Then he claims that Ford’s film was a rebuke to Cecil B.
Eliot mysteriously concludes that The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) is John Ford’s statement about Hollywood, though he doesn’t explain how. It’s not about a son’s struggle to displace his father and sexually possess his mother. But Winchester ’73 centers on Stewart’s character avenging his father’s murder and the theft of his rifle, both the doing of his brother. After all, says Eliot, the prized rifle of the film’s title is a phallic symbol. Eliot’s interprets the first and best of Stewart’s films with Anthony Mann, Winchester ’73, as an Oedipal saga. In a footnote on the same page, Eliot gives Thief‘s release date as 1955. Further, Eliot states that Cary Grant retired from acting after Monkey Business (1952), only to return seven years later in Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief. He makes this parenthetical observation about George Stevens’ film, Giant: “James Dean in his final screen performance before his sudden, early and tragic death in a car accident just prior to the film’s release.” James Dean died on 30 September 1955, about a week after filming his last scenes in Giant, but the film wasn’t released until November of the following year. Further still, Eliot can’t even keep his facts straight. Otherwise, his book is overrun with superfluous plot summaries ( Vertigo‘s takes up eight pages), and wrong-headed analyses of Stewart’s films. On the technical side, he mistakenly claims that How the West Was Won was released in Cinemascope instead of Cinerama, and describes another film as being made in VistaVision and 70mm, two physically incompatible formats. One need only turn the page to be greeted with a fresh example of Eliot’s ignorance of film history and technology. Jimmy Stewart: A Biography is an ineptly researched and written assemblage of material from previously published sources. Reading Eliot’s book reminded me of Pauline Kael’s review of the film Fahrenheit 451, in which she told how she horrified a Berkeley professor by burning a “crummy ghost-written” biography of a movie star in her fireplace. Curious to see what Marc Eliot wrote about the films Stewart made with directors Anthony Mann and Otto Preminger, I read those sections of his book first and was appalled by its awfulness.
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