Jimmy Stewart

Jimmy Stewart, 79, got a lifetime-achievement award Sunday night at a black-tie dinner ending the three-day Monterey (Calif.) Film Festival. The actor took the occasion to lambaste computer coloring of old black-and-white movies. "Colorization is one of the most disgraceful things in any endeavor in this country," he said. "The actors end up with orange faces. The cameraman took all this time . . . to create depth and to cast the right shadows. With colorization, people just walk like painted Easter eggs.

Oh, these modern actors. They all want to be Jimmy Stewart. Tom Hanks in Cast Away, Tom Cruise in Vanilla Sky, and Jim Carrey in The Majestic don't create original characters. Instead they pay tribute to Stewart's Everyman humility and the alternative-future scenario that haunts him in It's a Wonderful Life. As tribute performances go, Carrey's shows the most restraint and heart. If only I liked The Majestic half as much as I liked Carrey in it. Despite Carrey's best efforts and those of fetching newcomer Laurie Holden, Frank Darabont's film is an interminable, smothering tableau of Norman Rockwell pieties.

Asked about reaching the age of 80 today, Jimmy Stewart, came up with the following characteristic reply: "Ah . . . well . . . uh, it seems rather high. " Stewart doesn't plan anything special for the occasion. "Gloria (his wife of 39 years) has fixed up a party. I'll leave it all up to her. " Despite his octogenarian status, Stewart is keeping busy. This week, Stewart hosted a television tribute to Frank Capra, who directed several of his films. He will host three two-hour radio shows about Hollywood in the 1940s, '50s and '60s.

Jimmy Stewart, one of the last surviving big male stars from Hollywood's mid-century Golden Age, opened the celebration of his 85th birthday last night when he and his wife, Gloria, entertained 40 friends at their Beverly Hills home. On Saturday, about 800 people - Ronald Reagan among them - will honor the actor at a gala benefit for Santa Monica's St. John's Hospital and Health Center at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Last month St. John's invited fans to send birthday cards to Stewart - whose birthday is Thursday - and as of last weekend 10,000 cards had been received from all over the world.

Of all the high praise we are likely to hear for the great Jimmy Stewart today, maybe the most valuable tribute was left by the man himself. You can say of Stewart something you can say of no other actor - that in all of the 80 or so movies he made in his 50-year career that spanned fundamental transformations in moviemaking, Jimmy Stewart never gave a bad performance. Think about it. A million reels of film, a thousand roles, characters of staggering variety, and not one false note.

It might not be the Capitol itself, but the hearings were held nearby in a Senate office building. And that overgrown Eagle Scout with the expressive caterpillar brows, those true-blue eyes fringed with double-dip lashes, and the catch in his throat may not be Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. But squint a little, and Ollie North is a ringer for America's most beloved actor in the role that made James Stewart a national hero before his World War II service made him a duly decorated one. Call it Mr. North Goes to Washington : For the lieutenant colonel, any resemblance to heroes living or fictional seems purely intentional.

When he returned home from World War II, Hollywood icon James Stewart was featured on the cover of Life magazine in front of the Indiana County courthouse. "In New York, Stewart refused a hero's welcome," the text read. "Instead, he drove to Indiana, Pa., 50 miles from Pittsburgh. There, in his parents' comfortable red-brick house overlooking the town, he slept late, played the piano and joked with his family about the old days. " Just plain folks. That was the Jimmy Stewart legend.

Mr. Smith came back to Washington. Jimmy Stewart, the gangly hero of the movie classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, returned to the city where his famous film outraged the pompous press and politicians when it premiered here a scant 48 years ago. Still straight and skinny at 79, Stewart had played the gosh-and-golly Good Young Man, Sen. Jefferson Smith, who vanquished the corrupt and venal political system so that good would prevail and...

It sounds like a story Jimmy Stewart might have starred in: Fed up with big, bureaucratic banks that just grow more impersonal with each passing merger, some small businessmen meet at a local diner and decide to start their own bank. After a few struggling months headquartered in a basement, First National Littlebank opens its doors. The president greets depositors by name, and tellers remember their birthdays. A small but loyal base of customers grows steadily through word of mouth, and the bank's return on equity lives happily ever after.

CoreStates Financial Corp. yesterday announced a plan to dramatically expand its business in Delaware by purchasing a tiny savings and loan of the type featured in the Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life. CoreStates said it would purchase the Clayton Savings & Loan Association, a Clayton, Del., institution with no employees and less than $250,000 in assets, all home mortgages. The acquisition will enable CoreStates to offer retail banking services like savings accounts, mortgages and consumer loans that it is not now permitted to provide in Delaware.

If you're astounded by Herman Cain's rise to the top of the Republican pyramid, remember that Americans have long had a soft spot for the mythological outsider who rides to the rescue. Movie director Frank Capra was great at mining that fantasy, most notably in 1939, when Jimmy Stewart used his aw-gosh gumption to clean up corruption in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington . And, far more recently in Dave , Kevin Kline played the amiable, innocent owner of a temp agency who accidentally becomes president, brings in his neurotic tax accountant to clean up the federal budget - and, presto, the world is a better place.

