Men in War (1957)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann

Anthony Mann's Men in War, which actually takes place during the Korean War, is aptly titled, for it's one of the finest movies about any war I've seen. The film opens on the morning after a battle between Communists and a small platoon of American troops—around twenty in number—led by Lt. Benson (Robert Ryan). Stranded, their supply truck destroyed, they must make their way back on foot to a nearby hill to rendezvous with the rest of their unit. Almost as soon as they start out, a Jeep comes careering out of the distance, and Lt. Benson commandeers it and its two occupants—the driver, Sgt. Montana (Aldo Ray), and his mute, shell-shocked passenger, his commanding officer whom he calls simply The Colonel (David Keith)—to carry the platoon's weapons and ammunition. The rest of the film details the journey, which lasts several hours, to their destination.

Propelled by a sense of great urgency, the plot is utterly simple, consisting largely of the perils the platoon must deal with in order to reach its goal. These include snipers, land mines, and artillery attacks. The landscape the platoon moves through, rocky and nearly devoid of vegetation, offers little cover, and the sense of being constantly in the open and exposed to attack creates a milieu of unrelenting danger. Mann expertly milks this rather basic story for its full potential, creating a film that even in its infrequent lulls in action still maintains an atmosphere of nail-biting tension.

With such a basic plot, Men in War relies on the interactions of its characters for depth. Mann avoids the common cliché of many war movies of portraying the platoon as an obvious cross-section of ethnic and personality types. As in real groups of this kind, most of the men don't seem that distinct from one another, although a couple—a patient, likable African American medic and the nearly catatonic, battle-fatigued young soldier he cares for—do stand out. Lt. Benson, however, is thoroughly fleshed out, and Robert Ryan, who worked with Mann in three films, fully inhabits the character in one of his most nuanced and sympathetic performances.

Ryan's Lt. Benson is a weary man but a purposeful one, his immediate purpose to complete his mission and report back to his unit with vital information about the situation. At one point he states that his objective is to get just one man back to headquarters. In the meantime, although he views those under his command as resources to be deployed to achieve his strategic goal, he seems not without concern for their welfare. It's just that he sees completion of the mission overriding any consideration of the safety or even survival of himself or his men. Benson is a man of great leadership ability, able to keep his soldiers united in their purpose and focused on the task at hand. A follower of rules and prescribed procedures, he is nonetheless a practical, level-headed person able to gain the cooperation of his men with his confident attitude and skills of persuasion—organized without being a martinet, authoritative without being authoritarian.

The only person this reasonable approach does not succeed with is Sgt. Montana, and it is the clash between the personalities and attitudes of these two that provides the conflict in the film. Montana is Benson's opposite in every way, a maverick dedicated to his own agenda—to get his psychologically wounded Colonel back to safety and medical treatment. When he remarks at one point that The Colonel is the only man who ever addressed him as "son," it becomes clear that a kind of transference between the two has occurred. That The Colonel has become in essence a surrogate father for Montana explains his fierce personal loyalty, which in turn explains his disdain for Benson's mission, his animosity towards Benson, and his defiance of Benson's authority at every turn.

Burly Aldo Ray is quite good at conveying the unsympathetic qualities of Sgt. Montana. Not only is Montana an insolent loner, but he is also an almost paranoiacally suspicious racist who refers to Koreans with derogatory racial epithets, the only person in the film who ever does this. In a key sequence, the platoon encounters several American soldiers in the distance calling out to them and racing towards them. Without warning, Montana opens fire and mows them down. When the astounded platoon reaches the bodies, they discover that the dead men are actually Koreans with uniforms and weapons taken from dead American soldiers. After Benson angrily points out that Montana fired before he could even see their faces and might easily have killed Americans, Montana replies,"I can smell 'em," and adds that his practice is to shoot first and find out who he has killed later. The appalled Benson responds by saying, "God help us if we need men like you to win this war."

David Thomson compares Men in War to Mann's Westerns in the way it "work[s] toward an ordeal by combat that defines honor." In a sense, that's indeed what happens at the end of the film when the group reaches the hill only to find it has been taken by the Communists. Desperate, Benson works out a risky plan to retake the hill, and at this point circumstances force the two adversaries to set aside their considerable differences and work together. In the end, only accommodation between Montana's extremism and Benson's moderation, between Montana's gung-ho machismo and personal hatred of the enemy and Benson's professional shrewdness and detached view of the enemy as just another obstacle to be overcome, allows the two to combine the forces of anarchy and order and move towards a common aim.

