James Stewart Archives - chimesfreedom

The Circus Town’s Been Born

Astley's Amphitheatre — Astley’s Amphitheatre

On January 9 in 1768, the first modern circus was staged in London. Philip Astley, a former cavalry sergeant major, made a ring and invited the public to watch him do tricks on horseback as he rode around the ring.

The Growth of the Circus

Because the public enjoyed the act, Astley then added other riders, a clown, and musicians, eventually putting a roof over his ring in 1770. In 1782, Astley’s Amphitheatre faced competition from a similar act down the road, with the competitor using the name “Royal Circus.” The competitor took the word “circus” from the Roman name for where chariot races were held.

Eventually, the word “circus” would become the generic name for such events. And Astley himself eventually established eighteen more such venues across Europe.

Circuses spread around the world. John Bill Ricketts created the first U.S. circus in 1792 in Philadelphia. In the late 1800s, P.S. Barnum and James Anthony Bailey went into the circus business, as did five Ringling brothers.

The Greatest Show on Earth

Since the invention of the circus, fictional stories have used the circus setting to tell stories too. In 1952, director Cecil B. DeMille and Paramount Pictures released The Greatest Show on Earth, set in the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus.

The cast included Betty Hutton, Holly Cornel Wilde, Charlton Heston, James Stewart (as Buttons the Clown), Dorothy Lamour, and Gloria Grahame. Check out the trailer below, where it is funny to hear the narrator’s voice from The Ten Commandments (DeMille) narrating this trailer about a circus.

Springsteen’s “Wild Billy’s Circus Story”

One of my favorite stories about a circus is found in Bruce Springsteen’s song, “Wild Billy’s Circus Story,” from The Wild, The Innocent & The E-Street Shuffle (1973). The song is really an excuse to string together a number of wonderful circus images. Springsteen’s tale features the barker, the man-beast, the flying Zambinis, the stong man, and others.

Finally, “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” concludes with an enticing question that many children have dreamed of being asked. “And the circus boss leans over, whispers in the little boy’s ear, ‘Hey son, you wanna try the big top?'”

Apparently, I am not the only fan of the somewhat unusual and obscure song. In this video below from July 2013 in Kilkenny in Ireland, Springsteen explains how a fan has been following him around trying to get him to play “Wild Billy’s Circus Story.”

And then the Boss leans over and whisper’s in his ear that the wish will be granted. Or something like that.

What is your favorite circus story? Leave your two cents in the comments. Photo of Astley’s Amphitheatre via public domain.

Gary Cooper’s Three Oscars

A View from the Rear Window

Charles Lindbergh: The Spirit of St. Louis

3 a.m. Albums: Elvis Presley’s “The Jungle Room Sessions”

How Alfred Hitchcock made “Rope” With Only 10 Cuts

P.T. Barnum Brings “The Swedish Nightingale” to New York

(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)

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Gary Cooper’s Three Oscars

On May 7, 1901, Frank James Cooper was born in Helena, Montana. After some work as a salesman and promoter, he started working as an actor in 1925, changing his first name to Gary when he signed a contract with Paramount. Reportedly, a casting director suggested the new name after her tough hometown of Gary, Indiana.

Gary Cooper went on to star in many memorable films including Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), Meet John Doe (1941), Pride of the Yankees (1942), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), and The Fountainhead (1949). Cooper was nominated for the Best Actor Oscar and lost for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Pride of the Yankees, and For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Cooper’s First Best Actor Oscar

He received the Best Actor Oscar twice. First, he won the honor in 1942 for Sergeant York (1941).

Sergeant York features a terrific performance, even if some note that Hollywood may have been motivated to honor the World War I film about a pacifist becoming a soldier to encourage Americans to sign up to fight in the new war. Below is the trailer.

Cooper’s Second Oscar & The Meaning of High Noon

More than a decade later, he won the Best Actor Oscar for High Noon (1952), the last time he was nominated for Best Actor. It is hard to pick a favorite Gary Cooper movie, but I am not sure anything tops High Noon (1952).

We liked Cooper as a hero.

At the 25th Academy Awards in 1953, Cooper was filming another movie in Mexico and was ill. So, John Wayne accepted the award for him.

Below, actress Janet Gaynor announces Cooper’s win, and Wayne accepts the statue.

Interestingly despite Wayne’s joke wondering why he did not get the High Noon role, Wayne reportedly did not like the movie. There are various theories about why, but Garry Wills in John Wayne’s America explained that Wayne thought the movie ended on a note of disrespect for the law when Cooper dropped his badge in the dirt at the end.

Like Wayne, a number of people found political messages in High Noon. Some suspected High Noon had a “leftist” message. By contrast, though, others believed the script, written by Carl Foreman, who would later be blacklisted, was not sending a left-wing message but exploring the way people had cowered to the bully Sen. Joe McCarthy.

