James Stewart

He was an actor about whom I would say... I feel like a Jimmy Stewart movie.  I wonder if one is playing.  I didn't talk like that all the time about other actors although there are a few.  At the heart of it all is that I could count on Jimmy to deliver the goods... always.  His body of work is really astonishing.  He was quite an actor and quite a movie star.  We tend perhaps to think it's either/or but he had a healthy appetite for both.

I didn't see all of his work but I know I saw most of it.  He made 78 movies and among them are some of the most famous movies Hollywood ever produced.  I loved the westerns he made with director Anthony Mann and was drawn to his work as a Hitchcock leading man.  I didn't see a number of his thirties' films but the few I did see were golden.  Oddly, a couple of his signature films I barely liked and I loved one that it's generally fun for others to put down.

We will not discuss all of his films or even mention some of them.  Others will not be elaborated on here because they've been the subject of their own postings earlier.  But that still leaves a goodly amount to be chatted up at some level.  And the man has led an interesting life offscreen that demands some attention.  So no matter how we cut it, this will be one of those long ones.    

His appeal as an actor has everything to do with his appeal as a human being.  He is certainly one of the most caricatured actors ever with that special drawl, halting speech, elliptical phrase-making and his fondness for self-deprecation.  I can't imagine that those of us who have imitated him over the years are making fun of him.  It's never mean-spirited.  It's a joy to get in step with such a wonderful man, husband and father, a glorious actor, a highly-decorated war hero, patriot and American ideal.

He endeared movie audiences from the very beginning and it never changed although in some ways he did or at least the kind of movies he made did.  He always appeared sincere, a bit vulnerable and had that boy-nextdoor demeanor.  He populated movie after early movie with his charms but after the war that demeanor and his films changed a great deal.  But audiences never left his side.  He would always be the boy from Indiana, Pennsylvania with his everyman persona... admired, respected, honored, beloved. 

Before we spend some time with Jefferson Smith, Macaulay Connor, George Bailey, Elwood P. Dowd, Buttons the clown, Glenn Miller, Charles Lindbergh, Scottie Ferguson and others, we need to meet the young James Maitland Stewart.

The Early Years

Born in 1908 to a strong-willed father who owned a hardware store, the Stewart values we have spoken of were shaped by his dad.  While helping his father out in the store, the old man was always working on ways to teach his son important lessons on morality, good citizenship, family values, kindness, self-respect and such.  That is if he could get a word in edge-wise for the young man, while shy, loved to talk.  And talk and talk and talk.  Dad often included in his lessons the need to be a good listener.

After Stewart became a big star, it was said that John Wayne grimaced, Gary Cooper squinted and Clark Gable scowled while Stewart talked non-stop.  Little did we know that the long, filibuster speech in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington must not have been as difficult for him as once imagined. 

He was a Boy Scout because, as the old man concluded, it was the thing to be.  He was enrolled in one of the finest prep schools in the area where he participated in track, learned to play the accordion and tinkered around with a little acting.  Everyone knew his passion was aviation.  He liked the opposite sex but his shyness kept him out of the big leagues for awhile.  His father was a deeply religious Presbyterian and young Jimmy and his two sisters faithfully attended church in their youths.

It was always known Stewart would enroll in Princeton University because it was a family tradition.  He took part in more acting and music and did better academically than he ever had before.  After graduation in 1932, he joined the University Players, a summer stock company on Cape Cod.  It was there that Stewart would become buddies with a slew of future movie stars and directors, most importantly Henry Fonda and his (brief) wife Margaret Sullavan.  Fonda and Stewart would become BFFs and Stewart would later fall in love with Sullavan although an actual romance was never in the cards.

Hooray for Hollywood

After the Fondas divorced, Stewart and Fonda moved into a New York apartment together while both managed to snag some Broadway gigs.  After Fonda moved to Hollywood, Stewart followed.  Bill Grady, a talent scout for MGM who had been following Stewart's career since Princeton days, arranged a 7-year contract for him at the studio.

