If John Ford was the most influential director in Henry Fonda’s early career and throughout in John Wayne’s life, Frank Capra, Anthony Mann, and Hitchcock were the most crucial directors in Jimmy Stewart’s long, versatile career.
Frank Capra
Arguably the most important filmmaker in shaping his early screen image (before he went to War), emphasizing his small-town scout persona, Capra directed Stewart in three highly popular pictures:
You Can’t Take It With You (1938), Best Picture Oscar Winner
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Best Picture Oscar Nominee
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), Capra’s acknowledged masterpiece, Best Picture Oscar Nominee.
Anthony Mann
But it was Anthony Mann who made Stewart a Bona fide Western star in the 1950s, and it was Man who directed some of his most popular biopics and other non-Western films.
Mann directed Stewart in 9 of his 78 features, including two biopics:
The Glenn Miller Story (1954)
Strategic Air Command (1955), the story of Lt. Col. Robert Holland.
Directed by Hitchcock
The master of suspense directed Stewart in a series of artistically and commercially successful movies:
Rope (1948)
Rear Window (1954)
The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
Vertigo (1958)
Anthony Mann directed the largest number of Stewart’s films, nine (out of 78 pictures), turning Stewart into the third major star of the Western genre, next to John Wayne and Gary Cooper, in the 1950s.
Two of the 9 were popular biopics: The Glenn Miller Story and Strategic Air Command, the life story of Lt. Colonel Robert Holland.
Early on in his career, Stewart worked with Frank Capra on three crucial (all classic) films: You Can’t Take It with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, and It’s a Wonderful Life, and was responsible for defining and shaping the early, pre-WWWII Stewart screen persona.
Later on in his career , Stewart worked with Hitchcock, who used him to great effect in four movies, including Rear Window and Vertigo, films that brought completely different aspects of his image than Capra’s films. These Hitchcock movies were such blockbusters that they contributed to Stewart’s box-office popularity much more than his Westerns for Mann.
Hitchcock’s other favorite actor was Cary Grant, whom he directed in two l940s classic thrillers, Suspicion and Notorious, and brought out of semi-retirement in the 1950s with To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest, the latter featuring one of Grant’s most memorable roles.
Cary Grant, like Stewart, did his best work in the late 1930s, and then in the l950s. Indeed, he was cast most effectively by Hawks in a series of zany comedies, such as Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, and I Was a Male War Bride Significantly, Hawks excelled in directing two radically different genres: Westerns and comedies. And in each, he had a favorite star: Grant in comedies, and Wayne in Westerns.
