(Credits: Far Out / Wikimedia Commons)
There are very few ways to exit Hollywood cleanly. If you’re lucky enough to be a movie star, you will either suffer the indignities of being sidelined into minor roles or take on worse and worse movies in order to remain the leading character. Some stars have taken the bold route of quitting while they were ahead. Audrey Hepburn abandoned Hollywood near the peak of her career in the 1960s and only returned a handful of times, on her own terms. Daniel Day-Lewis is a more recent example. After schooling everyone in the art of Oscar-worthy acting, he threw in the towel and is probably somewhere making shoes or reciting the Gettysburg Address to his long-suffering loved ones as we speak.
For the most part, though, the Hollywood exit is very similar to the ultimate exit. There is a slow decline, and then death puts an end to it. There is no retirement, formal or otherwise. Many stars of Old Hollywood went this way. Bette Davis was working until her very last months on Earth, as was Joan Crawford. James Stewart might have had a similar trajectory, but he suffered a late-career setback, a movie that was so bad that it left critics bemused and ended his live-action feature film career on the spot.
Stewart was one of Hollywood’s most beloved leading men for decades. He radiated mild decency. Where Cary Grant was the impossibly charming face of glamour and Humphrey Bogart was the consummate grizzled underdog, Stewart was the everyman who always stuck to his morals. Mr Smith Goes to Washington, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Harvey all cast him as an average Joe who never failed to rise to the occasion and comport himself heroically.
All of that could be a little boring, though, which was why his turn to gritty westerns in the 1950s and ‘60s was so refreshing. While many stars clung to their personas of yesteryear, he embraced darker, less noble roles that saw him toting guns, sporting facial hair, and glaring at his foes with disconcerting intensity. This period lasted almost as long as his stint as Hollywood’s most upstanding on-screen citizen, and it revitalised his career.
By the early ‘70s, though, Stewart seemed a bit disconcerted by all the newness in the industry and tried to backtrack. He turned down future Oscar-winning movies like Network and On Golden Pond and instead made a Lassie movie and a disaster flick with Jack Lemmon and Olivia de Havilland called Airport ‘77. Then, he had the opportunity to star in a film set in Kenya about an elderly man who lives with his adult granddaughter in seclusion. Their little slice of paradise is disturbed when a pilot crash-lands near their cabin and suffers from amnesia, and things descend into pure, unadulterated chaos (script-wise) from there.
Directed by Susumu Hani, Green Horizon (also known as A Tale of Africa) was a Japanese production that Stewart agreed to make “on a whim”. In his biography, Jimmy Stewart: The Truth Behind the Legend, the actor is quoted as saying that he “[n]ever did understand what it was all about” but that he had hoped it would “help to promote wildlife conservation.” Even Stewart, a Hollywood legend and Oscar winner, didn’t manage to come across as a competent performer in the movie, and it was panned by the few critics who bothered to watch it.
After that debacle, Stewart did very little. He made a handful of television movies, did some Campbell’s Soup commercials, and read some of his own poetry on late-night television. His last screen role was as the voice of an Old West rodent named Wylie Burp in An American Tail: Fievel Goes West. It could have been worse.
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