every jimmy stewart performance in an alfred hitchcock movie, ranked by how much i wish he would just. stop.
Full disclosure: when I started this, I thought there were a lot more Alfred Hitchcock films with Jimmy Stewart in them. I also spent most of my life under the impression that there were like, twenty Hitchcock movies. There are 53 of them. Or, I thought 20% of all Hitchcock films had Jimmy Stewart in them, but it’s actually only 7.5%. Did you know there’s one called The Skin Game? I didn’t, because it’s part of the other, Stewartless 92.5%.
Jimothy here is one of my recent fascinations, because my twenty-first century sensibilities preclude me from ever understanding how this guy got his reputation as an everyman. Were people just weirder back then?
So. Here is that 7.5% of Hitchcock’s filmography, in ascending order of how many times I had to talk myself out of writing a cease and desist letter to a fictional character.
#4: Rear Window (1954)
Was L.B. Jefferies the original true crime girlie? I’m about to sound like such a hypocrite, because I watched that Netflix docuseries Don’t Fuck With Cats, and I got so mad about it that I yelled at the TV and spilled wine on myself. I think. I do not remember this super well, given the wine. The point: I wanted the Don’t Fuck With Cats sleuths to stop so, so badly. I guess the end justified the means there, but I certainly didn’t feel like anyone should’ve capitalized on it after the fact. They even tell you at the end of the final episode that you shouldn’t be watching this, you sick fuck, because that’s what the killer would want! If he kills again, it’s your fault, viewer.
THE POINT: Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff is a photographer with a broken leg. Bored out of his mind, he starts spying on his neighbors and becomes convinced (based on very little evidence) that one of them has murdered his wife. And he’s right. His girlfriend Grace Kelly and nurse are pretty much instantly on board with his theory, and they all badger Jeff’s cop friend about it until he believes them. See, if I may get on my soapbox one more time, what I really dislike about modern true crime media is that it fosters distrust among civilians by perpetuating the idea that anyone behaving in a (presumed) suspicious manner could be a serial killer, while painting the police (one of the only lines of work where you can legally get away with murder) as fair and trustworthy arbiters of justice. And I’d like that to stop. So I should, in theory, want the Rear Window gang to stop as well. But of course I don’t want them to stop, and neither do you, because then there’d be no movie! There’d be no objectively perfect film, averaging about 27 one-liners per minute, where Grace Kelly parkours into a murderer’s apartment and things escalate from there until a guy who started the narrative with one broken leg ends it with two.
#3: Rope (1948)
The other half of the Jimmy Stewart Solves A Murder In A Manhattan Apartment canon makes the extremely correct and valid decision to portray him as A Weird Guy. Probably his weirdest guy on this list. Basically, when he was housemaster at a prep school once, he jokingly invented the purge from the Purge franchise 65 years in advance, using the Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch to justify it, and then this gay couple (yes, really) he used to supervise took his philosophy way too seriously and strangled their former classmate to death with the titular rope. And now they’ve invited the victim’s friends and loved ones (and Jimmy Stewart) over for a dinner party so they can humblebrag undetected about their super ingenious crime.
Unlike Rear Window, you are not solving the murder in real time alongside Jimothy; you’ve already seen it happen. You’re just waiting for him to clue in and open the trunk where the body’s been stashed for the past 61 minutes. The only reason I am reluctant to endorse his quest here is because I support gay wrongs.
#2: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956)
He’s spent two movies being a nosy bitch, and now he knows too much! JStew’s Dr. Ben McKenna is in a failmarriage with Doris Day, and while vacationing in Marrakesh with their son, they accidentally become embroiled in an assassination plot. Their son gets kidnapped by two of the conspirators, who threaten to kill him if the McKennas tell the police what they know, (which is too much). So now they’re tasked with finding their son and foiling the assassination!
The operative word in the previous paragraph, if you can believe it, is doctor. No longer is Hitchcock casting Stewart as weird guys in the arts, but instead as an ostensibly normal family man in the medical field. He is trying so hard to be normal. He’s fighting for his life. It’s not working. A man dies in his arms, whispering, “Ambrose Chapel…” as he goes, and instead of a church, Ben decides he must be referring to a guy named Ambrose Chapell. Doris Day is the one who’s like, “It’s a church, dipshit,” and yet this movie is not called The Woman Who Knew Too Much. Ben spends like, twenty minutes investigating this red herring, which turns out to be a taxidermy shop, and he gets jumped by about six taxidermists who don’t appreciate his accusations of kidnapping. He does such a bad job fighting them off that at one point he accidentally catches his hand on a stuffed tiger’s teeth and screams in pain. All of this could’ve been avoided if he just knew what a church was! Not to imply that I am opposed to red herrings, or comedy. Unfamiliarity with the concept of churches is based, actually. I think this movie’s fatal flaw is the bleak instability of the McKennas’ marriage, which is not helped by the minimal chemistry between Stewart and Day, especially in comparison with Grace Kelly. Perhaps both McKennas should stop… being married.
Honorable Mention: His conspicuous absence in The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934)
This movie has everything (except Jimmy Stewart): Violent chair fights, sun-worshiping cults, a 75-minute runtime, Peter Lorre…
#1: Vertigo (1958)
Granted, you’re supposed to want him to stop. You’re like, “Hey James, can you leave your dead girlfriend’s mysterious doppelgänger alone?” and then he doesn’t, and then the mysterious doppelgänger also dies. From a NUN JUMPSCARE. Terrible job, guy.
The only admirable thing that this man (his name is John, but he makes everyone call him Scottie. I don’t like it. Deceitful) ever does is quit the police force, and it’s only because he has a debilitating fear of heights. And then his evil college friend is like, “Can you follow my wife around?” and Scottie goes right back to behaving policeishly! So really, Jimothy Stewart’s character does exactly two valid things in this entire, 128-minute film, and they are:
Save his friend’s wife from drowning
But other than that, you’re just in for stalking and coercion. Hey, British Film Institute, I can think of a better movie where you get to watch a guy be shitty for two hours!
This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Though the films mentioned therein predate even the 1960 WGA and Actors’ Strikes, and nearly everyone involved in their making has passed, it is important to note that no film, in the entire history of the industry, would exist without the labor of writers and actors.