Month: July 2023

WEEKEND MOVIE MARATHONS: James Stewart

Can y’all believe it’s been nearly a year since we’ve done a Weekend Movie Marathon?!?!?? I won’t make excuses, except to say that I’ve been in one of my infamous funks for quite awhile and have been a neglectful steward of this site. At any rate, poet Robert Frost famously opined that “the best way out is thru”, so that’s what we’re going to do, and I can think of no better way to accomplish the goal than to discuss one of my favorite actors of all time.

Jimmy Stewart hailed from Indiana, PA, which is about 45 miles north of Pittsburgh, which in turn is just a couple of hours from my home in northcentral West Virginia. There is actually a Jimmy Stewart Museum in Indiana that I’d love to visit but likely never will for various reasons. At any rate, I’ve been a big Stewart fan since I was a teenager, an obsession that probably began with my affection for all things Christmas related. That being said, we’re not discussing THAT movie today. Stewart starred in about eighty films during a career that spanned nearly six decades, and he did a little bit of everything…comedy, suspense, westerns, biopics, rom-coms. He was a versatile performer whose charm & humanity made him feel…accessible, not like an aloof movie star who’d likely scoff at you if you dared to say hello. He’s the only actor, strictly speaking, in my Hall of Influence, since I perceive Dean Martin & Frank Sinatra as singers who happened to do movies occasionally. What is presented here doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of Jimmy Stewart’s legendary career, but it showcases what I appreciate about him within the parameters of my particular entertainment palate.

Friday Night

The Philadelphia Story

It’s hard to imagine that Stewart only won one Academy Award. He was nominated five times, but took home the statue for Best Actor in 1941, overcoming competition from his good friend Henry Fonda, Charlie Chaplin, and Laurence Olivier. The Philadelphia Story is a romantic comedy in which he stars as a reporter covering the big wedding of a socialite (portrayed by Katherine Hepburn), which is complicated by the presence of her ex-husband (portrayed by Cary Grant). The film has a 100% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and illustrates Stewart’s ability to represent the “regular guy” while standing shoulder-to-shoulder with more glamorous colleagues.

Saturday Matinee

The Greatest Show on Earth

It’s an odd film and probably one of Stewart’s most under-the-radar performances. Four years before director Cecil B. DeMille gave us Charlton Heston as Moses in Biblical epic The Ten Commandments he & Heston teamed up for an ostentatious ode to the circus, which even as recently as my childhood was a significant piece of the American entertainment zeitgeist. Stewart has a supporting role as Buttons, a mysterious clown with a secret who no one has ever seen without makeup. The movie was a controversial winner of the Academy Award for Best Picture, beating out High Noon & Singin’ in the Rain (which wasn’t even nominated).

Saturday Night

Rear Window

Stewart collaborated with director Alfred Hitchcock on four movies and this one is my favorite. I appreciate restraint & minimalism, and there’s no better example than a film that mostly takes place thru the eyes of a man in a wheelchair confined to his own apartment (a circumstance to which I can relate…IYKYK). Jeff Jefferies is a renowned photographer recovering from a broken leg. Since this was decades before The Internet & social media his only human interaction is with girlfriend Lisa (portrayed by the future ill-fated Princess Grace of Monaco) and home health nurse Stella (you may remember the actress from a key scene in Miracle on 34th St.). Fortunately (or not 👀) Jeff lives in a courtyard apartment and spends his convalescence scrutinizing neighbors that he apparently doesn’t know at all, giving them nicknames like Miss Lonelyhearts & Miss Hearing Aid. The plot thickens when he becomes convinced that a man across the yard murdered his wife, with Lisa & Stella getting roped into helping him investigate.