 

He debuted a small role in a good film, The Murder Man (1935) with Spencer Tracy as the star in his first movie at MGM.  The studio put the lanky newcomer to work with a vengeance in 1936 with seven films.   Among them were as Jeanette MacDonald's brother in Rose Marie (1936) and Jean Harlow's beau in Wife v.s. Secretary.  His singing of Easy to Love opposite Eleanor Powell in Born to Dance hurt one's ears and yet it was endearing.  He was the murderer in After the Thin Man.   One could count on one hand how many times Stewart played a bad guy in his entire career.

Co-starring with Margaret Sullavan

By 1936 Sullavan had not only divorced Fonda but also director William Wyler and had just married Leland Hayward who was not only Stewart's agent but Fonda's as well.  Romantic love may not have turned out for Stewart and Sullavan in real life but it did in their four films... Next Time We Love (1936), The Shopworn Angel (1938) and The Mortal Storm and The Shop Around the Corner, both 1940.  She would always remain his favorite of all his actress costars.

Give me a minute to hang my head because I've not seen any of those films.  I did see snippets of a couple and the Earth didn't move.  It apparently spun wildly for many others.  They were also among some of Stewart's favorite films.  (Stewart was always chatty about which of his films he liked or didn't and would regale friends and family with various tales of filmmaking.  Fonda got the juicy stuff.)  Remember I wasn't nuts about movies from the 30s (there are exceptions) and I didn't like Sullavan at all because I found her to be enormously depressing.  If you like one or more of these films, feel free to write, sing their praises and inform other readers.  

The Late Thirties

My favorite Stewart films of the late 30s were all loanouts, which seems odd because by this time he had worked his way to the top of the large MGM roster of stars.  The studio was usually reluctant to loan out the big guns but Stewart was beyond thrilled to be going to Columbia to make not one but two movies with director Frank Capra.  His initial attraction to Stewart as an actor was his idealism, a trait most would also associate with the director.  

Stewart, Capra and others were enthusiastic about You Can't Take It with You (1938) because it had just won a Pulitzer Prize for the play.  It's a very funny story about America's class structure, namely the haves versus the have-nots.  One difference, perhaps, from other such stories is that these have-nots like their lives just as they are.  They consist of a grandfather-patriarch, his daughter and two granddaughters and one granddaughter's husband who all live in the same house.  (Years later Capra would refer to them as the movies' first hippie family.)  One granddaughter, Jean Arthur, is a secretary to a rich man she loves (our boy), son of a wealthy industrialist (Edward Arnold) and his snotty wife (Mary Forbes).

The melding of these two eccentric families who couldn't be more unalike, with Arthur and Stewart being the different ones in each of their families, makes for some delicious comedy.  Those glorious words, those unforgettable comic moments and the gorgeous acting of Stewart, Arthur and Arnold make this one special flick.  

The next Capra assignment also brought along Arthur and Arnold... it was this little comedy-drama called Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).  You've heard of it.  Imagine something funny (like haha) about Washington, D.C.  We recall this is about a naive guy who is appointed to fill a vacancy in the senate and promptly gets a rude awakening colliding with corruption.  In real life, as Capra hoped it would, the story rocked D.C.

Stewart is nothing short of sensational in a role he was born to play.  The fact that he lost the Oscar to Robert Donat for Goodbye Mr. Chips is another of the Academy of Motion Picture, Arts and Sciences' great embarrassments.  The filibuster scene at the end is the stuff of American movie legend.  Did you know he used mercury chloride on his throat to make his voice sound raspy?  Well, you do now.

Arthur, an aide to another senator, has fallen in love with the idealism and decency of Stewart's Jefferson Smith.  Claude Rains plays his nemesis, a Mitch McConnell-type, and Arnold is a party boss.  The great character actress Beulah Bondi plays Stewart's mother as she would in three of the four other films they made together.

