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.
Betty HuttonThe Greatest Show on Earth (1952) rates 4 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. DeMille filmed the Ringling Brothers circus for two and a half hours, wrapped it in a love triangle nobody remembers, and it beat High Noon.…
Andy DevineThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) rates 9 out of 10 on the rewatch scale. John Ford spent thirty years building the Western myth and then made the film that takes it apart, shot on a soundstage in black…
Frank MorganTwo Budapest shop employees who can't stand each other are unknowingly falling in love through anonymous correspondence. The Shop Around the Corner is Ernst Lubitsch's 1940 American romantic comedy adapted from Miklós László's Hungarian play Parfumerie, depicting two Budapest leather-goods…
Ben Gazzara1959 Otto Preminger courtroom drama with James Stewart as small-town Michigan lawyer defending an Army officer charged with murder. Anatomy of a Murder is Otto Preminger's 1959 American courtroom drama adapting Robert Traver's 1958 novel.
Barbara Bel Geddes
Grace KellyHitchcock's 1954 voyeurism thriller. Stewart immobilized in a wheelchair, Kelly, Burr across the courtyard.
Beulah BondiThe 8 rating is honest evaluation. It's a Wonderful Life is the gold standard for American Christmas filmmaking.
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