Other viewers find in High Noon a conservative message about how one man has to stand up when the justice system breaks down. Or they find an allegory about the Cold War. In Bright Lights Film Journal, Prof. Manfred Weidhorn summed up the contrasting theories about the movie, saying “High Noon, bristling with ambiguity, is a veritable Rorschach test.”

But High Noon is deep down a great movie, however you want to interpret any messages about the man (and his wife) standing up to the bad guys. And maybe the possibility of so many interpretations adds to its American character.

Many years ago when I was in college in the pre-Internet days and had some friends visiting from Sweden, I took them to a revival theater to see High Noon. I thought it was a wonderful example of an American movie, or at least of an example regarding how Americans see themselves.

Another former actor, Ronald Reagan, recognized how the movie remained in America’s consciousness decades later. He invokes the movie in this clip, discussing what it was like for a Republican to be in Democratic territory.

Cooper’s Third Oscar

Nearly a decade after High Noon, Cooper would be awarded a third and final Oscar. In April 1961, the Academy gave Cooper a Lifetime Achievement Oscar for his great career.

Cooper again could not accept the award. But this time, unknown to many, it was because of a serious illness.

When viewers saw Cooper’s friend Jimmy Stewart give an emotional speech at the Oscars, though, they realized Cooper was not well. The news soon came out that Cooper was suffering from prostate cancer. He died one month later on May 13, 1961, leaving behind a collection of great films that would be the envy of any actor.

What is your favorite Gary Cooper movie? Leave your two cents in the comments.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence (Part Two): The American Western

War Horse (Short Review)

Ayn Rand, Justice Thomas, & The Fountainhead

That Time George Kennedy Gave a Great Movie Its Name

The Circus Town’s Been Born

The Babe Ruth Story (and Funeral)

(Some related Chimesfreedom posts.)

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A View from the Rear Window

Filmmaker Jeff Desom recut the scenes from Alfred Hitchock’s Rear Window (1954) viewed out the apartment window into one video. In the original movie, L.B. “Jeff” Jefferies, played by James Stewart, is confined in a wheelchair with a broken leg and spends his time watching his neighbors through the window of his Greenwich Village apartment. Eventually, he begins to suspect that one of his neighbors murdered his wife. Jeff then convinces his girlfriend, played by Grace Kelly, to help him investigate. Did he see what he thinks he saw, or is he imagining things?

Desom’s complete 20-minute recut of the window scenes from Rear Window, entitled Rear Window Loop, is not online. But a making-of video called Rear Window Timelapse contains three minutes of what Jimmy Stewart saw outside his window in the film. Check it out.

Desom tells a little more about the process of creating the film in a recent interview. He completed the project by himself in six weeks for a Luxembourg club to show on a screen above the bar. Hopefully nobody gets so drunk they think they witnessed an actual murder.

What do you think of the Rear Window recut? Leave your two cents in the comments.

Christmas Don’t Be Late

The Circus Town’s Been Born

Gary Cooper’s Three Oscars

How Alfred Hitchcock made “Rope” With Only 10 Cuts

Charles Lindbergh: The Spirit of St. Louis

The Eyes of Alfred Hitchcock

(Some Related Chimesfreedom Posts)

Charles Lindbergh: The Spirit of St. Louis

On August 26, 1974, Charles Lindbergh died of cancer in Hawaii at the age of 72. Lindbergh was the first person to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean, and he is also the subject of one of my favorite bio-pics, The Spirit of St. Louis.

Looking at the year he died, it is difficult for me to believe that Lindbergh’s life overlapped with my childhood, as he seems from another age. And 1974 is not that long ago. Similarly, his talented wife, Anne Morrow Lindbergh lived until 2001.

The Spirit of St. Louis, directed by Billy Wilder, is the movie I saw in my childhood that established Jimmy Stewart as one of my favorite actors. It is a compelling movie about a unique type of heroism, and Jimmy Stewart must carry the movie. If he is not interesting, the movie fails, because a key segment of the movie is Stewart alone in the plane. But the film works and captures the drama, fear, and loneliness of that first solo transatlantic flight.

Lindbergh’s solo 33-1/2-hour trip, where he had not slept for 55 hours, was a kind of isolation that is rare in this modern world with crowded airplanes, cell phones, and Internet access to the world. Like Michael Collins’s trip around the dark side of the moon after separating from Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin in 1969, Lindbergh’s uncertain groundbreaking trip required a special resolve to face one’s fears alone.

And the movie The Spirit of St. Louis does an excellent job of showing that isolation, as well as the logistics and preparation involved.

After the Historic Flight

Although Lindbergh’s life continued past his flight and even past where he saw Apollo 11 land on the moon, the film rightfully ends with Lindbergh’s heroic triumphant flight in 1927. Unfortunately, the rest of Lindbergh’s life would not always be so happy.