Capra, who would work with Stewart one more time (hmmm, in what?), said he was his favorite actor of all the ones the director worked with and that is really saying a mouthful.  He said the actor's great appeal was in being so unusually usual.  He added there is bad acting and good acting, fine performances and occasionally great performances but there is a higher level than great performances in acting... a level where there is only a real, live person on the screen... a person audiences care about immediately.  There are only a few actors... very few... capable of achieving this level of an actor's art and Jimmy Stewart is one of them.

Everyone was talking about him at the time... his fan base was huge.  The two Capra films did the trick and before the public could draw its breath, there came Destry Rides Again (1939).  It was Stewart's first western and another top-notch comedy performance.  Pairing him with Marlene Dietrich was absolutely inspiring.  Could there be two more different types?

Serial Dating  

While everyone was yammering about Stewart, it wasn't all about his acting... a pretty fair amount was about his dating.  A shy boy no more, he was accused in some circles as being a womanizer.  That word's intended taint didn't extend to Stewart as I see it but one could not deny that his dance card was full.  The public knew that he dated Dietrich while they made the film but it was certainly kept quiet that she aborted his child.

The movie magazines were full of photos of Stewart and some actress at any number of Hollywood nightclubs.  He dated starlets but quite a number of dates were with the famous... Ginger Rogers, Olivia de Havilland, Dinah Shore, Norma Shearer, Rosalind Russell, Loretta Young.  Of course, as all good chums of either sex do, he compared notes with Fonda.  One chief difference between the friends would be that Fonda was married five times while Stewart's only marriage lasted until her death 45 years later.

The Oscar

Oscars are funny things... after all these years I don't know that I understand them any better than I ever have.  Stewart and I both agree that he shouldn't have gotten the award for The Philadelphia Story (1940).  His performance as the cynical, fast-talking reporter underwhelmed by the vapid airs and graces of high society, who falls in love with the young woman whose wedding he is there to cover is a good role.  He is not overshadowed by Katharine Hepburn or Cary Grant but an Oscar?  Good as his performance is, he'd done much better and certainly would again.

It has always been assumed that his win is a consolation prize for not winning for Mr. Smith.  I'll buy that.  Besides, it robbed his buddy Fonda of the honor which he richly deserved for The Grapes of Wrath.  The Philadelphia Story was the last time he was billed third and the only time he would ever win the Oscar.

Stewart was given top billing in Ziegfeld Girl (1941) only because of him being big news in such high-profile films.  His role here as a truck driver is actually quite small.  The true stars are Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Lana Turner.  All about aspiring showgirls, a Ziegfeld manager tells a large group of them that one-third will become stars, one-third will quit to become wives and mothers and the final third will turn into tramps.  Turner ditches boyfriend Stewart for the last group.  It was a big MGM musical that did solid business although a forgettable Stewart role.

The Wild Blue Yonder

Stewart wasn't the only actor of his day who was a pilot.  Some others were Sullavan, Robert Taylor, Robert Cummings, Robert Young, Olivia de Havilland, Joan Fontaine and her husband Brian Aherne and Tyrone Power.  But it can arguably be assumed that no one got as charged up about being in the cockpit as Stewart.  He admitted he loved making movies but there was always that nagging doubt that he should be working in aviation.

He was at first drafted into the army in 1940 but rejected because of low weight.  After adding some poundage he was the first name actor to enlist in the military, in his case in the Army Air Corp in early 1941.  During the course of the war Stewart rose to the rank of colonel.  After retirement he joined the Air Force Reserves where he was eventually promoted to brigadier general, attaining the highest rank of any of those in his profession. 

He was proud of his war record and the honors bestowed upon him but he rarely ever spoke of it.  Hollywood noticed that he had changed.  He was still the great guy he'd always been but there was a decidedly harder edge to him.  It wouldn't be too long before the public noticed it as well, thanks in large part to his work with two great directors.

