But aren’t we forgetting James Stewart? He certainly had a far greater emotional range than any of the competition. To name only the films that seem to me to contain his most innovative work, Stewart convincingly played a sly voyeur in Rear Window (1954), a seething necrophiliac in Vertigo (1958), a worldly circus clown in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), tenacious, driven cowboys in Bend of the River (1952), The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955). He also successfully played a Mitteleuropean clerk in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a middle-class banker driven to the edge of suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a swozzled fantasist in Harvey (1950), a grizzled old pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), a crafty small-town lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), a cynical reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and an idealistic Congressman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

Even Grant partisans will have to admit that these are the credits of an actor without fear, willing to try nearly anything. Stewart’s credits make the man who was born Archie Leach look pathologically cautious by comparison. And what’s more, Stewart was laboring manfully beneath a burden unusual for a movie star: After he outgrew his boyishly attractive pre–World War II gawkiness, he wasn’t sexy at all.

No, Jimmy Stewart deserves better than he’s gotten. And after Marc Eliot’s dismal biography, he still does.

The problem with writing about Stewart is that he was a kind, pleasant man—he wasn’t just liked around Hollywood, he was loved. He married once, raised a family, served his country nobly in World War II, grew increasingly conservative and actually lived his values. By modern biographical standards, he’s a dull subject. Not that there aren’t intimations of terrible stress under the surface; he flew several bombing missions during World War II and finally had something of a nervous breakdown, an experience that may have informed his increasingly ragged and vulnerable George Bailey in Frank Capra’s last great film.

Marc Eliot has produced a bewilderingly bad book, beginning with the false intimacy of its title. His comically clause-happy writing teeters on the edge of incoherence: “Almost from the day they took over the place, there were parties practically every night, where the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood, which meant in the country, which meant in the world, came to play and in most instances, to stay, at least until the next day.”

His judgments are often ridiculous, as in this, about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): “The art of this film, then, lay in its literal vision of God, while its mise-en-scène is a description of deception, Hollywood style, the truth defined as not what actually happens, but as how the camera sees it from where the director has placed it.”

When Mr. Eliot isn’t slaughtering the English language or flaunting his vulgarity (Gary Cooper, he writes, “talked softly and carried a big dick”), he’s mangling film history: Mack Sennett’s name was not “Max”; producer Joe Pasternak worked at Universal, not Paramount, when he made Destry Rides Again (1939); Joseph Schenck came over with Darryl Zanuck from Twentieth Century Pictures to run Fox, and was not the presiding eminence at Fox before the merger; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was neither “rarely seen” nor “a box-office dud”—it went into profits within a couple of years of its release, as did practically every John Wayne movie (ditto for James Stewart).

Finally, anyone who could sum up Lubitsch’s exquisite The Shop Around the Corner, one of the few nearly perfect movies in Hollywood history—a romantic comedy that dares to put its characters on the edge of emotional obliteration—as “unexceptional” deserves to have his keyboard impounded. If that doesn’t stop him, he should, like Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson, have his fingers broken.

You might expect a style this barbarous in a book about sports—as Hunter Thompson observed, sportswriters as a breed generally don’t have enough sense to empty warm piss out of their boots. But no sportswriter who manifested such transcendent ignorance of his subject would get a book contract.

There is no—repeat, no—excuse for a book this badly written, this reportorially suspect. Does no one edit anymore? Does no one care?

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer.

But aren’t we forgetting James Stewart? He certainly had a far greater emotional range than any of the competition. To name only the films that seem to me to contain his most innovative work, Stewart convincingly played a sly voyeur in Rear Window (1954), a seething necrophiliac in Vertigo (1958), a worldly circus clown in The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), tenacious, driven cowboys in Bend of the River (1952), The Far Country (1954) and The Man from Laramie (1955). He also successfully played a Mitteleuropean clerk in The Shop Around the Corner (1940), a middle-class banker driven to the edge of suicide in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), a swozzled fantasist in Harvey (1950), a grizzled old pilot in The Flight of the Phoenix (1965), a crafty small-town lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder (1959), a cynical reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and an idealistic Congressman in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939).

