James Stewart built a prewar career on decency, in Mr Smith Goes to Washington and The Philadelphia Story, which won him Best Actor. Then he flew more than twenty combat missions over Germany as a bomber pilot and came back different.
The postwar work is markedly harder. The Anthony Mann westerns give him obsessive, vengeful men, and the Hitchcock films go further: Vertigo is a study of a man remaking a woman into a dead one, and Rear Window is about a voyeur who is proven right without becoming less of a voyeur.
It’s a Wonderful Life sits between the two periods and is far bleaker than its Christmas reputation, with a long stretch in which the protagonist is genuinely suicidal.
He rose to Brigadier General in the Air Force Reserve and declined to have his service used in publicity, which was unusual for the period.
