MOVIES: Jimmy Stewart Movie Marathon

December is Jimmy Stewart month on Turner Classic Movies, as I discovered while flipping through the channels last night. Stewart is my favorite actor of all time; seemingly unlimited range, such brilliant comedic skills, such intense, hidden depths*. He is, of course, the Every Man. And to me, he is the movies. I was glued to TCM for the rest of the night -- as I may well be for the rest of the month.

I tuned in in time to catch the last half of The Shop Around the Corner, on which the thoroughly contemptible You've Got Mail was based. The original, which I'd never seen, has its charms -- obviously there's Stewart, along with Margaret Sullavan, whom I'd never seen in a movie before, and who was adorable, and Frank Morgan, the Wizard of Oz himself, as the shop-owner -- but, much like Tom Hanks in the remake, Stewart's concealing from Sullavan that he's discovered she is his secret pen-pal, and his subsequent lies and manipulations of her feelings, seem cruel and disturbing to me, rather than cute or romantic.

Up next was Bell Book and Candle, which I also had never seen. Jimmy Stewart and Jack Lemmon co-star**, along with Kim Novak, who plays Lemmon's sister. She's a witch who meddles in Stewart's love life (leading to the wonderful line from Janice Rule as the woman Stewart has jilted for Novak, when he tells her Novak is a witch: "Oh, Shep, you just never learned to spell"). Jack Lemmon is a tremendous amount of fun, Ernie Kovacs is surprisingly low-key as a drunken author (in a performance that makes you wonder if the drunkenness was acting or not), Stewart is charming as always in what would be (according to the trivia page at IMDb) his last role as a romantic lead, but Kim Novak -- wow. She's sexy, silky, slinky, smoldering, sinuous, seductive... she's a knockout. She dominates this film with her presence. It wasn't a wonderful movie -- not bad, just not wonderful -- but I'm glad I saw it if only for her memorable performance.

After that was one of my all-time favorites, The Philadelphia Story. Jimmy Stewart as Macaulay "Mike" Connor, Cary Grant as one of the best-named characters in moviedom, C.K. Dexter Haven, and the luminous Katharine Hepburn as ice goddess Tracy Lord. (Ruth Hussey is equally wonderful -- funny and smart and world-weary as Liz Imbrie, long-time torch-holder for Mike.) Not many movies that can match that cast.

It's one of the most fantastically written movies ever. Like Casablanca or Citizen Kane, every word is a gem. From throwaway screwball-type exchanges (Dexter: "Can you use a typewriter?" Liz: "Thanks, but I've already got one at home."), to the casually cruel barbs delivered in machine gun fashion ("To hardly know him is to know him well," or, "She's a girl who's generous to a fault -- except to other people's faults."), to the hilariously non-sensical ("Do you have any violin strings?" "I have an aspirin. Will that work?" or Mike, on the phone to another room in Tracy's family mansion: "This is the Voice of Doom calling! Your days are numbered to the seventh son of the seventh son!"), the words are so fast and so sharp it's a dizzying joy to experience. And of course, there's my favorite scene, the crazily romantic speech Mike makes to Tracy, so absurdly over-the-top, but somehow Stewart makes it work: "You're lit from within, Tracy. You've got fires banked down in you -- hearthfires and holocausts!" It's stunning.

The movie has one hell of a beginning, a real shock of a laugh -- Tracy is throwing then-husband Dexter out, smashing his belongings as he goes; Dexter goes to retaliate, drawing back a fist, but can't hit her; a smug expression registers on her face for just a second, and in response, he puts his hand over her face and pushes her to the ground. Domestic abuse -- funny! Okay, it shouldn't be funny... but it is. It's the suddenness and the full physical commitment to the moment that startles a laugh out of you -- Grant really hurls Hepburn, and she takes the fall like a stuntwoman.

The high point of the film is the romantic moment between Mike and Tracy I mentioned above, but there are so many wonderful scenes. Like when Tracy and her younger sister Dinah, pretending not to know that Mike and Liz have been sent from a magazine to get the scoop on Tracy's wedding, dazzle Mike and Liz with an aggressively accommodating welcome; ballet, piano recitals, greetings in French, capped off with Tracy's seemingly innocent questions which absolutely rake Mike and Liz over the coals. There's the scene at the library, in which Tracy reads Mike's book of short stories and realizes there's something more to him that she'd assumed, as he learns the same thing about her. Then there's the pool house scene, in which Dexter and Tracy tear into each other with increasingly vicious accusations while Mike looks on in comic horror. And there's Mike's drunken confrontation of Dexter, after Mike has begun to fall for Tracy; Stewart's hiccuping drunk act is hysterical, and Grant matches him word for word, gesture for gesture.

I've got a couple of gripes about the film. I've never been wild about the ending, which is a little too sudden, a little too neat: Tracy has broken her engagement on her wedding day, but there's a hall full of guests waiting for the ceremony. Suddenly Mike proposes, apparently just in an attempt to help her save face. Tracy gently sends him over to Liz, who nonchalantly takes his hand, as though she hadn't just seen him propose to another woman. And then Dexter proposes to Tracy, which is of course the expected ending, but it's so abrupt, the turn-about from their earlier tooth-and-nail verbal warfare (warfare concealing their continued affection for one another, but warfare nonetheless) so complete, that even for a romantic comedy it's a little hard to swallow.

And then there's Tracy's father, who, in a truly hateful moment, rationalizes his philandering ways to Tracy and her mother (who has taken him back). He has the gall to blame Tracy for his affair -- if he had had a loving daughter, he explains, he wouldn't have had to go looking for love elsewhere. (Which is tinged with a little incestuous creepiness, now that I think about it.) He accuses Tracy of driving him away by being cold, emotionless, heartless -- and what's worse, she buys it, this strong, smart woman buys into this load of garbage from her adulterous father. This scene always makes me wince.

But those are small detractions from an otherwise dazzling film. I could watch this one every week. I hope TCM's got some equally great Stewart films on tonight.

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*I could say -- and have said -- the exact same things about Jack Lemmon. They're both favorite.
**What a remarkable coincidence!