A couple of years ago, me, my wife, and my brother were in one of those old-fashioned diners – the sort of place that hearkens back to the 1950s and 1960s. It has all sorts of photos on its walls of classic movie actors, early rock and roll stars, etc. My wife and I were having fun guessing who the actors were and what movies the photos were from.
Buy James Stewart 4-Film Collection Blu-ray from MovieZyngMy brother was useless at it. I was surprised at this because he’s a big movie nerd. Eventually, he had to admit that he doesn’t like old movies. He says they look different from modern films, and the acting is weird. It is all stilted and unnatural.
He’s not wrong, of course. Old movies do tend to look slightly fake. They were mostly shot inside studios where they built all the sets and made big matte paintings for the exteriors. Acting evolved from being big and bold – the way actors have to act on a stage – to something more subtle, natural, and nuanced. But that took a lot of time. So, I absolutely understand how a person not used to those things would find old movies off putting. You do have to get used to it.
The other day, me and my brother were chatting about movies, as we often do and the subject turned to Christmas movies. He said he’d watched a good one the other day: Miracle on 34th St. He asked me if I’d seen it. Which one I asked, the old one or the one from the 1990s? He said he didn’t know there had been a remake. Then he quoted the movie with a smile, saying it was the one where “every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings.”
I laughed and said that he had not watched Miracle on 34th St., but It’s a Wonderful Life. We both agreed it is a great movie. He went on to say the lead actor was real good and that while he still had that old actorly way of talking, he loved his voice. I agreed and noted that James Stewart was a great actor and did indeed have a wonderful voice.
I love that. I love that my brother got out of his comfort zone and watched an old movie and loved it. I especially love that it was a James Stewart movie. That’s the beauty of Jimmy Stewart – he’s still making fans of non-believers some thirty years after he died and eighty years after that movie was made.
I think I just might buy him this new collection of James Stewart movies for his birthday and see if I can’t make him a full-fledged fan. I don’t really know how Warner Bros. decides which films to include in these four-film sets they’ve been releasing lately. Obviously, they are films they have the rights to, but other than that, there appears to be no rhyme or reason to it. This set features two films released in 1940, a western from 1953, and a grand epic from 1962. I scratch my head over their decision-making and delight in it all the same.
These films were all previously released on Blu-ray, and all the specs and extras have simply been ported over, but the price has been dropped, making it exceedingly affordable and a great way for fans to build up their collections.
So let’s get to the films.
The Shop Around the Corner (1940) is probably best known today as the basis of You’ve Got Mail, the Nora Ephron rom-com starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. I had always assumed the original would be similar to the remake, with the James Stewart character running some large shop where he’d fall in love with someone who ran a rival shop via snail mail.
But The Shop Around the Corner is something different. And wonderful. Set in Budapest during the Great Depression, the film centers around a single leather-goods shop. Stewart plays Alfred Kralik, the shop’s top salesman. Margaret Sullavan plays Klara Novak, the new salesgirl trying to get ahead. Those two do not get along. They constantly quarrel over trivial things. But they are also sending each other love letters through the mail without knowing each other’s identity.
The way their romance unfolds is just lovely, sweet, and funny. But the movie is so much more than that. Every person working for the shop is a character unto themselves. Director Ernst Lubitsch gives each of them at least a few moments to shine. It is subtle and elegant, with a sly visual wit and a sophisticated touch. It is a prime example of what they call the “Lubitsch Touch,” and it is worth the price of this collection alone.
Made in the same year as Shop and with the same three leads (Stewart, Sullavan, and Frank Morgan, who played the shop owner in the previous film), The Mortal Storm is a drastically different film. Set in 1933, the film dramatizes the horrific effects Hitler’s rise to power had on a small German village. It starts out rather slow. It is Prof. Viktor Roth’s (Frank Morgan) birthday. He is greeted kindly by his wife and stepchildren. The university where he teaches throws a party in his honor. This all goes on for some time, and I kept thinking to myself that they should speed things up. That I got it – the whole town loves this guy. But the film does this so that Roth’s fall when Hitler becomes the supreme leader of Germany is all the more dramatic. This town that loves the professor at the beginning of the film turn on him ever so quickly the moment he doesn’t fall in line with the new Reich.
