{"id":189681,"date":"2025-10-10T04:53:10","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T04:53:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/189681\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T04:53:10","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T04:53:10","slug":"james-stewart-hated-a-movie-so-much-he-lobbied-against-it-to-the-government","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/189681\/","title":{"rendered":"James Stewart hated a movie so much he lobbied against it to the government"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"James<\/p>\n

(Credits: Far Out \/ Wikimedia Commons)<\/p>\n

Fri 10 October 2025 0:30, UK <\/p>\n

James Stewart <\/a>racked up enough impressive acting credits in his tenure as a star that you\u2019d be lucky to have just one of them in your filmography. The actor certainly knew how to pick a good role, which included the iconic Christmas classic It\u2019s A Wonderful Life. <\/p>\n

While he featured in many Alfred Hitchcock films<\/a> and appeared alongside John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, it\u2019s Frank Capra\u2019s charming festive tale that has perhaps most familiarised people with the star, whose portrayal of George Bailey remains simply iconic. Yet, there was a time when Stewart rallied against the film, so much so he took it up with Congress. <\/p>\n

Well, let me explain. The thing is, Stewart was immensely proud of the film, which debuted in 1946 and eventually became his most beloved project he\u2019d ever been a part of. So, when a new trend began to emerge in the 1980s, which saw studios taking old films and colourising them, he was furious. Stewart couldn\u2019t see why It\u2019s A Wonderful Life <\/a>should be taken out of black-and-white and artificially coloured for the sake of modern audiences who might not be as familiar with monochromatic movies.<\/p>\n

He had a fair point. If a film was originally made in black and white, it should be left that way. Tampering with the look of a movie \u2013 especially when the director\u2019s no longer around to weigh in \u2013 goes completely against their artistic vision. And let\u2019s be honest, colourised films rarely look quite right. You can tell it\u2019s not true to what the actors were wearing or what the sets actually looked like. So whose vision is it, really?<\/p>\n

Stewart was among various actors and filmmakers who rallied against this colourisation trend, including Ginger Rogers and John Huston. Various films were subject to this awful cinematic trend and their makers weren\u2019t happy about it, and for Stewart, this tampering with It\u2019s A Wonderful Life was a crime he simply couldn\u2019t let slide. <\/p>\n

Stewart didn\u2019t arrive in person to testify, but he wrote a letter which Rogers read out, not holding back on his distaste for movies being bastardised like this. He compared the film to \u201ca bath of Easter egg dye\u201d (via\u00a0The New York Times), adding, \u201cGloria Graham played a character named Violet, so someone thought it would be cute to have all her costumes in violet. That is the kind of obvious visual pun that Frank Capra never would have considered.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Interestingly, Capra was initially intrigued by the colourisation process, and he even met with a company that showed him some scenes of his movie with added colour, subsequently giving his written permission to have the film edited. He soon changed his mind, though, when it became clear that he had no control over how the film would look. <\/p>\n

Capra didn\u2019t want It\u2019s A Wonderful Life to end up looking like a huge colourful mess, but it was too late. Like Stewart, he was disgusted by the tainting of his film, which certainly didn\u2019t need messing with at all.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"(Credits: Far Out \/ Wikimedia Commons) Fri 10 October 2025 0:30, UK James Stewart racked up enough impressive…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":189682,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[96,83346,83347,2839,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-189681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-frank-capra","10":"tag-james-stewart","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=189681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/189681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/189682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=189681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=189681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=189681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}