In 1932, Lindbergh lost his son in an infamous kidnapping and murder. And as World War II approached, his statements about the war made him a fallen hero. He argued against U.S. involvement in the war, making controversial statements supportive of the Nazis. But after the war broke out, he served in the Pacific as a military observer and flew combat missions.

Each one of those stages are worthy of more discussion — or additional movies, because Lindbergh was a complex man. There is Forward From Here: Leaving Middle Age–and Other Unexpected Adventures, a book by Lindbergh’s daughter Reeve Lindbergh, where she recounts her discovery after her parents’ deaths that her father had three secret families in Europe. Using fiction to consider Lindbergh’s complexities, author Philip Roth wrote a novel, The Plot Against America, that imagines an alternate history with an anti-Semitic Lindbergh being elected president over Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

It is difficult not to ask questions about the choices that Lindbergh made in his life, where he resided on the edge between being a hero and a villain, between joy and tragedy, between order and chaos. We may revisit some of these topics in the future, but for today, on this anniversary of Lindbergh’s death, if you are interested in the heroic flight, the James Stewart movie is a great place to start.

I have been to the spot on Long Island from where Lindbergh began his historic flight. But unfortunately, it is a shopping mall.

Fortunately, Lindbergh’s body received a better burial. After he died, he was buried on the coast of Hawaii next to the ocean. The inscription on his tombstone includes a phrase from Psalm 139: “If I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea.” Although the Psalm continues, the inscription on Lindbergh’s tombstone ends there, leaving the reader mid-sentence, wondering if you do that, then what? Just like Lindbergh’s life, the inscription leaves one with many questions.

Have you seen The Spirit of St. Louis? What did you think of it? Leave a comment.

The Circus Town’s Been Born

Gary Cooper’s Three Oscars

A View from the Rear Window

How Alfred Hitchcock made “Rope” With Only 10 Cuts

Long Live Max: RIP Maurice Sendak

Audie Murphy: To Hell and Back to Film to TV to Song

(Some Related Chimesfreedom Posts)

Jimmy Stewart’s Movie Mom

Jimmy Stewart's Movie Mom

Happy Mother’s Day this weekend! One famous movie mom was Beulah Bondi’s portrayal of Ma Baily in It’s a Wonderful Life. It was a great performance, including a touching scene with her son George Bailey, played by Jimmy Stewart, as she sends him off to court Mary Hatch, played by Donna Reed. At the other extreme, in an alternate reality in the same movie, Bondi plays a bitter and angry version of the character who does not recognize her son.

Did you know that Beulah Bondi played Jimmy Stewart’s mother in a total of four movies? She also was his mother in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Vivacious Lady (1938 ), and Of Human Hearts (1938).

I did recently catch her as Stewart’s mom in Of Human Hearts on the Turner Classic Movies Channel. In that movie, she plays a faithful mother to Jimmy Stewart’s ungrateful son, resulting in Bondi’s second Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. I learned of the persistent Stewart-Bondi connection from Robert Osborne on TCM when the movie ended. This “Top Ten Facts About It’s a Wonderful Life” also notes the connection.

I have not seen Vivacious Lady, which finally became available on DVD after this original post was written. Bondi makes a brief appearance in this trailer for Vivacious Lady at around the 2:35 mark.

Beulah Bondi gave memorable performances in other movies, including Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), where she played an abandoned mother, and Our Town (1940), where again she played a mother but not to Stewart. Her other Oscar nomination resulted from The Gorgeous Hussy (1936), where she did not play Jimmy Stewart’s mom. Bondi regretted not playing the role of Ma Joad in Grapes of Wrath (1940), where she missed portraying the mother of Stewart’s good friend, Henry Fonda.

Bondi appeared on several television shows, winning an Emmy for a performance as Aunt Martha Corinne Walton on a 1976 episode of The Waltons. Her TV work also occasionally reunited her with Stewart. IMDb notes that Bondi played Stewart’s mother in one episode of The Jimmy Stewart Television Show (1971). Earlier, she appeared in one 1957 episode of G.E. True Theater, called “A Town with a Past,” with Stewart, although apparently not as his mother.

In movies today, producers’ obsession with an actress’s age sometimes lead them to cast a mother who is in reality too young to be the mother of the actor son. For example, in The Fighter (2010), Melissa Leo played Mark Wahlberg’s mother while being only 11 years older than him. But in Bondi’s case, she was a more realistic age to play Stewart’s mother. She was born May 3, 1888 and Stewart was born May 20, 1908, which would have made her 20 years old when she gave birth to the fictional James Stewart.

In real life, one of the movies’ greatest moms never married and never became a mother herself, passing away in 1981. But Bondi’s warm portrayal of movie mothers gives her a special place in the hearts of anyone who loves old movies or moms. So Happy Mother’s Day to Beulah Bondi, to my mom, to the other mothers out there, and to all those who were born by mothers.