A Wonderful Life

The end of the decade would be even more gratifying than the close of the prior one.  That being said, it doesn't have much to do with the fact that his first film back as a civilian is It's a Wonderful Life (1946).  He wasn't impressed with the story but he was very happy to know Capra would again assume the reins.  The director had established his own production company and this film would be important to the company.

The two pros went back and forth on story ideas, ad nauseum, with Stewart getting some say so.  But when Capra started another late night discussion with see, it opens in heaven, Stewart wanted to yell and scream. 

Stewart ended up not only doing the film but was happy about it... until it was over.  It was then that he said he was depressed and tired of it since he realized he also felt that way through most of the making of it.  His frustrated George Bailey is contemplating suicide at the beginning of the film and for two hours we're treated to all the reasons George feels so low.  It certainly is a joyous ending with most of the company in the Bailey home but for my taste it is a case of too little too late.  

I hope I'm not saying goodbye to any of you but I just never understood this movie's acclaim and I've tried three or four times over many years.  It is just so depressing and due to that fact alone, I'll be hornswoggled to understand why it's a Christmas favorite.  Even Stewart and Capra didn't see it as a Christmas movie.

It bombed so badly when it was first released that it shut down Capra's production company for good.  It did manage to get five Oscar nominations but lost in all categories.  The studio didn't publicize it, the critics railed, the public stayed away.  When Stewart first saw his performance, he didn't understand what he was watching and thought he'd lost his touch.

And then just like in the movie, the clouds lifted, the sun broke through and everyone (well...) not only liked this movie, they fell all over themselves.  Greatest movie of all time.  (Hold on to that one because it's coming up for another Stewart film.)  Stewart has said it is his favorite of all his films.  Reviewers now give it the most stars they offer.  Well, ok, fine, I've been on the outside of public opinion before.

I'm not trying to ignite your crestfallen opinion of me but the film does have its moments.  Some of the small-town humor and sentiment appealed to me, it employed so many wonderful character actors and it is a very good Stewart performance, one that is chock full of emotions.  There is that dark side to George Bailey and those two future directors noticed it, too.

Call Northside 777 (1948) is a damned good Stewart movie and performance although the film isn't as remembered as much of his other work.  It's a documentary-style, black and white film noir concerning a Chicago reporter who reopens a decade-long murder case with surprising results.

Mr. and Mrs. Stewart

Best of all, the wonderful life started with Gloria McLean.  The man-about-town was about to settle down at age 40.  She was a twice-divorced mother of two sons (they would have twin daughters) and she would be by his side for 45 years.  If their marriage wasn't blessed by the gods, I don't wanna know about it.  Those movie mags of so long ago were filled with gorgeous pictures of this society couple.  The lights were dimmed when one son was killed in Vietnam and Gloria's death broke Jimmy's heart and began the start of his own finale. 

Alongside June Allyson

Mutual admiration was formed by Stewart and the perky blonde, the perfect wife, the husky-voiced June Allyson, a fellow contract star at MGM.  They would make three films together, two of which are among Stewart's favorites and for all of which the public went crazy and demanded more of them together.  They were friends for the rest of their lives.

The Stratton Story (1949), was Stewart's first time out in a film biography.  Frank Stratton played for the Chicago White Sox who, as the result of a hunting accident, had his leg amputated.  It made for a compelling drama with Allyson demonstrating why she was one of the movies' great criers.  

Of their three outings, it is The Glenn Miller Story (1954) that was a screaming hit... for the glorious music, for Stewart's look-alike portrayal of the beloved bandleader and for another Stewart-Allyson pairing.  It may have been a bit light in the bio department but made for gushing around the world.

It shouldn't be too surprising that among Stewart's favorite films is Strategic Air Command (1955).  He got to be a pilot again, work with Allyson for the last time and do some patriotic-type work for the publicly-dogged SAC.  It's just a so-so movie to me but the aerial scenes with Paramount's new VistaVision screen process is breathtaking.  

