That one time when Jimmy Stewart ended the Golden Age of Hollywood

If you’re in need of a worthwhile read this afternoon, I suggest you check out this excellent piece by Doug Dibbern at the Daily Notebook, entitled “Jimmy Stewart: Angel of Death.” It’s one-part self-consciously crackpot psychoanalysis, one-part erudite historiography and one-part extra-pithy “j’accuse.” I couldn’t care less whether Dibbern’s thesis or the conclusions he reaches are correct; the medium is truly the message in this short essay.

I’m suddenly very excited to watch Stewart in Anthony Mann’s “Bend of the River” (1952), which played at NYC’s Film Forum a week ago and which sits near the top of my personal film-viewing queue. (Oh, how I wish I was in Manhattan right now. Between Film Forum’s Anthony Mann retrospective, which ends this week, and the American debut of Jacques Rivette’s “Around a Small Mountain” at the IFC Center, there’s plenty of cinema to get lost in.)

Tags: Anthony Mann, critic-on-critic, Jimmy Stewart