The most devastating moment of James Stewart’s career: “Absolutely a slap in the face”

Even though his on-and-offscreen reputation was that of an all-around nice guy who didn’t have a bad or malicious bone in his body, nobody makes it to the top of an industry as ruthless as Hollywood without having the bit between their teeth, and James Stewart was no different.

To millions of audience members, he was ‘Golden Age’ Hollywood’s ultimate everyman. While it definitely wasn’t an act, considering nobody in the business had a bad word to say about him, Stewart was hardly a pushover who embraced his aw-shucks appeal 24 hours a day.

After all, this is a guy who stood up to the head of an organised crime syndicate and received death threats for his troubles, which was a risky proposition when the mafioso in question co-founded a group that was quite literally called Murder, Inc.

He was also one of the brave few who’d stand up to Alfred Hitchcock and put the ‘Master of Suspense’ in his place, and it speaks volumes to Stewart’s character that for a filmmaker with such an overbearing reputation, the happy-go-lucky Academy Award winner was capable of striking fear into the auteur.

Stewart’s filmography stacks up against anybody’s, but not all of them were winners. It’s almost impossible for an actor to go through their entire career without at least a couple of misses being peppered among the hits. Still, there’s a cruel sense of irony in the star’s most devastating moment being tied to what’s arguably his most beloved film.

After a five-year absence from the silver screen, during which he became a decorated war hero, Stewart returned to cinema and reunited with Frank Capra for It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s been rewatched annually by viewers worldwide for decades, but during its initial release, the whimsical fable bombed so hard at the box office that it killed a studio.

“It was the first picture I did after the war, after being almost five years away,” Stewart recalled to The New York Times. “Frank did everything he could to get these wonderful character people in the thing, people like Ward Bond, and that left everybody feeling good about the picture. So when it didn’t do well, it was absolutely a slap in the face.”

“It was sort of a bad time for all of us,” he understated. In fact, It’s a Wonderful Life had failed so spectacularly that it left Stewart wondering if he’d made a mistake returning to movies: “So I wondered: Have I lost my audience? Aren’t things working anymore?”

As he’d soon discover, though, it was only a blip. Not only did It’s a Wonderful Life take its rightful place as a classic, but Stewart would go on to make some of his best films in the years that followed through the likes of Harvey, Rear Window, Vertigo, The Sons of Katie Elder, and more.