Men in War ends with a brief but powerful scene in which Benson and Montana together posthumously "award" to their fallen comrades Silver Stars Montana has been given by The Colonel, each man's behavior in the scene absolutely typical of his essential nature. As the two stand atop the hill they now control, Benson methodically reads off the names of the dead in alphabetical order from a notebook in which he records the details of combat, while Montana tosses the medals over the sandbag parapet of the hill, strewing them randomly over the bodies of the dead soldiers below. I would say that in this scene Men in War arrives at a conception of honor quite unlike the unambiguous moral choice normally found in Mann's Westerns. War, Mann seems to be saying, consists of equal parts method and chaos, of both selfless nobility and selfish ferocity, of great personal sacrifices made to achieve minor victories. In the face of this paradox, honor becomes such a relative term that it ceases to have any clear meaning.

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You might also be interested in my post on Samuel Fuller's Korean War movie The Steel Helmet.

Reign of Terror (1949)

***
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann

Anyone interested in the works of Anthony Mann, the subject of a recent three-week long retrospective festival at the Film Forum in New York, would be well advised to take a look at his unusual 1949 film Reign of Terror (also known as The Black Book). It was shown at the Film Forum on Bastille Day, July 14, and on the same day on the Turner Classic Movies channel, where I saw it.

Reign of Terror, which takes place in France in 1794, five years after the French Revolution, opens with the public condemnation and execution of Danton, engineered by Maximilien Robespierre (Richard Basehart). Immediately afterward, Robespierre finds that his secret black book, containing a "hit list" of the other rivals he intends to denounce and persuade the street mobs to condemn to the guillotine, has been stolen. Robespierre wants to be proclaimed absolute dictator of France in a few days' time, but he realizes that if his enemies make public the contents of his black book, this will never happen and he himself will almost certainly be condemned for his aspirations to power. To find the missing book, he sends for a judge from Strasbourg known for his harsh sentencing of enemies of the Revolution (500 condemned in one month alone). This "hanging judge" is assassinated, however, and his place taken by an impostor intent on exposing Robespierre's treachery, Charles D'Aubigny (Robert Cummings). The rest of the movie is essentially a thriller that details D'Aubigny's attempts, aided by his mistress Madelon (Arlene Dahl), to avoid detection and find the missing book.

Those familiar with the films noirs of Mann from the late 1940s and the Westerns he made in the 1950s, considered landmarks of their genres, will recognize elements of both in Reign of Terror. Made almost at the end of Mann's series of noirs and just before his first Western, it can in many ways be seen as a transition between the two. Themes found in Mann's versions of both those genres are also present in Reign of Terror—impersonation, underworld power struggles, loyalty and betrayal, order versus anarchy, the crushing of ordinary people by the lawless, interpersonal conflict that can erupt into what for its time must have been quite shocking physical violence. D'Aubigny might almost be an undercover agent in one of Mann's noirs, like Dennis O'Keefe's character in T-Men, and Robespierre the leader of a criminal gang the agent infiltrates. Similarly, he resembles one of the heroes portrayed by James Stewart in the Westerns, a man trying to bring a criminal to justice, as in The Naked Spur. The black book itself acts as the movie's "McGuffin," in the same way as the stolen loot O'Keefe seeks to retrieve in Raw Deal or the rifle James Stewart tries to track down in Mann's very first Western, Winchester '73.

The rather bland Cummings might seem a surprising choice to play the hero in a romantic intrigue, but he is actually good, playing the role straight, his voice pitched lower than usual, in a restrained performance quite different from the glib, almost camp persona of his 1950s television sitcoms. Basehart is even better as the notorious Robespierre. The highlight of his performance comes near the end of the film with his impassioned speech to the bloodthirsty mob after the contents of the black book are indeed revealed. When he tells the mob that to die for liberty would be a privilege, is he sincere or is it a clever ploy devised by a master strategist to win their sympathy and save his own life? The scene is especially intriguing coming soon after another scene in which he attempts to cajole a young boy into revealing the whereabouts of the black book with gentle, silver-tongued blandishments as cunning as those of the serpent in the Garden of Eden. Film noir stalwart Charles McGraw also makes a strong impression as Robespierre's uncouth, sadistic chief henchman. But the acting honors in the movie surely must go to Arnold Moss as Robespierre's ally/rival Fouché. He is by turns menacing, sarcastically flippant, and slyly calculating. One moment he seems trustworthy, the next moment entirely duplicitous.