Even Grant partisans will have to admit that these are the credits of an actor without fear, willing to try nearly anything. Stewart’s credits make the man who was born Archie Leach look pathologically cautious by comparison. And what’s more, Stewart was laboring manfully beneath a burden unusual for a movie star: After he outgrew his boyishly attractive pre–World War II gawkiness, he wasn’t sexy at all.

No, Jimmy Stewart deserves better than he’s gotten. And after Marc Eliot’s dismal biography, he still does.

The problem with writing about Stewart is that he was a kind, pleasant man—he wasn’t just liked around Hollywood, he was loved. He married once, raised a family, served his country nobly in World War II, grew increasingly conservative and actually lived his values. By modern biographical standards, he’s a dull subject. Not that there aren’t intimations of terrible stress under the surface; he flew several bombing missions during World War II and finally had something of a nervous breakdown, an experience that may have informed his increasingly ragged and vulnerable George Bailey in Frank Capra’s last great film.

Marc Eliot has produced a bewilderingly bad book, beginning with the false intimacy of its title. His comically clause-happy writing teeters on the edge of incoherence: “Almost from the day they took over the place, there were parties practically every night, where the most beautiful starlets in Hollywood, which meant in the country, which meant in the world, came to play and in most instances, to stay, at least until the next day.”

His judgments are often ridiculous, as in this, about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962): “The art of this film, then, lay in its literal vision of God, while its mise-en-scène is a description of deception, Hollywood style, the truth defined as not what actually happens, but as how the camera sees it from where the director has placed it.”

When Mr. Eliot isn’t slaughtering the English language or flaunting his vulgarity (Gary Cooper, he writes, “talked softly and carried a big dick”), he’s mangling film history: Mack Sennett’s name was not “Max”; producer Joe Pasternak worked at Universal, not Paramount, when he made Destry Rides Again (1939); Joseph Schenck came over with Darryl Zanuck from Twentieth Century Pictures to run Fox, and was not the presiding eminence at Fox before the merger; The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance was neither “rarely seen” nor “a box-office dud”—it went into profits within a couple of years of its release, as did practically every John Wayne movie (ditto for James Stewart).

Finally, anyone who could sum up Lubitsch’s exquisite The Shop Around the Corner, one of the few nearly perfect movies in Hollywood history—a romantic comedy that dares to put its characters on the edge of emotional obliteration—as “unexceptional” deserves to have his keyboard impounded. If that doesn’t stop him, he should, like Paul Newman’s “Fast Eddie” Felson, have his fingers broken.

You might expect a style this barbarous in a book about sports—as Hunter Thompson observed, sportswriters as a breed generally don’t have enough sense to empty warm piss out of their boots. But no sportswriter who manifested such transcendent ignorance of his subject would get a book contract.

There is no—repeat, no—excuse for a book this badly written, this reportorially suspect. Does no one edit anymore? Does no one care?

Scott Eyman reviews books regularly for The Observer.

Thirty-odd years ago, it would have been, I was summoned to the office of Frederick L. Ehrman, chief executive of Lehman Brothers, the firm of which I was then a partner, and informed that I had been accused by Darryl F. Zanuck, C.E.O. of 20th Century Fox (of whose board of directors I had been a member for a couple of years), of conspiring with David Merrick to take over the company. According to Ehrman, Zanuck had informed Lehman Brothers that unless I resigned from the board and Lehman substituted another partner, Zanuck would take his investment-banking business elsewhere.

I replied that the accusation was patently false and a straw man: My real crime, in Zanuck's eyes, had been to question the propriety, at a recent board meeting, of awarding him a 40 percent raise just as the company was about to announce the largest loss in its history. Zanuck had been furious at the time and had clearly not forgiven me.

My argument cut no mustard; I was shortly gone from 20th's board and Ehrman himself took my place. Sic semper virtutis.

Now fast-forward three decades, to November 2003, to the opening scene of James B. Stewart's engrossing if ultimately exhausting DisneyWar, which will surely be the most talked-about book of the season among those people-many of whom are numbered among the readership of this paper-for whom a masthead change at Condé Nast is of more poignant human import and graver cosmic significance than, say, a genocide in subequatorial Africa. (Who knows? They may be right.)

