James Stewart: Diffident strokes

James Stewart made a career out of playing hard to get. As the NFT screens a season of his films, David Benedict ponders the conundrum of the romantic star who wasn't

Gauche and grumpy, languid and lanky, he plays most of the picture like a giraffe at a banquet: he just seems too damned tall. I'm talking about James Stewart as the magazine reporter and inverted snob Macaulay "Mike" Connor in The Philadelphia Story. He uses his quizzical right eyebrow a good deal to indicate contempt for Katharine Hepburn's wildly wealthy lifestyle, but dropping into the local library to dig for dirt, he finds her engrossed in his little-known novel... and in the middle of a rethink.

Hepburn: "I can't make you out at all now."

Stewart: "Really? I thought I was easy."

Hepburn: "So did I. But you're not. You talk so big and tough, then you write like this. Which is which?"

What's remarkable about Stewart is that despite 80 movies across five decades he's remembered for almost none of the qualities Hepburn perceives. Indeed, it wasn't until Anthony Mann fashioned eight Westerns around him, climaxing with The Man From Laramie in 1955, that anyone credited him with toughness at all. He said it himself in what became his signature role in Frank Capra's happiness-is-in-your-own-backyard hymn, It's A Wonderful Life. Pie-eyed after a dance that ended in a pool, he's walking with Donna Reed, having grabbed some dry, outsize clothes. He looks down at the stripy football shirt emphasising his gangly frame and mutters: "I guess I'm not the football type."

It's not just the physicality that gave rise to the view that Stewart only ever played one part: himself. Hesitation hovers over almost every performance, plus that breathy, dragged-out drawl that was his vocal hallmark. Even he told an interviewer: "If I had my career over again? Maybe I'd say to myself, speed it up a little." And did any other actor spend so many years playing characters who said "gee whiz"?

At first the studio didn't know what to do with this boyish man. He played the baddie in After the Thin Man (1936) but that was a rare excursion. He'd started a year before in a bit part as a reporter in The Murder Man, but rose swiftly to play the idealistic rich son in Capra's You Can't Take It With You. In 1939 he was the struggling lawyer opposite a miscast Carole Lombard in Made For Each Other, a mess of a movie that cannot decide if it's a drama, a comedy or an action picture. (It's actually none of the above). The interesting thing about the film is that at its peak, when it looks as if his child will die, he's shot from below. That, together with high-contrast, steeply-angled lighting, lends drama to the long planes of Stewart's face, a trick other directors later leapt on. It also marks an early appearance of the frenzied, wide-eyed desperation Hitchcock harnessed so effectively in three of their four films.

Those, however, were a long way off. Ice Follies of 1939, meanwhile, caused an unexpected outburst of astringency in the usually gushy Picturegoer. "James Stewart is becoming rather stereotyped. He needs to watch out that his engaging naturalness which first singled him out does not develop into forced artificiality." Thirty years later, Pauline Kael wrote: "When you're at a movie you don't have to believe in it to enjoy it, but you have to be interested. Just as you have to be interested in the human material too. Why should you go and see another picture with James Stewart?"

Why? Because beneath all that guileless, golly Moses, decency is a conundrum: Stewart was the leading man who was led. Male stars were built to be bold. Clark Gable didn't hang around waiting to be kissed; Cary Grant charmed the pants off any passing stranger; forever-on-the-make Gene Kelly never took no for an answer. And Stewart? He's not the kisser, he's the kissed.

Off-screen, Jean Arthur was far less impressed with him than she was on-screen where it was she who had to do all the legwork playing opposite him in You Can't Take It With You and Mr Smith Goes to Washington. Hitchcock learnt exactly how little sexual heat Stewart generated. His asexual performance in what should be a triangular relationship in Rope is one of the reasons the film failed. The screenwriter Arthur Laurents said: "Stewart never had an affair with anyone: he was just a boy scout." So, in Rear Window, Hitchcock changes tack, giving Stewart a broken leg, keeping him in a chair and creating a shocking erotic charge by having Grace Kelly's face and scarlet lips fill the frame to bursting point as she leans in to kiss him.