Robert Cummings and Arnold Moss search for the black book

But the thing that will keep your eyes glued to the screen the whole time is the sheer visual panache of the film. Cinematographer John Alton and Mann made a formidable team in the three noirs they worked on together (four, if you include Mann's uncredited contribution to He Walked by Night, also with Basehart), but to my mind, visually Reign of Terror surpasses even the most impressive of those. The movie may technically be a historical thriller, but it is in many ways a film noir masquerading as a costume picture. The high-contrast lighting, camera placement and movement, dynamic composition, and depth of field all bear the clear stamp of film noir. At the same time, Mann's use of outdoor locations, uncommon in the generally set- and interior-bound early noirs, points ahead to his Westerns. Near the beginning of the movie is a striking landscape shot of a lone horse rider seen from a distance slowly moving horizontally across a gently arcing hill, the hill and tiny rider silhouetted against a cloudy sky just after sunset, a shot that wouldn't seem out of place in a Western. The film includes a thrilling action sequence that also prefigures Mann's Westerns, in which D'Aubigny escapes Robespierre by jumping through a glass window (which in a Western would most likely have been the window of a saloon). This is followed by an extended chase with D'Aubigny and Madelon in a wagon, pursued by mounted horsemen through the streets of Paris and then through the countryside, again a scene that might have come directly from a Western.

Receiving credit as producer is the great William Cameron Menzies, noted production designer (Gone With the Wind, For Whom the Bell Tolls) and occasional director (the 1936 version of H. G. Wells's futuristic Things to Come, the 1953 sci-fi classic Invaders from Mars). IMDb lists him as an uncredited art director on Reign of Terror. Even though he doesn't receive formal credit, his hand is evident throughout the film in its production design, and he should receive recognition at the very least as an indirect contributor to the film's strong visual appeal. The baroque bedchamber of D'Aubigny's mistress Madelon, the bakery containing Robespierre's headquarters, Robespierre's torture chamber in the basement of the bakery, his private quarters with their bookcase-lined walls that conceal a secret room—all these settings are tremendously atmospheric, far more so than their economical and rather minimal construction would lead one to expect.

Reign of Terror might fall short of greatness, but it does contain enough spectacular parts to make it a pleasure to watch. Connoisseurs of artistic mise en scène will find much to relish here, and because the film stands on the cusp between Mann's noir and Western periods, admirers of his work will find it indispensable to an appreciation of his development as a director.

Raw Deal (1948)

***^½
Country: US
Director: Anthony Mann

From the mesmerizing opening sequence, it's clear that Raw Deal is something special. A car pulls up to a fortified fence labeled "State Prison" and as the gates open, we hear, over eerie theremin music, Claire Trevor in an ominous voice-over: "This is the day . . . the last time I shall drive up to these gates." As she walks down a long hallway, dressed entirely in black and wearing a black widow's veil, cocooned in silence except for the click of her high-heeled shoes on the floor, she continues, "I don't know which sounds louder—my heels or my heart. It's always like this when I come to see him." The man she has come to visit is her lover, Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe), and very soon he will be escaping from prison to claim his share of the loot from the robbery for which he has been jailed.

The escape from the prison in Oregon has been engineered by a vicious hoodlum named Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr), the man Joe worked for and for whom he has taken the rap. From his headquarters in Corkscrew Alley in San Francisco, Rick has dispatched his henchmen, Fantail (John Ireland) and Spider, to make sure the jailbreak will fail. But Rick's plans to get rid of Joe go awry when Joe takes hostage Ann Martin (Marsha Hunt), the secretary of the lawyer who was arranging a parole for him, and pursued by both the state police and Fantail and Spider, sets off with the two women on an odyssey to San Francisco to find his double-crossing ex-partner, get his money, and leave the country.