Anyway, in the scene as painted by Mr. Stewart, Roy E. Disney, Walt's nephew, a 50-year veteran and important stockholder, upholder of the company's great tradition of animation and a longtime Disney director, arrives at a Pasadena restaurant for a meeting with another member of the board. Roy Disney is apprehensive and troubled. He thinks the company is being run into the ground by its longtime C.E.O., Michael Eisner; he has spoken up against Mr. Eisner's compensation at a time when the company is doing badly; and he's afraid Mr. Eisner is moving to stifle dissent.

His fears prove well grounded. He is advised by his fellow director, a man whose wife is employed by Disney at a salary of over $1 million a year, that it has been "concluded that you shouldn't run for reelection."

"Roy … was speechless," Mr. Stewart writes. "He felt like a knife had been stuck into his heart …. It wasn't just that he was still one of the company's largest shareholders. He had given fifty years of his life to Disney. He was the only direct link to Walt on the board."

When I read that and recalled my own Hollywood experiences, I thought-with no satisfaction at all-"Well, some things never change." And then I thought of the veteran screenwriter William Goldman's famous dictum, "In Hollywood, no one knows anything," and reflected that Mr. Goldman may be right as far as making movies is concerned, but when it comes to fucking each other over, the people out there wrote the book. And that book is this book.

Here, I suppose, I should declare an interest or two. I consider Jim Stewart a friend, although that friendship has consisted of perhaps a dozen entirely happenstantial encounters in the 14 years since we first met following my (favorable) review of Den of Thieves (1991) on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. I admire him as a reporter and a writer, and I value our cordial acquaintanceship.

I also have certain feelings about Disney. Not about its "iconic" place in American popular culture, the sort of pap from which DisneyWar is mercifully and blessedly free. (Mr. Stewart's book is about the mismanagement of a company, not the desecration of a holy place, although Roy Disney might say it's also the latter.) No, I think of Disney because it fell out that in the late 60's and early 70's, I also worked on their investment-banking business, on which we were "joint account" with Kidder Peabody, in close but subordinate harness with the late Joe Rosenberg, Lehman's L.A. partner-who, back in the 1930's, when he was at the Bank of America, loaned Walt and Roy O. Disney (Roy E.'s father) the money to make Snow White. We went way back with the Disneys, in other words, and it is hard to read much of what Jim Stewart has written without a certain pang.

I have neither the inclination and the space to regurgitate the "plot" of DisneyWar or to synthesize or synopsize the material. The book has been excerpted in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, and been reviewed and written about elsewhere. Because I was reading it for review, I plowed straight through, but had I bought it for myself (and I surely would have, and not regretted a penny of the investment!), I would have done more dipping and skipping. It's an intense, dense piece of work. No one would wish it longer. Indeed, there were times-after encountering yet another of Michael Eisner's pathological, ultimately self-destructive changes of attitude-when I was reminded of one of those cute children's sayings of the kind compiled by Art Linkletter, a third-grade book report that went, "This book tells me more about penguins than I care to know."

And yet I do not think Mr. Stewart could have done otherwise. This is one of those stories that requires that all of it be told if any of it is to be understood. It cumulates: meeting by meeting, small treachery upon small treachery, memo by memo.

At the center, of course, is Michael Eisner, who came to Disney as a 42-year-old wunderkind, although such wunderkinder frequently make their bones as No. 2 to a born No. 1 (in Mr. Eisner's case, Barry Diller) and end up confronting their own limitations, which is what may have happened here.

After more than 500 pages, I'm not sure what to make of Mr. Eisner as Mr. Stewart presents him. Is he nuts? Does he suffer from A.D.D.? What is the compulsion that, time and again, causes him to raise someone up and then, the minute that person is installed on a rickety stool next to the Eisner's throne, to start to kick the legs out? In his epilogue, Mr. Stewart compares Mr. Eisner to those Shakespearean monarchs "whose power is such that [they] bend the truth itself to suit [their] will," and he cites as Mr. Eisner's overriding negative trait "his dishonesty."

