I suspect that back then, Jimmy, who is seen above with child actor Dennis Holmes as a polio stricken Tiny Tim, was best known as Hollywood's version of "a regular guy". Despite those deeply ambivalent and gritty Anthony Mann Westerns such as Winchester '73 (1950), The Man From Laramie (1955), an occasional appearance as June Allyson's spouse in such popular fare as The Glenn Miller Story (1954) and in some fairly racy Hitchcock flicks he seemed less of an icon than now. A few probably still cherished his pixelated turn in Harvey (1950), a role that caught the man's sweet and gentle vagueness rather well, (even though he was never satisfied with his playing of the role on film).
After It's a Wonderful Life (1946) fell into the public domain and started to show up on the tube non-stop around Christmas, things changed. Now, of course, you might feel lucky if you can avoid a day in December when Mr. Stewart isn't appearing on the box in that movie, The Shop Around the Corner (1940), or perhaps, Mr. Krueger's Christmas* (1980).
Today, Stewart may be one of the most revered of the stars of the classic era. I suspect that a random comment he made, reportedly tossed off sotto voce during the filming of Anatomy of a Murder (1959), might have been closer to his own assessment of his career and Hollywood. Being up in northern Michigan during the location shooting for the Otto Preminger drama, he decided that he'd do a little fishing in his spare time. Using the large, makeshift dressing room shared by the whole cast to don his angling gear, he listened quietly to a particularly breathy starlet expounding on her burgeoning career prospects. Picking up his hip boot waders, Stewart murmured to another person out of the corner of his mouth as he pulled on the boots, "I advise you get a pair of these, because we're in it up to our asses."
The above picture also makes this viewer think of the fact that most of us under 50 have no memory of polio, thanks to Jonas Salk and the other medical researchers who worked for decades to obliterate this scourge. Today, one occasionally meets an older adult with the traces of this still mysterious affliction. To a 1957 audience however, it may have brought a stab of fear associated with summer outbreaks, of FDR, of the March of Dimes, and first hand knowledge of the effect of this disease on those they knew and loved, as well as on themselves. Today our world sometimes seems to be about to break under the weight of all our problems. Maybe we should take a moment to remember that while realistically, it seems that much of our daily petty pace is pretty futile, occasionally, the work of many and the insights of one individual can make a difference for the better as well as the worse. Just by putting one foot in front of the other, no matter how clumsily. Or maybe I'm just getting soft looking at Stewart.
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*If you don't know the short, Mr. Krueger's Christmas, you might like it. It is a surprisingly affecting 25 minute film about a lonely janitor that Stewart appeared in late in his career. It can be seen in its entirety here
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