Over at Dean’s World there’s a discussion going on, fomented by Dean, of whether Tom Hanks is today’s Jimmy Stewart. I think that’s the wrong way to look at it.
Every actor or actress is unique but, unfortunately, parts in Hollywood movies aren’t. No matter what the writer may write the parts will be shoehorned into the expected roles by studios and directors. Like the Commedia dell’arte there’s a relative handful of stock parts. Some of them are obvious: Female Ingenue, Hero, Male Ingenue (a hero who’s just as innocent as the female ingenue), Jaded Lady, Sneering Villain, and so on.
Think of these stock parts as cubbyholes, all in a row. Individual actors and actresses are shoved into the cubbyholes. Over time the cubbyholes can take on the shape of a particular actor or actress if that performer has been stuck in that cubbyhole long enough. So, for example, John Wayne was in the Cowboy Hero cubbyhole for so long that the hole itself looks like John Wayne. But the Cowboy Hero stock part was filled by others, e.g. William S. Hart, Harry Carey, and Tom Mix, before John Wayne came along and it’ll probably be filled by others in the future.
Charming Leading Man has been filled by Fredric March, Joel McCrea, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson. Patrick Dempsey seems to be a leading candidate for the role nowadays. Charming Leading Man is different than Hero. Hero must be virtuous. Charming Leading Man doesn’t need to do anything. Just being is enough. Female Ingenue and Jaded Lady alike fall in love with him.
Every so often there’s a role so unique that it creates an entirely new cubbyhole. So, for example, Alan Ladd created a brand new cubbyhole, Psychotic Antihero Killer, in This Gun for Hire. The role had been foreshadowed by Edward G. Robinson, Humphrey Bogart, and Jimmy Cagney during the 1930’s. Jimmy Cagney took the role and ran with it in White Heat. I’d argue that’s the cubbyhole that was filled by Clint Eastwood in the 1960’s and 1970’s and by Mel Gibson more recently.
I would argue that Tom Hanks has largely played roles in two related cubbyholes: The Innocent (Charlie Chaplin, Harry Landon) and Shlemazel. Great examples of The Innocent that compare well with Tom Hanks’s roles are Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve and Gary Cooper in Ball of Fire. Some of Tom Hanks’s most notable roles fit that stock part nicely: Big and Forrest Gump.
But he’s also played Shlemazel, the poor guy that things happen to, e.g. in Philadelphia and Castaway. And Jimmy Stewart generally played Shlemazel.
Jimmy Stewart’s great gift was the ability to portray inner conflict, even inner turmoil, on the screen. That gift gave him the ability to portray the poor that things happened to with enormous dignity and that’s what made Jimmy Stewart Jimmy Stewart.
So it’s not so much that Tom Hanks is the Jimmy Stewart of our time as it is that Tom Hanks and Jimmy Stewart have both played the same stock character in Hollywood movies and the differences between the two actors make the difference between the roles.