The Hitchcock Films

Considering the actor and director didn't get on all that well while making the murder-mystery Rope (1948), it's a wonder they worked together three more times.  Along with quite a few others, myself included, Stewart wasn't the best choice for the detective who has a blemish on his career and character.  Stewart looked uncomfortable and thought he was miscast, saying he never really understood the character who is investigating a thrill killing by former students.  Hitchcock was more concerned with the technical difficulties on the film and didn't give Stewart or any of the actors much attention.

Kelly, Hitchcock and Stewart

Rear Window (1954) offers a delightful Stewart performance as a top photographer, wheelchair-bound due to a broken leg, who spends his time watching his neighbors through windows across a courtyard and eventually is certain a man (Raymond Burr) murdered his wife.  Voyeurism had come to the big screen and Hitchcock seems like the appropriate director to present it.  In this mega-hit, he and Stewart got along much better and the actor was further hyped by the presence of Grace Kelly as his lady love.

Gloria Stewart was known to have said it was the only time she was concerned about her husband and one of his beautiful costars.  Kelly was known to have bedded most of her leading men, she had a thing for older men and Stewart couldn't stop talking about her.  They were planning on making another film (Designing Woman) but Kelly headed off to Monaco.  Nonetheless, they never lost touch.

One of my least favorite Hitchcock films is The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) and I'm not sure why.  The story of an American couple's child being kidnapped as they holiday in Morocco had all the elements of a good chasing-down-the-criminals film.  It was something the director was familiar with since he'd made it over 20 years earlier in Britain.  I'm not sure if I didn't care for Doris Day in the role or if I thought she and Stewart had no connection.    

We won't delve much into the surreal masterpiece Vertigo (1958) because it got a treatment here earlier but this is that other Stewart film that in some circles today is considered the greatest American film ever made.  Yes, it bumped off Citizen Kane and Casablanca and whatever else may have held that lofty position.  It is the best film Stewart did with Hitchcock and many think it's Stewart's best film period.

Hitchcock, who once said he identified closely with the characters Stewart played in the director's films (oh?), seemed to have fun perverting that everyman image by having Stewart's characters have a quietly twisted side.  In truth though, Hitchcock didn't do much true directing.  He did so much preparation for his films that by the time they went before the cameras, he let all the other pros just do their things.  

Costar Kim Novak has said frequently that Stewart was her all-time favorite costar.  She adored him.  He lived in the midst of all that vanity and was never tainted by it, she said.  So many times we would sit after the scene was over and we'd take off our shoes and put our feet on the table and not even talk.  We'd just hang out because we were both real.  It was hard for me to believe that somebody could live in Hollywood for so long, right in the middle of Beverly Hills, and stay real.  He deserves a big trophy just for that.

Directed by Anthony Mann

No more Mr. Nice Guy determined Anthony Mann.  The western characters these two concocted were disillusioned, embittered, often seething with fury and bent on wreaking vengeance against anyone, deserving or not, who got in the way.  When these characters snapped, they were mighty scary.  Mr. Nice Guy, always the most emotional of actors anyway, would become synonymous with a new standard of graphic movie violence.  One reason I have such a love of westerns is Jimmy Stewart, particularly in films with Mann.

Actually Stewart and Mann partnered on a total of eight films, three of which were not westerns... the aforementioned The Glenn Miller Story and Strategic Air Command and also Thunder Bay for the record.  But it is these five westerns that make their pairing so notable.

Showcased are the weary but vengeful cowboy trying to get his prized, stolen rifle back in Winchester 73 (1950), the wagon master wanting to get settlers up a mountain while battling robbers in the colorful Bend of the River (1950), the near-psychotic bounty hunter in The Naked Spur (1953), still on a mountain as a man who becomes hateful when he's conned out of his herd of cattle in The Far Country (1954) and the brutal, rage-filled cowboy out to find his brother's killers in The Man from Laramie (1955).  This is said to be the best of the bunch and Stewart said it was his favorite western of any.  I liked it very much but always licked my chops more for The Naked Spur.

