Jimmy Stewart will forever be known as the star of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, but his most iconic role unfolded far away from Hollywood, without a camera in sight.
On a brutal winter flight in 1944, while flying over the German countryside, Stewart’s B-24 Liberator bomber was hit by a bursting anti-aircraft shell, leaving a gaping hole beneath the pilots’ feet. Stewart was able to land the plane, but as it touched down, it cracked in half.
“Somebody sure could get hurt in one of these damned things,” Stewart is said to have wryly told the crew.
The upcoming film Jimmy, set to premiere in November, aims to showcase both sides of the beloved actor’s life and work – while also paying fitting homage to the bomber he flew.
In an interview with Sandboxx News in September, film director Aaron Burns said the B-24 that appears in the film was a massive reconstructed cockpit built in Ireland, merged with a real British Percival P.66 Pembroke light military transport aircraft that had been designated for scrapping.
“We captured that experience of Jimmy getting hit by that shell,” Burns said. “That’s the last mission that we show, and the pain and damage and sacrifice that it took to keep getting up and going again and again.”
But while the crew had to build a Frankenstein aircraft to accommodate filming needs, one of the few real and still-flyable B-24s in existence played a key inspirational role.
The film’s writer, Justin Strawhand, had been searching for a place to write where he could feel close to Stewart and understand him better. He connected with the headquarters of the Commemorative Air Force in Dallas and the staff there arranged for him to sit under the aircraft while writing the script “and just come in every day to feel the airplane,” Burns told Sandboxx News.
That experience birthed another tribute to service that made it into the film: a scene in which more than 30 members of the real Air Force Band, clad in authentic 1940s-era uniforms, make an ensemble appearance as the Glenn Miller Orchestra.
“To have them as real active-duty military who were buying into what we’re doing was pretty fun,” Burns said.
Beyond access to military inspirations, Jimmy is guided by Stewart’s daughter, Kelly Stewart-Harcourt, who played an advisory role in the project. Stewart-Harcourt told Sandboxx News that her father had “recoiled” at the thought of having a film made about him, feeling it was a self-congratulatory exercise. But when she first connected with Burns around 2023, she felt that this was a different kind of project.
“When the idea of this film came up, I initially thought, ‘this is doing exactly what Dad didn’t want to do, just combine his military service with Hollywood,'” she said. “Then I read [a script treatment] and thought … this is a story that hasn’t been told. Maybe there’s something here.”
Burns said his inspiration for the project came from learning about Stewart’s private struggle with post-traumatic stress following his service in the Air Force and return to Hollywood. (Evidence of that struggle and the emotion Stewart was processing informs his work on It’s a Wonderful Life, his first film after the war.)
Burns noted that Stewart fought to be granted a real role in combat rather than simply a figurehead or promotional position, and that his work carrying out daylight precision bombing operations – at least 20 different missions – cleared the way for the Normandy invasion and the ultimate defeat of the Nazi regime.
And, he said, the war left an indelible mark on him.
“He’s the one who’s writing letters home to the families of his boys who were killed. So he comes home deeply broken, and the first film he makes when he gets back is It’s a Wonderful Life and and he channels all of his pain into that film, but also finds the beginning of healing through the making of that, and then gives us the gift of not only having served us as in the military, but … of the stories that he told,” Burns told Sandboxx News.
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“Eighty years on, we’re still beneficiaries of both of those gifts that he left us. So, I was just floored that this story was true and never had been told before,” he added.
The role of Stewart is played by KJ Apa, a New Zealand native who has starred in teen dramas including Riverdale. Burns and Stewart-Harcourt said that Apa, was able to find Stewart’s voice in his own way and avoid turning the portrayal of the actor’s distinctive accent and intonations into a caricature.
Apa “was building from scratch,” Burns said. “He had the respect for who Jimmy is and what he did.”
At the heart of her father’s story, Stewart-Harcourt said, is a simple message: “It is the right thing to spend your life to try and be as good a person as you can be,” she said. “And that’s what Dad did.”
“Jimmy,” which also stars Rob Riggle, Jason Alexander, Sarah Drew, and Max Casella, will open in theaters November 6.
Feature Image: A B-24 Liberator bomber shown during a mission in the movie Jimmy. (Burns & Co)