Raw Deal is one of several films noirs that director Anthony Mann and cinematographer John Alton made in the late 1940s, and to my mind the best of them, an underappreciated gem that approaches the caliber of the best examples of the genre from this period. Martin Scorsese, in his film A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995), cites the Mann-Alton collaborations as notable films of the time, ones that with their distinctive style and visual atmosphere had a huge impact on him as a young moviegoer and later as a film director. On the basis of this movie, I would say that his admiration is clearly justified. For one thing, Raw Deal is a brilliantly edited movie. With its fluid alternation of close-ups, medium shots, and long shots, and its creative combining of sound and image, it is virtually a textbook of film editing. Even more impressive is Alton's photography. Masterfully executed lighting effects, stunning use of deep focus, creative alternation of the static and moving camera, inventive camera placement (with the camera often mounted very low looking sharply up, or very high looking sharply down)—again the film is virtually a textbook of cinematography.

Another virtue of Raw Deal is the way Mann tells the story in such a dynamically visual way. The film contains several standout set pieces. During a stop along the way, at an isolated taxidermy business on the beach in northern California called Grimshaw's, O'Keefe has a long, very physical fight with Ireland in a back room full of stuffed animals, the lengthy scene filmed in near-darkness (above). In a sequence that predates Fritz Lang's The Big Heat by several years, Burr hurls a dish of flaming cognac in the face of a woman in a restaurant after she bumps into him and spills her drink on his jacket. (This is filmed by having Burr appear to toss the flaming liquid directly at the camera—actually probably at a pane of glass in front of the camera.) "She should've been more careful," he says nonchalantly afterward! The movie's finale, a nighttime confrontation and shootout in Corkscrew Alley as Burr watches from a window above, is another stunner. For any fan of American film noir, Raw Deal is simply a must-see.

A Dedicated Man: An Appreciation of James Stewart

"James Stewart, the most complete actor-personality in the American cinema"

—Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema

For many years I took James Stewart (1908-1997) for granted. I never thought of him as n exceptional actor, as one of the great self-manufactured screen personalities like Cary Grant or one of the great emoters like Marlon Brando. He always struck me as a regular guy who appeared to be playing himself in every role. In the last few years, though, I have revised my opinion of him as an actor. This new appreciation came about partly from seeing him in pictures I hadn't seen before and partly from rewatching some of his performances I had seen years earlier but dismissed as unexceptional. I suddenly saw sides of him that I had never noticed before and subtleties that had previously escaped me. My present view of Stewart is that he is one of the great American actors, second only to Cary Grant in my own pantheon of the great actors of the studio era.

When Andrew Sarris referred to Stewart as an "actor-personality," he got it exactly right. Stewart was that rare breed of screen actor who in every role seems to be both the character he is playing and himself. Every character seemed a new incarnation of a familiar personality. On reflection, I think it is this combination of familiarity and continuity of personality that blinded me for so long to the true artistry of his acting. When he projected a heightened emotional state, it didn't seem like acting at all, but like the wholly natural outgrowth of a familiar and normally staid personality pushed to its limits.

That personality, the one we automatically think of when we think of James Stewart, is one of comfortable ordinariness. If ever there was a screen personification of the American Everyman, it was James Stewart. He suggested none of the uniqueness or quirkiness of Cary Grant or the barely contained passion of Marlon Brando. His personality was always exactly life-sized, never larger than life. His screen presence was closer to that of Spencer Tracy, Joel McCrea, or his lifelong friend Henry Fonda—all, like Stewart, masters of understatement and invisible technique. Just watch one of Stewart's performances with the sound off and observe how subtly yet clearly his body language and especially his facial expressions register his emotions.

But the screen personality known as James Stewart did have one individual trait that persisted from movie to movie. Call it steadfastness, tenacity, constancy, perseverance, loyalty, or even stubbornness—these are all aspects of the quality that Stewart consistently projected and around which he fashioned each performance. Although modified to suit the needs of the role, this quality was the constant that set him apart from the truly ordinary man, that gave him the quiet individuality it took me so long to recognize and appreciate.