There was to have been a sixth cowboy collaboration, Night Passage (1957).  While Mann was unquestionably the boss on his films, he certainly paid attention to the musings of his star and on this film the musings became rants on both sides.  Stewart could be tough on sets... he pretty much wanted them run the way he liked.  Most big stars did.  He asked for no more than professional behavior but expected those around him to exhibit self-discipline. The thing is that most times his sets were pleasant affairs.  This time not.  

Mann wasn't crazy about how the story was proceeding but more importantly he detested Audie Murphy and the performance he was turning in.  Stewart (inconceivably playing Murphy's brother) took Murphy's side and Mann walked off the picture.  When the reviews called the movie a stinker, (a petulant?) Stewart never spoke to Mann again.

The 50s... His Greatest Decade

When Stewart moseyed over to Universal-International at the dawning of the 1950s, the maker of colorful B movies couldn't afford Stewart's $200,000 fee.  A new type of deal was cooked up among Stewart, his agent and the studio whereby in lieu of a salary Stewart would instead get a percentage of the profits.  It was usually a hefty percentage, coupled with the popularity of his films, made the actor a very rich man.

We've already mentioned a number of his movies in this decade but it would be reckless and I a bad blogger to not include a few more.  Do you need to take a break?  We'll wait...

At the start of the Mann westerns, Stewart made another popular western, Broken Arrow (1950), directed by Delmar Daves.  This was the actor's third western and one that was sympathetic to the Native American point of view.  Stewart plays a mail rider and former army scout who brokers a peace offering with Cochise (Jeff Chandler) while romancing the chief's sister (Debra Paget).  In two scenes-- when she is murdered and when he is almost hanged-- the actor unleashes a fury that is memorable.

I hope Google doesn't shut down the blog because I don't like Harvey (1950).  Actually that's an understatement made worse, I suspect, by the fact that I've never seen all of it.  I am aware that if one were to do a piece on Stewart's 10 best role, his portrayal of the amiable boozer Elwood P. Dowd would be among them.  Stewart had also appeared in the play.  Watching the entire hour and 44 minutes of Elwood talking to a 6'3" invisible rabbit would have left me with facial tics and trauma. 

Oh why must I now go into discussing The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) right after tearing into Harvey?  Stewart's role in the movie that children loved and adults mocked was Buttons the clown.  He plays the entire role in clown makeup since he is a doctor evading the law for killing his wife who was suffering.  Stewart called producer-director Cecil B. DeMille and asked for the part because it would fulfill a childhood wish of wanting to be in the circus.  Good as he is in the role, the fact that the movie won the Oscar for best picture has long been considered one of Oscar's great missteps. 

With The Spirit of St. Louis (1957) he plays another real-life person, that of Charles Lindbergh and his famous solo flight across the Atlantic.  Lindbergh was Stewart's childhood hero and he could scarcely believe he, a 47-year old, was going to play a famous man in his mid-20s.  Age-appropriate John Kerr had originally been offered the role but turned it down because he disapproved of Lindbergh's pro-Nazi sympathies and his racist and anti-Semitic views.

There were plenty of filmgoers who agreed with the entire former paragraph but more perhaps were eagerly-awaiting their favorite actor playing an American hero.  The film does contain another great Stewart performance despite all the controversy.

While they were making Vertigo, Stewart and Kim Novak knew they would be making their next picture together and already great pals, they were happy about Bell, Book and Candle (1958).  The comedy about witchcraft was another great success.

Stewart nabbed his fifth and final Oscar nomination for Otto Preminger's frank depiction of rape in Anatomy of a Murder (1959).  As I see it it's one of his very best roles.  He plays a canny small-town Michigan lawyer defending a soldier (Ben Gazzara) on trial for killing the man who allegedly raped his wife (Lee Remick).  For Stewart the film ended a sparkling decade in which he chose roles at odds with his wholesome persona.

