Liberty’s too precious a thing to be buried in books. Men should hold it up in front of them every single day and say: I’m free to think and to speak.
– Actor Jimmy Stewart
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Samizdata quote of the dayAugust 4th, 2007 |
 18 comments to Samizdata quote of the day |
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That’s Brigadier General James Stewart, U.S. Air Force.
Awwwwr…. guess so son!
Me and Harvey could have had a comfortable billet for the duration.
But we chose to fly bombers .
Fine Man.
What was Marion doing for the war effort again?
Oh yes!
Fictionalising it later.
With all due respect, shouldn’t the attribution for that quote go to screenwriter Sidney Buchman?
I oddly enough have enormous respect for Jimmy Stewart as a man but really don’t like his acting.
But what the hell. Picture the scene. It’s WWII and you’re a rookie gunner on a bomber and the voice of the pilot comes over the intercom and it’s Jimmy Stewart! You just know you’re gonna survive this one.
One of his finally acts in WWII was to preside over the court martial of the unfortunately named Lt Sincock. Lt Sincock had gone two hundred miles off course and had decided to bomb a target of opportunity – a railway station. Unfortunately for the hapless Lt this station was in Switzerland. He missed it and flattened a street of houses killing six people. As you might imagine this created something of a diplomatic incident. Lt Sincock got off because the navigation gear was faulty but somehow I suspect he didn’t make Captain for a while.
I am reciting this from memory so some of the details might be a little off but the story is essentially correct.
I have though looked up James Stewart’s wikipedia entry and frankly I want to puke. Nobody should make Brigadier General (winning the DFC twice, the Croix de Guerre and the Air medal with three oak-leaf clusters) and be nominated for five Oscars, winning one and a lifetime achievement award. No fair!
General Stewart I salute you!
Nick: you said yourself that his acting wasn’t much. Actually I sort of agree, although it is not as simple as that. I think Stewart basically played the same character over and over, namely himself, and that was his greatest appeal.
An unfortunate Lt with an unfortunate name:-) What about all those people named Richard (none of the regular commentators included)?
Alisa,
Well my greatest hero was called Richard. I think you know exactly to whom I refer. Having said that there was a Richard who is vastly less admirable. He was a US fertility doctor who fraudulently didn’t pay for donors. The end result was that many women inadvertantly bore his children (and he was no Brad Pitt either) and he received a jail term. He was called, and I kiddeth yea not, Dick Seed. The first Richard won a Nobel prize. The second got an IgNobel.
So Richards are in fact a mixed bunch. But then my name is ultimately derived from Athina-Nike the Greek goddess of victory but is also English slang for thieving.
You are absolutely right about Jimmy Stewart. He starred in many films in the same role every time. I tend to like actors who have more range. But then I also adore Eastwood* and you just know every time you see him on screen that some evil scumbag will get the shit kicked out of him. I also like Willis and you just know that bloodied but unbowed he will kick the shit out of someone, whilst wearing a vest. There has been much discussion of films recently on SD but what can I say? I like films in which bad guys get the fucking bejesus kicked out of them. I defy anyone not to find Jackie Chan whacking someone with a step-ladder with balletic grace vastly more entertaining than some existential froggy navel gazing (unless the navel being gazed at belongs to Julie Delpy**).
That’s not to say I’m anti-foreign language films (and I don’t count even Mr Chan’s Hong Kong ouevre “foreign language” because the dialogue is less important than his perfect fluency in the internal language of violence) per se. I recently saw “Little Ottic” which is Czech and thought it grand. And I certainly have no time for Richard Curtiss’s (another Dick!) romantic “comedies”. Or indeed for those English period dramas where either (a) fuck all happens other than vaguely comedic misunderstandings or (b) two people who want to screw each other spend two hours not screwing and getting angsty over it (as Nike would say “Just do it”).
Give me Mr Eastwood in a poncho spitting a wad of tobacco and saying to a Union soldier, “So are you gonna pull those pistols or whistle Dixie?” and make “media studies” “students” watch The Battleship-sodding-Potemkin.
*I think Eastwood’s greatest achievement was to play a character who was genuinely threatening yet managed this whilst wearing a sports jacket with leather patches on the elbows in the manner of a geography teacher.
**I had to watch “Killing Zoe” twice because the first time it wasn’t her navel I was watching.
Nick M–
I wholeheartedly agree about Julie Delpy and to see another similarly afflicted is refreshing. Usually, I just get blank stares and the ‘who?’ rejoinder. Moves like a dream.
Check out Tavernier’s Passion of Beatrice. She’s only a teenager but you can see the foundations of her acting style already. No reason to confine yourself to navels either….shuffles uncomfortably.
I enjoy both Jackie Chan and many period dramas where fuck all happens:-) I was never much into Bergman, but Fanny and Alexander was a wonderful exception.
I Googleimaged Julie Delpy, and I see what you mean:-)
I often wonder about actors like Jimmy Stewart: if he was given a role that was totally out of his character, say some evil bastard, who is also a mental case, would he have been able to handle it? I think that given a right director he would have. I think that basic intelligence, especially well developed imagination, is a major prerequisite for good acting, and I think he had it. The reason I think so is because, as I said above, he was playing (not being) himself, or rather the audience’s perception of himself, and he did it very well. I think the same can be said about Chan. Eastwood has answered that question long ago, as we all know.