In his early romantic roles, Stewart's devotion is to someone he loves. In You Can't Take It with You (1938), the breakthrough role that made him a star just three years after his first credited part, his allegiance is to Jean Arthur. Despite her unconventional family and the disapproval of his stern and narrow-minded father, a banker and industrialist, he remains true to Arthur, even sacrificing his career and inheritance (in the middle of the Great Depression). In The Mortal Storm (1940), one of four films he made with his friend Margaret Sullavan, he risks his life to help Sullavan escape from Nazi Germany. Later in his career, in the whimsical Harvey (1950) he never loses faith in the existence of his imaginary friend, a 6-foot tall rabbit. And in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), as another ordinary man, a dentist from Indiana, he must use his wits and rise to heroism to rescue his kidnapped son from terrorists.

In many movies Stewart's commitment is to a principle or ideal. In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) it is to the ideals of democracy and honesty in government. In Destry Rides Again (1939), in which he plays the inexperienced sheriff of a lawless Wild West town, it is to the notion that law enforcement can be practiced without the use of firearms. In Call Northside 777 (1948), as a reporter, it is to his belief that an imprisoned killer is innocent. In Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in which he plays a criminal lawyer, it is to the legal principles of presumption of innocence and that every accused person is entitled to the most effective representation. In John Ford's The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) it is again to the rule of law, non-violence, and the ideals of American democracy. In The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) it is to his unshakable faith that if he can keep the crew of the crashed plane united in their purpose, they will somehow overcome all obstacles and get that plane in the air again.

From 1941 to 1945 Stewart left pictures and served in the U.S. Army. An aviation enthusiast, he had earned his pilot's license in 1935 and even had a commercial pilot's license. During World War II he flew many combat missions over Europe. When Stewart returned to making movies after the war, he seemed different. The boyish charm that had been a big part of his screen presence was still there but seemed somehow muted, with an undercurrent of sadness that hadn't been there before. And he looked different. The skinny boy now looked looked older and a bit worn. He had been absent from the screen for only five years, but when he returned he looked closer to fifteen years older.

Stewart's first movie after the war was Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Surprisingly, Stewart was not Capra's first choice to play George Bailey in the film; Cary Grant was. Today it's hard to imagine anyone but Stewart in the role. This is a part that required him to play a tormented and disappointed man, a man shattered by self-doubt who has given up all hope. Considering the upbeat and optimistic streak that runs through Stewart's prewar performances, it is perhaps understandable that Capra did not immediately think of him for the part. Possibly Capra eventually realized that the role would not be too much of a stretch for the actor who in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington played a man so committed to his principles that in the end he drives himself to physical exhaustion and comes close to a nervous breakdown.

Contrary to what one might have expected from Stewart's prewar performances, his depiction of George Bailey's despair is almost overpowering in its intensity. And when Bailey is saved at the end, his sense of joy and relief is almost tangible. It's enough to persuade even the most obdurate cynic to accept the movie's simple premise that every human life, no matter how ordinary, has meaning and value. And it's hard to believe that any actor but James Stewart could have communicated such a premise with so much conviction.

It's a Wonderful Life liberated the dark side of the American Everyman by showing that the adherence to a belief that typified Stewart's characters, in this case his unswerving belief in his own worthlessness, could when taken to extremes result in destructive obsession. But it was not by any means the last that moviegoers would see of this side of James Stewart. His dark side was most fully mined in Stewart's collaborations with two great directors in the 1950's.

Between 1950 and 1955 Stewart made several Westerns directed by Anthony Mann. Considering the series of stark low-budget films noirs that Mann made in the late 1940's, it is not surprising that his Westerns of the 1950's would have darker overtones and greater emphasis on character psychology than the typical studio Western of the time. In The Far Country (1954) Stewart plays a character motivated solely by self-interest. He lets nothing stand in the way of his goal of making a fortune in the Gold Rush-era Yukon and returning to the U.S. with his loyal pal to buy a ranch. He refuses to intervene as a sadistic and power-crazed local boss terrorizes and exploits the inhabitants of the mining village where he has staked his claim. It is only after his friend is killed and their gold stolen that he takes action and defeats the villains. In The Man from Laramie (1955) Stewart plays a man consumed with finding those responsible for his brother's death. He endures extreme physical suffering and eschews all intimate human contact in his relentless pursuit of revenge.