The nearest Stewart gets to traditional male roleplay is in the comedy-Western Destry Rides Again. Marlene Dietrich is Frenchy, the uberfloozy at the Bottleneck saloon, who sings: "You've got that look, that look between the lines/ You with your let's-get-more-than-friendly designs," and she's almost right because for once there's sex in the air. But this is the result of her efforts, not his. She's direct and unblinking, he's the one with maidenly uncertainty and darting eyes. Visiting Frenchy in her (un)dressing room, he fails to make a pass. As her maid opines: "That's the most peculiar man I ever did see."

His undemonstrative nature is made explicit in It's a Wonderful Life, where Reed is a open book of expectation that Stewart cannot or will not read. He prattles on about this and that until an old man sitting on a stoop voices the audience's exasperation: "Why don't you kiss her instead of talking her to death?" He doesn't... which is where the Tom Hanks comparison comes in.

Hanks's finest work to date is as the man transformed back into a boy in Big, a role that has nothing whatsoever to do with sexuality. Like Stewart, his characters don't do sex. Hanks has Forrest Gump – a benign, naive man drifting through life – and Stewart has Harvey, the story of a man untroubled by any relationship bar the one with his companion: an imaginary six-foot white rabbit. In Nora Ephron's Sleepless in Seattle, Hanks only meets Meg Ryan in the final scene but that suits him fine because (like Stewart) he clearly longs less for sex than for romance and settling down. Ephron tried a similar trick, reteaming them in the pen-pal-plotted You've Got Mail, which was actually an inferior remake of Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner, which starred Margaret Sullavan and... James Stewart.

Lubitsch's romantic masterpiece is a quiet and quite perfectly formed tale of requited love written as comedy. It brims not with sentimentality but true sentiment etched in exquisitely observed acting. Stewart's sincere performance is beautifully calibrated. Like Jack Lemmon after him, he's appealingly youthful and open-faced. But, as with Lemmon, that atrophied into mannerism as the years went by.

It's at its worst in Bell Book and Candle – which co-stars the young Lemmon – a fascinating romantic comedy of witchcraft in Fifties Manhattan. (Rosemary's Baby it ain't – here, witchcraft is a metaphor for homosexuality.) Kim Novak fancies the publisher living upstairs (Stewart) and puts a spell on him to get him. It takes that to break him out of his diffidence. Supposedly deliriously happy, he jilts his reproving fiancée, saying he's intoxicated. Intoxicated? Stewart's uninflected, stuffed-shirt performance sandbags the movie, which might have worked had the original casting come through. It was to have starred Cary Grant, who has the devilment and shimmering wit that the dogged Stewart never mastered.

The outstanding exception to his back-foot sexuality came late. Aged 50, he made Vertigo. Nothing about his demeanour suggests aggressive masculinity, which makes his mounting desire for Kim Novak all the more shocking. Having saved her from drowning, he takes her to his apartment. He's been following her for days but they've never spoken. Wearing only his dressing-gown, she sits across from him in a two-shot, but Hitchcock tightens the tension by continuing the scene in intercut close-ups with a long lens blurring the foreground and background to distill their presences. Suddenly we see them in another two-shot: Stewart reaches for Novak's coffee cup and their hands touch. She looks up at him but Stewart is terrified to return her gaze for fear of revealing his explosive passion. It's electrifying – and overturns everything we've ever felt about Stewart and sex.

Their consummating kiss is the climax – in every sense – of Hitchcock's most extraordinary film. Stewart has transformed Novak into the woman he loves, Bernard Herrmann's love theme soars and she yields to him completely, her head thrown back in ecstasy, but it's Stewart's erotic and emotional epiphany – through sheer will-power he has made past and present combine; his fantasy has become reality.

Vertigo is predicated entirely upon our expectation of Stewart. In all those films, in all those years, we have known him to be utterly normal and on our side. We identify with Stewart's nightmare because we know he represents our "best" self. It's what defines his career. Check back to 1938. In Vivacious Lady he tries to tell Ginger Rogers why he likes being a professor:

Stewart: "When I see something like that university, it gives me quite a thrill, because..."

Rogers: "Because why?"

Stewart: "I'd like to tell you, but I'm afraid you'd just think I was bragging."

Rogers: "No, I like people who think they're good."

The James Stewart season is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1 until 30 December (020-7928 3232; www.bfi.org.uk/stewart)