Tagged: John “Chip” Hardesty
Jimmy Stewart’s Christmas Cardigan in The FBI Story
James Stewart in The FBI Story (1959)
Vitals
James Stewart as John “Chip” Hardesty, earnest FBI agent
Chicago, Christmas 1933
Film: The FBI Story
Release Date: October 1959
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Costume Designer: Adele Palmer
Background
While Jimmy Stewart’s cinematic Christmas creds are primarily as the troubled protagonist of It’s a Wonderful Life, more than a decade later we’re treated to a brief holiday sequence in The FBI Story.
Essentially a feature-length dramatization propagating the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s role in quelling all American lawlessness across the first half of the 20th century, the once-obscure The FBI Story has been the subject of some renewed interest as it had been the first major production to depict the Osage murders of the 1920s that were recently at the center of Martin Scorsese’s epic Killers of the Flower Moon.
Jimmy Stewart’s Undercover Denim Jacket in The FBI Story
James Stewart as agent John “Chip” Hardesty in The FBI Story (1959)
Vitals
James Stewart as John “Chip” Hardesty, earnest FBI agent
Oklahoma, June 1930
Film: The FBI Story
Release Date: October 1959
Director: Mervyn LeRoy
Costume Designer: Adele Palmer
Background
One of the greatest stars of the 20th century, James Stewart—known to friends and fans as “Jimmy”—was born on this day in 1908 in Indiana, Pennsylvania, just about an hour west of Pittsburgh.
Among the less celebrated titles in the actor’s extensive filmography is The FBI Story, a J. Edgar Hoover-influenced epic exploring the early successes of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Jimmy plays our fictional all-American agent John “Chip” Hardesty, whose Forrest Gump-like decades-long career with the Bureau includes a role in nearly every major investigation from tracking down the bank-robbing “Public Enemies” of the Depression and World War II spies to the bombing of United Flight 629 in 1955.
An interesting chapter of The FBI Story sends Chip to Oklahoma in the summer of 1930 to investigate the “Reign of Terror” in Osage County, Oklahoma, represented on screen as the obsoletely named “Wade County”. These murders of dozens of Osage Native Americans throughout the ’20s were recently explored by David Grann in his fascinating book, Killers of the Flower Moon, which provided the basis for a Martin Scorsese film of the same name currently in production starring Jesse Plemons, Robert De Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio. Continue reading