Sunday Matinee

The Glenn Miller Story

Glenn Miller was a successful big band leader in the 1930s & 40s whose life was cut tragically short. Jimmy Stewart just happened to be a Miller doppelgänger, so he was an obvious choice to portray the music man in a 1954 biopic. It’s an entertaining flick with great supporting performances from June Allyson & Harry Morgan (15 years before he’d become a TV star on Dragnet & two decades prior to starring in MASH) and cameos from many real life musicians, including Louis Armstrong. I was probably a teenager the first time I watched The Glenn Miller Story, and it began a lifelong appreciation of big band music.

Sunday Night

Harvey

Harvey is a unique film. Actually, it began as a Pulitzer Prize winning Broadway play which has had multiple revivals. Stewart portrays Elwood P. Dowd, an eccentric middle-aged man who is known to imbibe adult beverages with some regularity. Elwood’s quirkiness is quite singular because he claims his best buddy is a six foot tall rabbit, which concerns the man’s spinster sister tremendously. She decides to have her brother committed to the nuthouse and slapstick hilarity ensues. Actress Josephine Hull won both the Golden Globe & Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, while Stewart was nominated for Best Actor at both shows but won neither.

Dandelion Wine

This is the first of several books by author Ray Bradbury that you will see here eventually, and I have to give a shout out to my friend The Owl for introducing me to Bradbury in college. I would love to be able to say that I am one of the many who enjoyed his stories from a young age, but unfortunately that isn’t the case. I vaguely recall a TV show called The Ray Bradbury Theatert that aired for a few years back in the 80’s, but at the time it didn’t seem like something that would frost my cupcake. I don’t think I developed good taste in much of anything…literature, food, music, movies…until I was a young adult. We lost Mr. Bradbury in 2012, and I felt his passing as a profoundly loss. I wish I would have “gotten the memo” about his stuff when I was a kid, but I guess it is better to be late to the party than to miss it altogether. The great thing about authors (and I suppose any artist…actors, musicians, etc.) is that we can enjoy the fruits of their talent long after they themselves have left this mortal coil.

I am not a fan of cold weather and think the only good things about autumn & winter are football, Christmas, and The Great Pumpkin. Other than those few exceptions I would prefer a perpetual state of warmth & sunshine. Dandelion Wine is Bradbury’s ode to summer.

Originally written as disparate short stories, they share enough common threads to be strung together into one congruent novel. The main characters are 12 year old Douglas Spaulding (based on Bradbury himself) and his 10 year old brother Tom. The setting is Green Town, IL, loosely based on Bradbury’s recollections of his boyhood hometown of Waukegan, IL (40 miles north of Chicago). Green Town has sort of a Mayberry feel to it, with just a tinge of mysticism & fantasy thrown into the mix. We are introduced to the boys’ family, neighbors, and various townsfolk, but generally see things thru the eyes of the two youngsters. The summer depicted is 1928…a simpler, more bucolic time to be sure. A small town, the prism of childhood, an assumption of a more peaceful era…all combine to make this a fun, nostalgic, & easy read. The infinitesimal elements of what I suppose might pass as sci-fi or horror are non-intrusive, but enough to keep things interesting. Bradbury’s lyrical prose makes humble traditions of summertime…sitting on the front porch swing, eating ice cream, mowing grass, and enjoying Grandma’s cooking…seem monumentally important, which of course they are to a child. The boys are occasionally confronted with heavy issues like death, illness, fear, and the loss of a best friend to relocation, and Douglas is a deep thinker who waxes philosophical about life, but even the chapters that deal with these melancholy subjects retain a light tone. The stories are realistic enough to induce wistful remembrances of a bygone era, yet fantastical enough to sweep the reader away to the land of make believe.

I have always had a tendency to remember my own childhood as being far more idyllic than it likely was in reality, which is probably why I really like Dandelion Wine. Bradbury leans toward the sentimental, which is just fine by me. In our modern age of violence, callousness, and immorality it is nice to atleast pretend that it wasn’t always this way. Dandelion Wine may not belong in the same conversation as the greatest works of literature, and it probably isn’t even Bradbury’s best effort, but it is immensely enjoyable and a nice way to spend a couple of afternoons.