For Fans of James Stewart

Stewart was 50 when he made Vertigo and had never played anything close to its protagonist: a detective whose obsessive love turns controlling and finally self-destructive. It is not a comfortable performance. Hitchcock used Stewart's established trustworthiness as a trap, letting audiences follow a man into behavior they would normally reject. The film failed commercially on release. Fifty years later it sits at or near the top of almost every serious critical ranking of cinema. Stewart never played it safe here, and it cost him at the box office.

Between 1950 and 1955 Stewart made five Westerns with director Anthony Mann that collectively reinvented what a Western hero could be. These men carried grudges, made mistakes, and sometimes won through stubbornness rather than virtue. Winchester '73, Bend of the River, The Naked Spur, The Far Country, and The Man from Laramie form a complete arc through postwar American anxiety, dressed up as frontier adventure. They are still among the finest psychological Westerns ever made.

Elwood P. Dowd is Stewart's purest character: a man who sees an invisible six-foot rabbit named Harvey and refuses to apologize for it. The film is a comedy, but Elwood's philosophy of radical acceptance and unconditional kindness is played completely straight. Stewart understood that Elwood is not eccentric. He is simply free. Everything else in Stewart's career can be read as different ways of asking whether that kind of freedom is possible in the real world.

Before the Hitchcock collaborations and the psychological Westerns, Stewart won his only Academy Award for a screwball comedy, playing a wisecracking reporter opposite Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn. The Philadelphia Story shows how much charm and comic timing underpinned his dramatic work. His ability to seem flustered and sharp at the same time carried directly into the nervous energy of Rear Window and the coiled impatience of his Mann Westerns.