Perhaps the greatest of the Stewart-Mann collaborations is The Naked Spur (1953). Here he plays a man obsessed with capturing a dangerous outlaw, not out of any sense of justice, but strictly to claim the reward money that will allow him to buy back the farm he lost through betrayal by a woman while fighting in the Civil War. He is a man driven by a compulsive pursuit that he believes will correct the injustices of the past and restore what he has lost, and his obsession causes the death not only of the outlaw but also of every other person in his party except for the outlaw's girl friend. It is only the promise of her love that in the end breaks the hold his anger and disappointment have over him and allows him to escape his past and move on to a new future.

The other director who used the darker implications of Stewart's dedication to purpose to its full advantage was Alfred Hitchcock. Rope (1948) first hinted at the dark themes that Stewart's covertly obsessive persona was capable of catalyzing. In this movie Stewart plays a rather smug teacher who purports to believe in the Nietzschean proposition that laws and morality are mere human inventions and that some people are above them, even the ultimate prohibition against murder. For him this is strictly an intellectual proposition. He never imagines that two of his former pupils, taking his teachings literally, will put them into practice by murdering an unpopular former schoolmate. His smugness becomes horror as he gradually sees the destruction his adherence to a wrong-headed concept has inspired.

Hitchcock took the dark component of Stewart's screen persona even further in Rear Window (1954). In this movie Stewart's character, a news photographer temporarily confined to a wheelchair with a broken leg, idly begins spying on his neighbors. What begins as an amusing pastime quickly takes over his life and becomes an obsession. Without professional constraints, Stewart's desultory curiosity grows into full-blown and dangerous voyeurism that places himself and his fiancée at considerable risk from a ruthless murderer.

But it was in Vertigo (1958) that Hitchcock gave Stewart's embodiment of all-consuming obsession its ultimate expression. What begins as a scheme to exploit former detective Scottie Ferguson's (Stewart) fear of heights in order to disguise a murder as suicide grows out of control when Scottie falls in love with the woman he has been hired to follow, Madeleine Elster (Kim Novak). The long sequence in which he tails her around San Francisco in his DeSoto—without dialogue, filled with swooping camera moves, Bernard Herrmann's alternately pensive and majestic music, shots of the most picturesque locations in San Francisco, and close-ups of Stewart's reactions as he spies on her, and ending with Stewart pulling her from the Bay at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge—is one of the great sequences in modern movies. But it would be far less effective without Stewart's wordless reactions conveying the transformation of professional detachment to romantic curiosity and finally helpless love. This is the intersection of brilliant, showy filmmaking with subtle, expertly calibrated acting.

Believing that Madeleine has died as a result of his paralyzing phobia, Scottie is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and loss. When by chance he encounters her doppelganger, he loses all control as he obsessively molds her into the image of his lost love. This is the closest Stewart ever came to playing a villain (save for 1936's After the Thin Man), and Hitchcock is merciless in his treatment of Stewart's obsessiveness. In Vertigo there is no final reprieve by the acceptance of love, no saving change of heart, no last-minute pulling back from the abyss for Stewart. His obsessiveness results both in his losing his beloved again and in his own psychological destruction. To see the very quality that made Stewart the All-American Everyman become so distorted that he is transformed into an agent of destruction is a devastating thing to watch.

After Vertigo Stewart seemed to regain some of the easygoing charm that had been so much a part of his early work, while still retaining the gravitas that his screen persona had acquired in the postwar roles. That same year he starred again with Kim Novak in Bell, Book, and Candle, a delightful light comedy that is in a different world altogether from Vertigo. The very next year he gave what is my favorite performance of his career in Otto Preminger's Anatomy of a Murder (1959), in a role that achieved the perfect equilibrium between the two sides of his screen personality. His Paul Biegler is completely focused on the task at hand—defending a soldier on trial for murder—yet he never allows the case to skew his perspective on life. At the end of the movie he is able to let go of the case and simply go fishing.

When I think of James Stewart, that is the way I like to picture him: balancing serious dedication to a purpose with an innate sense of enjoyment of life, and keeping each in its proper proportion.


I don't think Stewart ever gave a bad performance, and his presence makes any movie worth watching. But here are my ten favorite performances by James Stewart:

1. Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
2. Vertigo (1958)
3. It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
4. Rear Window (1954)
5. The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
6. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
7. The Philadelphia Story (1940)
8. Destry Rides Again (1939)
9. The Naked Spur (1953)
10. Harvey (1950)