the aw-shuck inspirational messaging done right. I suspect that many other viewers won’t get as much out of the film at all. If you want to hear James Stewart talk about the other Thunder Bay in northern Ontario, have a look at Anatomy of a Murder instead.

  • Destry Rides Again (1939)

    Destry Rides Again (1939)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, August 2020) It can take a lot for a western film to grab me these days –it doesn’t help that there’s a seemingly infinite number of them in the Classic Hollywood catalogue. Also, perhaps more importantly, I don’t have any basic affection for the genre as I do for musicals or film noir – as a result, I tend to watch westerns and forget them almost immediately. But Destry Rides Again is slightly different. For one thing, it features none other than screen legends James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich in the lead roles – for another, it’s a somewhat less trigger-happy take on cleaning up a rowdy frontier town, with a baby-faced Stewart playing a deputy sheriff with an aversion to carrying or using a gun. (This being said, the film makes it crystal-clear that he’s an expert marksman when he wants to, which is a trope that frequently turns up in American “pacifist” fiction.) Meanwhile, Dietrich plays the femme fatale of the local drinking establishment, a powerful influence who could make or break the deputy sheriff’s efforts to get rid of the local lead hoodlum. The absolute highlight of the film comes when the two get involved in a saloon fight – or more specifically when she starts throwing objects at him and he’s bound not to answer in kind. Otherwise, Destry Rides Again does follow a generally satisfying narrative that promotes non-violence in the service of a taming-the-wild-west story. Or rather up to a certain point: true to form for American cinema, there’s a point where guns have to be used and bad people have to die. Still, the result is more memorable than many other westerns from the era.

  • No Time for Comedy (1940)

    No Time for Comedy (1940)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, July 2020) If you like James Stewart (and who doesn’t?), No Time for Comedy has him in a good role as a young romantic lead, a gifted comic playwright playing opposite an actress (the rather wonderful Rosalind Russell) through high and low times in their relationship. As a portrait of another era where playwrights were household names, No Time for Comedy is interestingly off-beat—it speaks to readers and movie fans alike in having Stewart as an agreeably awkward writer as the protagonist. Russell was very near the peak of her early roles at the time of this film (shortly after great turns in The Women and His Girl Friday) and her screen persona is a good match for the material. Both Stewart and Russell had better roles in 1940 alone—for Stewart, his foremost turn as a young romantic lead came the same year in The Shop Around the Corner—but it’s actually fun to see them both in a lesser-known film playing to their strengths. If anything, No Time for Comedy is a perfectly acceptable little comedy (despite an unconvincing slide into manufactured drama in the third act), and it’s not quite as overexposed as His Girl Friday or The Shop Around the Corner from the same year. Stewart and Russell are perfectly up to their personas, and the result is a nice little discovery.