He is not an Aryan, you see, and he believes that everyone, no matter their race, has dignity and should have a voice. Even more than that, he is a scientist, and his teachings are that the blood of any man is no different from the other, which flies in the face of the Nazis view on white supremacy.
His daughter Freya (Margaret Sullavan) is in love with Martin Breitner (James Stewart), a farmer who lives high up in the mountains. He hates the Nazis and everything they stand for. This gets him in trouble, especially with the professor’s two sons, who have completely joined the party.
It is both thrilling and harrowing. Made a year before the United States entered into World War II, and well before any other Hollywood films were tackling the rise of Nazism, it is a fascinating glimpse into what we knew back then and how big of a threat at least some filmmakers considered the Nazi regime. Watching it now, one can’t help but make parallels between our current state of events and the past. But it’s also just a generally thrilling film, one that can be enjoyed without digging too deeply.
Director Anthony Mann and James Stewart collaborated on eight films together, five of which were westerns. All of them were made in the 1950s, and they helped redefine the genre. In the previous decades, westerns were mostly light entertainment where heroes dressed in white battled black-clad villains (and “savage” Native Americans), But by the 1950s, that was starting to change. Westerns grew more mature and more nuanced, and Mann’s collaborations with Stewart had a lot to do with that.
The Naked Spur was their third collaboration. Stewart plays Howard Kemp, a farmer who is now tracking Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), a man wanted for murder, across the Rocky Mountains. He hires a grizzled old prospector (Ralph Meeker) to help him catch Howard, and before long, they’ll come across a former soldier (Millard Mitchell,) who forces his way into the party as well. They’ll eventually catch Ben and find he’s got a lady with him (Janet Leigh). The men don’t need her, but she refuses to leave. Ben is cunning and spends the rest of the film pitting the three men against each other.
The film makes great use of its exteriors. The scraggly mountain backdrop becomes a character unto itself. Mann increases the tension throughout, and it all ends in a spirited finale.
Our set ends with a grand epic, one in which Stewart plays but a small part. Stretched over 164 minutes, How the West Was Won tells five loosely connected stories about how the West was settled and tamed by Europeans. It has a massive cast, including pretty much every Hollywood star still working in 1962, and was directed by such luminaries as John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall.
Stuart stars in the first section, “The Rivers” as a mountaineer – one of the earliest pioneers who traveled all over the country trapping furs. He’ll keep crossing paths with Eve Prescott (Carroll Baker) and her family as they head West to find a patch of land they can settle on. They’ll eventually fall in love, and it is their family that the other stories in this film follow.
In “The Plains,” we’ll follow Eve’s sister Lillith (Debbie Reynolds) as she treks from St. Louis to California, where she has inherited a gold mine. In the Civil War, Eve’s son Zeb (George Peppard) fights for the Union. In “The Railroad,” Zeb will team up with Jethro (Henry Fonda), and will try and keep peace with the Native Americans as railroad man Mike King (Richard Widmark) ignores their treaties and tries to lay as much track as possible. In “The Outlaws,” Zeb and Lillith will team up with a marshal (Lee J. Cobb) to defeat a gang of outlaws (featuring Eli Wallach and Harry Dean Stanton.)
I haven’t mentioned half the stars that play in this. This film is so stacked it’s narrated by Spencer Tracy. Unfortunately, it is still a bit of a bore. I’m not a big fan of these anthology-type films that feature a bunch of short stories. There never seems to be enough time to get me really interested in any of them. It is fun to see all these great actors in one film. Most of it was shot on location in Cinemascope, and it looks absolutely amazing, but there wasn’t a single story that kept my interest.
Buy James Stewart 4-Film Collection Blu-ray from AmazonBut what do I know? The film won loads of awards and is still beloved today. But even with my lack of appreciation for that film, this set is just wonderful. James Stewart was one of the all-time great actors, and this is a great collection featuring four of his best films all packaged in an affordable set.