RAB was a bit unfair about the man from Iowa (Marion Morrison – John Wayne).
He was messed up rather badly (which cost him a career in sports). It is easy enough to look fit and healthy in a film, it does not mean one actually is fit and healthy.
Well actually it is not “easy” – John Wayne was a better actor than he is given credit for (he even manages to make the distorted walk look like a sign of strength).
I suppose John Wayne could have got a desk military job if he had wanted one (as Ronald, bad hearing in one ear, Reagan was given – he did not lack courage, but having a man under your command who can only follow your orders if there is not a lot of other noise about and you are standing on the correct side…..) – but this would not have been combat. For those who could not serve in combat going into the military was bit of waste of time.
As for lack of courage in the case of John Wayne.
Anyone who can play a man dying of cancer (“The Shootist”) when he actually is dying of cancer (and knows it) did not lack courage.
Paul I have just watched someone close to me die of cancer.
It didn’t take courage
It just took time.
She was paralised from the waist down for the last 6 months and had no life beyond the window of the window onto the street or the window of the world provided for her by the TV.
Yes I was being flip as usual, dissing Marion like that.
Tis my way! But John was essentially what Jimmy was , an actor who played himself.
Like Niven, Grant , Flynn… all the way to Hugh Grant, actors of range are very few and far between.
Very few O’Tooles, Burtons or Oliviers in this world who can play good and bad guys and with different accents and dont bump into the furniture.
Alisa, remember Vertigo? Closest Jimmy got to being somebody scarilly else.
You have my sympathy RAB.
My mother died of a cancer – stomach cancer in her case (like Edmund Burke).
However, mother (although her fate was a bad one) did not go through the horror you describe.
On acting:
Yes I can not remember John Wayne ever playing a bad guy – although he did sometimes play characters who were grimmer than others.
James Stewart did sometimes play bad guys. Nice young society types – who, one was shocked to find, had evil under their charm.
Stewart and Wayne also did anger very differently.
John Wayne either became cold and grim, or played a form of jokey anger.
Stewart (especially as he got older) could produce a sudden transformation of pure rage – which was rather scary.
If Stewart was playing himself when he did that – I certainly would not like to have crossed him.
A Dog Named Beau
Mid, many thanks for that!
Sentimental old fool that I am, I can barely see to type for the trickles of emotion coming down my cheeks.
As you know I was talking about an all to human neighbour rather than my recently departed Holly dog.
A lady who had all to live for but it was not to be.
That’s life folks.
Embrace it, smell it, touch it, make love to it.
Cos all to soon, when your making plans for that ideal point in the future when you’ve got all your beans in a row and the world will be perfect-
You run out of road.
Paul: that’s interesting, I don’t recall any of those Stewart moments. Can you give me some pointers?
Regardless of whether both guys played themselves or not, they for the most part played the same guy. Personally I happened to like Stewart’s guy much more than Wayne’s.
RAB: note that the examples of actors of range that you gave all have had a background in English theater. What I think it means is that an actors range has much to do with their training, and less with their inborn abilities. But the second most important factor is the audience’s expectations as they may be perceived by the Studios.
Alisa:
Jimmy Stewart played a charming bastard in After the Thin Man (1936). (US readers will be able to see it on TCM on August 9 at 11:15 AM ET.) Stewart is also less like his normal character in Rope.
Cary Grant was most certainly subverted by the studios. After all, the producers forced Hitchcock to change the ending of Suspicison because they didn’t like the way it made Grant look. But he most certainly could act: Hitchcock got a brilliant performance out of him in Notorious (and Ingrid Bergman and Claude Rains are even better!), while Grant also showed his range in Penny Serenade. To be honest, though, Cary Grant did have his limits: have a good laugh watching him in the period piece The Howards of Virginia.
Thanks Ted, I’ll check out After the Thin Man when I get a chance. Needless to say, Cary Grant is one of my all time favorites. I have not seen The Howards. There can be several reasons why an actor would do a bad job in a movie, and not all of them have to do with his own abilities. An actor is part of a team, not only of other actors, but also, first and foremost, of the screenwriters and the director. I’d have to see the movie to make the judgment.
Alisa
On the transformation of rage – several of Stewart later Western’s spring to mind.
For example, there is one where he plays a man trying to get captives back from Indians.
He appears quite calm and reasonable, till at one point he is told he can not do something – his face and tone of voice (not volume, tone) suddenly change. It is rather more scary than anything in John Wayne’s “The Searchers” although this to is an interesting film.
Of course neither film could be made today. The P.C. powers-that-be would not allow it.
Worth checking out is a film Stewart did late in his career, “Shenandoah.” He plays a Virginia farmer who wants to be allowed to tend his land and raise his family until the Civil War intrudes.
Lt. Johnson: When are you going to take this war seriously, Anderson?
Charlie Anderson (Stewart): Now let me tell you something, Johnson, before you get on my wrong side. My corn I take seriously, because it’s mine. And my potatoes and tomatoes and my fence I take note of because they’re mine. But this war is not mine and I don’t take note of it.