James Stewart: A Wonderful Life

"James Stewart: A Wonderful Life," hosted by Johnny Carson, is from 1987, ten years before Stewart's death. His last years were fraught with illness, and after his wife's death, he became reclusive.

Here, however, he talks with Johnny Carson about his career, and there is some wonderful old footage of him with Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullivan doing summer stock, and some stills of him in plays, as well as family photographs.

There are interviews with Richard Dreyfuss, Lee Remick, Gloria Stewart, and Peter Bogdanovich as well, and scenes from Philadelphia Story, Anatomy of a Murder, It's a Wonderful Life, etc.

In the end, we revel in Stewart's accomplishments but we don't find out too much about him as a man. The aw, shucks veneer hid an intelligent man, a Princeton grad, a committed actor, and an ambitious one. He left us a great legacy of films. It's evident he was more interested in that than letting us in on who he really was. And that legacy is more than enough.