Back in the Saddle

I loved him as Rance Stoddard, the optimistic attorney who goes on to be a senator in John Ford's classic The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).  Teaming Stewart with John Wayne was the stuff of western movie legend... the cowboy in me found it thrilling to see the two of them share the screen. One of Stewart's great anger scenes comes in the cafe involving Wayne and Lee Marvin and a tray full of food.  

Stewart appears in the first segment of the gargantuan western saga, How the West Was Won (1962) as a mountain man who somewhat reluctantly settles down with Carroll Baker. 

I am pleased to be speaking up for Shenandoah (1965).  I wonder how many others would include this as one of the actor's best performances.  Chomping constantly on a cigar butt he plays the widowed Virginia patriarch of a large family who is indifferent to the impending Civil War but takes a far different attitude when his youngest son (Phillip Alford, Jem of To Kill a Mockingbird fame) is captured by the union army.  Included is a great cast of familiar character actors and a slew of fetching up-and-comers.

He briefly put the horse in the barn to make the exciting and well-acted The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), his last big role in a big film.  He is the grizzled pilot flying a group of men back from a Saharan oil field when the plane crashes in the desert due to a sandstorm.  One of the men says he has designed planes and they all contribute to making a new one out of the wreckage.

Stewart, believe it or not, was nervous about working with so many European actors, something new for him.  He thought they (Hardy Kruger, Peter Finch, Richard Attenborough, Christian Marquand and Ian Bannen) would act him off the screen.  Ha.  It's a compelling story and was a difficult shoot, including the death of a stuntman.

Then came a slew of B westerns, most of them far beneath his talents but in his upper 60s, pickings were slim.  There was The Rare Breed, Bandolero and two with Fonda, The Cheyenne Social Club and Firecreek.  Also mixed in there are some decidedly unfunny comedies.

For 22 years in 15 westerns Stewart rode the same sorrel stallion named Pie and he dearly loved the animal, calling it his favorite costar.  For years he tried to buy the horse from its owner but she wouldn't sell.  It was around this time, the late 60s or early 70s that Pie retired.

In 1973-74 he tried a television series, Hawkins, with his Bend of the River costar, Julie Adams, but it didn't work. 

He had a small role as a doctor telling John Wayne he is going to die from cancer in The Shootist (1976).  I thought it was a good story which paralleled Wayne's own life in his final film.  It was also my swan song for my longtime buddy Stewart.

The Closing of a Wonderful Life and Career

He ended his big screen career with some films that were unworthy of him but enjoyed a couple of good TV movies.  One could often find him on Dean Martin's show.

In 1980 he was honored with the American Film Institute's life achievement award and the AFI ranked him third on their list of the greatest American film actors of all time.  That august body also named five of his films-- Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, The Philadelphia Story, It's a Wonderful Life, Rear Window and Vertigo-- as among the 100 greatest American films of all time.

In 1983 he was a recipient of the Kennedy Center Honors.  In 1985 President Reagan awarded Stewart with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Also in 1985 Stewart was awarded an honorary Oscar.  He told the star-studded audience this is the greatest award I have received, knowing that, after all these years, I haven't been forgotten.  The audience gave him an astonishing 10-minute standing ovation.   I can still almost feel the tears running down my face.  Steven Spielberg said he was humbled just to be in the same room with Stewart.

In 1982 Henry Fonda died.  Stewart said he lost his best friend and cried inconsolably.

When his beloved Gloria died in 1994, Stewart shut himself off from the world, staying mostly in his bedroom.  He had a series of illnesses but it was cardiac arrest and an embolism following respiratory problems that took his life at age 89 in 1997.  His last words to his children were I'm going to be with Gloria.  His funeral, which included full military honors, was attended by 3,000 mourners. 

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