Well, I don't know. Something compulsive is at work here, something much fiercer than mere dishonesty, a kind of paranoia. As I read, there came to the tip of my tongue the name of someone to whom Mr. Eisner's pattern of treacherous, dissimulating behavior seemed authentically similar, but it was a while before I got who I was trying to think of: Stalin. No one was ever dragged out of the "Team Disney" building and summarily executed on Donald Duck Drive on the tyrant's orders, but in the Hollywood scheme of things they might as well have been; and on page after page, the mood of Mr. Eisner's minions as they whistle their way to work is just what you'd find on a gray morning at the Lubyanka. Oddly, unless I missed something (and I went back to the index and double-checked), Mr. Eisner at no time seems to have sought or obtained either therapy or medication. To have behaved this way this long without calling for the Prozac either testifies eloquently to strength of character or to outright lunacy.

In this area, as in others, Mr. Stewart is both limited and advantaged by his sources. People were reluctant to talk for the record, so we can only guess what Michael Ovitz told Mr. Stewart, or didn't; or Sid Bass, or Warren Buffett-who ended up with a bundle of Disney stock when Mr. Eisner bought Cap Cities, and presumably sold it forthwith. On the other hand, Mr. Stewart had access to all the court papers filed in the two lawsuits in which two of Mr. Eisner's "best friends," Mr. Ovitz and Jeffrey Katzenberg, were handed, properly (according to their contracts), some $420 million of the Disney stockholders' money- and with his lawyer's training, Mr. Stewart knows what to make of the rich evidence presented in discovery. Including Mr. Eisner's own literary testament: The man seems like a kind of pre-blogger, in that he shares present-day bloggers' vain absorption with their every utterance, and can't help writing it all down in a way that's clearly intended to show off as well as to inform.

DisneyWar is a plum pudding of a book: It repays the probing or roving finger with many a choice sweetmeat. Obviously, the gossip will attract many readers. I would think a close reading essential if one is to hold one's own at the dinner table of, oh, a Stephen Schwarzman, himself the apparently willing recipient of a reportorial whoopee cushion a couple of months or so ago in The Times. Certainly everyone in Hollywood will devour it-or already has. Yes, it might have been more aggressively line- and copy-edited (on page 508, I think "dispersed" was meant, not "disbursed"). Just take it more slowly than I was able to, and it will repay this more measured pacing a dozen times over. It's one of those books that needs (and deserves) to be read as it is written.

In a larger context, it seems to me that DisneyWar completes a virtual trilogy-the other volumes being Bryan Burrough and John Helyar's Barbarians at the Gate (1990) and Mr. Stewart's own Den of Thieves. Together, they vividly capture the whole arc of what, to my thinking, has emerged as the great business/finance story of the mega-cycle that began in August 1982, when the stock market broke out. It's the story of the evolving abuse of "insiderness" in the Greenspan era of (virtually) free money. If there's to be a fourth volume, I dare say it will feature real heads on real pikes. But for the nonce, Michael Eisner's grinning face impaled on James B. Stewart's elegant prose and exhaustive research will do just fine.

Michael M. Thomas writes The Midas Watch for The Observer.

