Stewart played darker, more morally ambiguous characters in movies directed by Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Naked Spur (1953), and by Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958).

Stewart also starred in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), The Spirit of St. Louis (1957), and The Flight of the Phoenix (1965) as well as the Western films How the West Was Won (1962), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

[27] The company's directors included Joshua Logan, Bretaigne Windust, and Charles Leatherbee,[28] and amongst its other actors were married couple Henry Fonda and Margaret Sullavan, who became Stewart's close friends.

[62] For his next film, the romantic drama Seventh Heaven (1937), Stewart was loaned to 20th Century-Fox to play a Parisian sewer worker in a remake of Frank Borzage's silent classic released a decade earlier.

[63] Stewart's next film, The Last Gangster (1937) starring Edward G. Robinson, was also a failure,[52] but it was followed by a critically acclaimed performance in Navy Blue and Gold (1937) as a football player at the United States Naval Academy.

[72] It was a critical and commercial success, and showed Stewart's talent for performing in romantic comedies;[73] The New York Herald called him "one of the most knowing and engaging young actors appearing on the screen at present".

[96] Stewart's final film to be released in 1940 was George Cukor's romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story, in which he played an intrusive, fast-talking reporter sent to cover the wedding of a socialite (Katharine Hepburn) with the help of her ex-husband (Cary Grant).

[120][b] He was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for actions as deputy commander of the 2nd Bombardment Wing,[122] the French Croix de Guerre with palm, and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters.

[146] Andrew Sarris stated that Stewart's performance was underappreciated by critics of the time, who could not see "the force and fury" of it, and considered his proposal scene with Donna Reed, "one of the most sublimely histrionic expressions of passion".

[180] Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that "so darling is the acting of James Stewart [...] and all the rest that a virtually brand-new experience is still in store for even those who saw the play",[181] while Variety called him "perfect" in the role.

[182] John McCarten of the New Yorker stated that although he "doesn't bring his part to the battered authority of Frank Fay...he nevertheless succeeds in making plausible the notion that Harvey, the rabbit, would accept him as a pal.

[c] Stewart portrayed a photographer, loosely based on Robert Capa,[198][199] who projects his fantasies and fears onto the people he observes out his apartment window while on hiatus due to a broken leg and comes to believe that he has witnessed a murder.

[201] Although most of the initial acclaim for Rear Window was directed towards Hitchcock,[202] critic Vincent Canby later described Stewart's performance in it as "grand" and stated that "[his] longtime star status in Hollywood has always obscured recognition of his talent.

[214][215] Although Vertigo has later become considered one of Hitchcock's key works and was ranked the greatest film ever made by the Sight & Sound critics' poll in 2012,[216] it was met with unenthusiastic reviews and poor box-office receipts upon its release.

[236] A classic psychological Western,[237] the picture was shot in black-and-white film noir style at Ford's insistence,[238] with Stewart as an East Coast attorney who goes against his non-violent principles when he is forced to confront a psychopathic outlaw (Lee Marvin) in a small frontier town.

[235] Stewart filmed two television movies in the 1980s: Mr. Krueger's Christmas (1980), produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which allowed him to fulfill a lifelong dream to conduct the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,[269] and Right of Way (1983), an HBO drama that co-starred Bette Davis.

[310][311] Both Stewart's and Fonda's children later noted that their fathers' favorite activity when not working seemed to be quietly sharing time together while building and painting model airplanes, a hobby they had taken up in New York years earlier.

[318][319][e] In addition to his film career, Stewart had diversified investments, including real estate, oil wells, the charter-plane company Southwest Airways, and membership on major corporate boards; he became a multimillionaire.

[324] A highly proficient pilot, he entered a cross-country race with Leland Hayward in 1937[324] and was one of the early investors in Thunderbird Field, a pilot-training school built and operated by Southwest Airways in Glendale, Arizona.

He served as the national vice-chairman of entertainment for the American Red Cross's fund-raising campaign for wounded soldiers in Vietnam, as well as contributed donations for improvements and restorations to Indiana, his hometown in Pennsylvania.

[337] Following the assassination of Senator Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, Stewart, Charlton Heston, Kirk Douglas, and Gregory Peck issued a statement calling for support of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Gun Control Act of 1968.

"[344] In 1989, Stewart founded the American Spirit Foundation to apply entertainment-industry resources to developing innovative approaches to public education and to assist the emerging democracy movements in the former Iron Curtain countries.

[351] More than 3,000 mourners attended his memorial service, including June Allyson, Carol Burnett, Bob Hope, Lew Wasserman, Nancy Reagan, Esther Williams, and Robert Stack.

[379] According to film scholar Amy Lawrence, the main elements of Stewart's persona, "a propensity for physical and spiritual suffering, lingering fears of inadequacy", were established by Frank Capra in the 1930s and were enhanced through his later work with Hitchcock and Mann.

[380] John Belton explained that "James Stewart evolves from the naive, small-town, populist hero of Frank Capra's 1930s comedies to the bitter, anxiety-ridden, vengeance-obsessed cowboy in Anthony Mann's 1950s Westerns and the disturbed voyeur and sexual fetishist in Alfred Hitchcock's 1950s suspense thrillers.

[426][144] According to film scholar Tim Palmer, "Stewart's legacy rests on his roles as the nervous idealist standing trial for, and gaining stature from, the sincerity of his beliefs, while his emotive convictions are put to the test.

[429] According to film scholar Murray Pomerance, "the other Jimmy Stewart ... was a different type altogether, a repressed and neurotic man buried beneath an apparently calm facade, but ready at any moment to explode with vengeful anxiety and anger, or else with deeply twisted and constrained passions that could never match up with cheery personality of the alter ego.

"[430] Bingham has described him as having "two coequal personas; the earnest idealist, the nostalgic figure of the homespun boy next door; and the risk-taking actor who probably performed in films for more canonical auteurs than any other American star".

[434] According to Bingham, Stewart marked "the transition between the studio period...and the era of free-lance actors, independent production, and powerful talent agents that made possible the "new kind of star" of the late 1960s".

[447] The L. Tom Perry Special Collections Library at Brigham Young University houses his personal papers and movie memorabilia including letters, scrapbooks, recordings of early radio programs, and two of his accordions.