Fool's Parade -- The Final Film (Sort of) of James Stewart

Consider the ends of the careers of two great Golden Era stars...who both famously worked for Alfred Hitchcock. Cary Grant and James Stewart.

Cary Grant rather famously and conclusively retired from movies a bit younger than necessary (62) and with a solid, if not classic, romantic comedy called "Walk, Don't Run," in which Cary slyly played matchmaker to a young couple(Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton) but made his final scene about how he was going home to have sex with his wife and make a baby. No classic, but a perfect farewell for a suave romantic leading man. Cary Grant in his final scene in his final film looked fit, handsome and suave. The year of this final Cary Grant movie was 1966.

Hitchock's other great leading man, James Stewart, worked past 1966. And unlike Cary, James (or Jimmy) rather moved out of his film career is a slow descent -- a few formulaic Westerns, one TV sitcom that failed(The Jimmy Stewart Show), one TV mystery lawyer show that failed (Hawkins) and a few noteworthy short cameos -- the remake of The Big Sleep, Airport '77, and best of all, as the old doctor who tells old gunfighter John Wayne that he is dying, in "The Shootist" (1976.)
There was an HBO movie with Bette Davis, a vocal for a Spielberg cartoon movie -- Jimmy sort of faded away, bit by bit.

But for all of that, there IS a "final James Stewart movie" -- one in which Stewart is not playing a cameo, and he's not on TV. He's in a movie that people paid to see: not many people, but that made it a movie, nonetheless.

Its called "Fool's Parade." I wanted to see it in 1971 when it came out because it was advertised as a "period action thriller with a macabre edge," and I liked all of that. But I never saw it. I've been vaguely aware of it over the years as "Jimmy Stewart's last movie." Wanted to see it. Finally did. On cable the other night(March, 2015.)
Its always odd to catch up with a movie decades after its release.

Its a very, very, very odd little movie. But, its a good one, a few dramatic flaws aside. And its a true showcase for a lot of what made James Stewart a great movie star, almost in spite of himself.

Stewart looks plenty old in "Fool's Parade." You notice that first --he's simply too old to be a leading man; Grace Kelly and Kim Novak are way the hell behind him. And he isn't really given much of a co-leading man to cover the romantic bases.

It turns out to be: Kurt Russell. The Kurt Russell of his Disney movie days, (post?) teenage, square of jaw but just too square in general to register as much of a character --- Kurt would need 8 years, "Elvis," "Used Cars" and "Escape from New York" to mature into the kind of charismatic,comedy macho he used for his second tier star career.

In Fool's Parade, Kurt Russell is "the kid" in an oddball trio of freshly released convicts of a rural West Virginia prison...Old Jimmy Stewart, Middle-aged Strother Martin(rather delightfully strange when we get stuck with him for a whole movie) and Kurt Russell as the kid.

Stewart had recently been paired in Westerns with Henry Fonda and Dean Martin to keep him "marketable for the sixties" but "Fool's Parade" really belongs to him. Its odd: the movie really lets Stewart "let loose." He gets to be folksy ..but raging(he twice threatens men with violence and you believe he COULD beat them up.) He gets some long speeches.

And he gets a big (fake) glass eyeball on his face that ensures he never looks "right" for the whole movie. Stewart seems to have delighted in knowing that he was now old enough he could mess up his face and play not only a "character" but a bizarre-LOOKING character. Stewart's character occasionally pulls that glass eye out, using it to terrify bad guys and to predict the future for himself and others. Its a great gimmick and it ensures that you'll always remember how Stewart looked in Fool's Parade.

The plot's pretty simple. Stewart, released from prison after 40 years, has $25,000 and change in Depression-Era 1935 dollars saved up from his prison work. But two men want to frame him, kill him, and take the money away from him: George Kennedy(second-billed over the title) as an oafish prison official with a bloodhound, a shotgun, really bad teeth and the face of a frog; and David Huddleston, a crooked banker who knows about the money.

"Fool's Parade" is an "action movie" like they used to be in 1971: low budget, low action, very realistic. The film is set in 1935, so Kennedy's shotgun is the main deadly weapon. Kennedy enlists two oddball hitmen to help him hunt Stewart, and the whole piece plays rather like lesser Elmore Leonard: more character than action, but the action is deadly when it comes.

Two things lift "Fool's Parade" above the norm. One is its decided, novelistic grotesquerie. (Which makes sense; its from a novel by Davis Grubb, who also wrote "Night of the Hunter.") Several faces are just plain weird: Stewart's with his glass eye; Kennedy's with his rotted teeth, and Anne Baxter as a houseboat madam with a face painted to look like a porcelain doll. Match these faces to some decidedly baroque dialogue and "Fool's Parade" at times plays like a Southern Gothic horror fable rather than a shoot 'em up.

But the other great thing about "Fool's Parade" is: Jimmy Stewart. Or James Stewart. He's an acquired taste for me as movie stars go, at least in his romantic roles. But in "Fool's Parade" even looking old and spindly, Stewart reveals that he was indeed, every inch the movie star. He commands his every scene just by being there, standing tall and delivering his dialogue in that great voice with that great spin. Stewart's playing a killer here; it was a smart, tough choice and I wonder if he knew it was his last one as a leading man. I found Stewart's work here to be not that far off the deceptively homespnun sharpster he played in "Anatomy of a Murder."

There's one clip from the movie on YouTube in which Stewart stands off Kennedy and the crooked banker with a bunch of dynamite tied around his waist(ala Heath Ledger's Joker about 37 years later). Its classic Stewart acting in a not-too-classic movie. But the scene conveys the flavor of the film, and Stewart's performance, and Stewart's bizzare glass-eyed look...very well. It also gives us a nice compare-and-contrast of the voices of Stewart, then-newbie Huddleston(decades away from being The Big Lebowksi), and Kennedy(like Stewart, an Oscar winner and underrated, I think, in his ability to project a certain "smart dumbness" just by making his voice heavy and his eyes dull.)