When he was indicted, Rod Blagojevich quoted Kipling. After his impeachment, he quoted Tennyson. And Monday, on the day he was convicted on 17 corruption-related counts, the former governor of Illinois quoted Elvis. "My hands are shaky, and my knees are weak," he told reporters as he left his home for the courthouse to hear the verdict. "I can't seem to stand on my own two feet. " Luckily, Blago did not have to stand for long. He, his famous Elvis hairdo, and his wife ducked into an SUV and made their way to the federal court.

Helen Buck O'Neill, 96, a former amateur golf champion and Broadway actress and dancer, died Friday, Dec. 3, at Holy Redeemer St. Joseph Manor in Meadowbrook. In 1940, Mrs. O'Neill defeated Helen Sigel Wilson to win the Philadelphia Women's Golf Championship at Philadelphia Country Club. A second-generation member of Huntingdon Valley Country Club, she was an eight-time women's champion at the club and won doubles championships with partners including her husband, Frank, for the Boyle Cup; her son Donald for the Griscom Cup; and Charlotte Buck for a mother-daughter title.

The population of Ogden Marsh, Iowa, just dropped from 1,260 to 1,259 - when Sheriff Dave (Timothy Olyphant), given no choice, shoots and kills the town drunk as he walks across the high school baseball field in the middle of a game, a rifle in his hands. And so begins The Crazies , a timely remake of George Romero's 1973 B-movie about a community gone mad, burning and murdering and acting all zombielike in the wake of a secret government-perpetrated biological accident. See, Rory didn't have a drop of alcohol in his blood when he staggered across the outfield.

When he returned home from World War II, Hollywood icon James Stewart was featured on the cover of Life magazine in front of the Indiana County courthouse. "In New York, Stewart refused a hero's welcome," the text read. "Instead, he drove to Indiana, Pa., 50 miles from Pittsburgh. There, in his parents' comfortable red-brick house overlooking the town, he slept late, played the piano and joked with his family about the old days. " Just plain folks. That was the Jimmy Stewart legend.

From the sepia-toned Universal logo to the big-band soundtrack and even the slapstick speakeasy brawl, George Clooney's Leatherheads is a larky throwback to the breakneck screwballs of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Problem is, it isn't breakneck enough. Clooney, the closest thing modern Hollywood's got to Clark Gable, bats his lashes, wrinkles his brow, and woos, coos and dukes it out, with wiseguy charm. Set in 1925, in the wild, woolly, early days of professional football, when teams were sponsored by starch companies and turnout was good if 200 fans huddled in the bleachers, Leatherheads is an admirable, if not altogether successful affair.

From the sepia-toned Universal logo to the big-band soundtrack and even the slapstick speakeasy brawl, George Clooney's Leatherheads is a larky throwback to the breakneck screwballs of Frank Capra and Preston Sturges. Problem is, it isn't breakneck enough. Clooney, the closest thing modern Hollywood's got to Clark Gable, bats his lashes, wrinkles his brow, and woos, coos and dukes it out, with wiseguy charm. Set in 1925, in the wild, woolly, early days of professional football, when teams were sponsored by starch companies and turnout was good if 200 fans huddled in the bleachers, Leatherheads is an admirable, if not altogether successful affair.

Gas & Electric Arts' Quick Silver by Kira Obolensky gets the Fringe off to a baffling start. A play about the destruction of a town through industrial waste, this show - part human, part puppet, part agitprop, part satire - mixes metaphors as well as styles. The town has one industry - hatmaking - and one tycoon, whose daughter is doomed to marry an old rich guy despite the charms of a poor young poet. The air is toxic, ditto the cliches, the leaden, repetitive dialogue, and the extreme slowness that director Lisa Jo Epstein chooses as the show's tempo (making the title all the more puzzling - nothing could be less mercurial)

Somewhere in this news tidbit lies a critical piece of our cultural DNA, which probably does not bode well for the future of Western civilization. But our job is not to make sense of current events (phew), merely to report them. So here goes: The Hollywood Reporter has, for the fourth year running, compiled its latest list of top-paid female movie stars. Julia Roberts leads it - for the second year. Roberts, 38, earns $20 million per film. Nicole Kidman holds second place.

Even while working as an extra in an Academy Award-winning movie as a youngster, Eagles radio announcer Merrill Reese had football on his mind. Reese appeared in The Greatest Show on Earth, which won for best picture of 1952, and his fondest memory consists of having a catch with one of the actors in the film, who played a clown. The actor happened to be Jimmy Stewart, whom Reese knew only as the man nice enough to have a catch with him during lunch breaks. "I thought he was a great guy with a good arm," Reese recalled.