Among the most entertaining of non-"auteur" star vehicles-made at a time when stars often were not only good actors but unique personalities as well-is the first pairing of America's innocent James Stewart (as he was always billed in pictures, never Jimmy) and Europe's worldly Marlene Dietrich, out in the Wild West of 1939's Destry Rides Again [Tuesday, Feb. 24, AMC, 54, 11 P.M.]. The picture is a perfect example of what made the old studio star system in its heyday work so well: Both stars' parts are expertly styled for what these actors can do best and, because their innate personas have such appeal and scope, the characters achieve an added dimension of mythic size that could never be attained with only good actors. It was Stewart's first of about two dozen westerns-only John Wayne rivaled him for hit cowboy pictures throughout the early 50's and early 60's (Wayne's first hit western, John Ford's Stagecoach, was also released in 1939)-and set a particular image of him that he and others did variations on for the rest of his career: the book-reading, nonviolent Eastern dude in the West who must learn to use a gun when necessary. Western master Ford cast Stewart in exactly that same role 23 years later for what would turn out to be Stewart's, Ford's and Wayne's last great western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Also released in 1939 was Stewart's most defining nonwestern role, in Frank Capra's Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. For Dietrich, on the other hand, Destry was a huge change of image-done with that clearly in mind: Marlene, after several successes with director-discoverer-mentor-lover Josef von Sternberg in the early 30's, had toward the end of the decade become "box-office poison" to exhibitors, the somewhat distant pedestal Sternberg had put her on having lost its allure with Depression audiences. Destry ripped her right off any pedestal and, interestingly, it was Sternberg himself who convinced her to take the role of a tough, brawling saloon chanteuse, a woman of easy virtue. The extended cat fight between her and Una Merkel is justly famous, and the novelty song she sings, "See What the Boys in the Back Room Will Have," became a popular Dietrich standard throughout the rest of her career. I saw her sing it marvelously at a concert in Denver 33 years later. Directed by veteran Hollywood hack George Marshall, the film is unadorned, straightforward, unpretentiously made and surely Marshall's best movie of about 400 he did. Marlene and Jimmy had a blazing affair during the shooting, and the electricity is noticeable. Dietrich told me that during one love scene, Stewart's "interest" became so "apparent" that director Marshall called an early lunch, at the same time wagging his index finger reproachfully at the actor, "Jimmy …"

The Hitchcock Watch: Stewart's lifelong best friend, Henry Fonda, did one stark, strange suspense film with the Master, an especially personal work to Hitchcock, yet among his least known and least popular, 1957's true story The Wrong Man [Tuesday, Feb. 24, AMC, 54, 8 P.M.]. When Hitchcock was 5, his father had a police friend put the child in a prison cell for five minutes to teach him "what happens to bad little boys"; this resulted in a thoroughgoing terror of police, and in this picture an innocent man goes to jail, which drives the wife mad. Done in a kind of hypnotic, quasi-documentary fashion, the film is brilliantly played by Fonda and Vera Miles, and reveals the director in one of his darkest moods. From 1938 comes Hitchcock's final English success, relying on a lot of British humor, The Lady Vanishes [Saturday, Feb. 21, CUNY, 75, 9 P.M.]. Although Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood and Dame May Whitty are absolutely splendid, the script dates: As Hitch himself used to say, negating the entire message-in-code plot, "Why didn't they just send a carrier pigeon?" But as an example of the oddball innocence of early Hitchcock, it's charming.

Wednesday, Feb. 18

Olympic Winter Games. Tonight: Ladies' figure skating, short program. NYTV correspondent Nick Paumgarten filed this report from his couch:

Sadly, there are only a few more days left to watch figure skating practices in prime-time. No more Verne Lundquist and Scott Hamilton, the CBS commentators in the brown sweaters, killing time in the skim-milk light of a near-empty rink, while flu-ridden CBS staff members keep repeating the network-mantra that Americans tune into the Olympics for stories, not sports. Now you have to settle for Verne and Scott in tuxedos getting worked up over American medal contenders Michelle Kwan, Tara Lipinski and Nicole Bobek in the real competition.…

In fact, at this point, the Olympics may make for compelling TV. The ice dancers will be swapping partners back at the hotel, the female hockey players will be loading up on the sake and looking for a scrap in the Olympic Village.…

But if the coverage is still pissing you off, or if you have questions (i.e., is Scott Hamilton "best friends" with every skater whose moves he describes?), just put in a call to Leslie Anne Wade, the CBS Sports Olympic spokesman. Ms. Wade is the Mike McCurry of the Nagano Olympics. She calms all the disgruntled sports TV columnists who keep writing about how dull host Jim Nantz is and why they delayed the women's Super G, etc.…

NYTV called her in Nagano to complain about Verne and Scott's brown sweaters, but wound up taking a shine to Ms. Wade's smoky voice. "Did you know the voice was gonna sound like this?" she said. "It's not from smoking or talking too much. I've sounded like this since I was a kid."…

Then Ms. Wade started putting the hurt on me a little bit: "So what are you gonna write about, how beleaguered I am or something?" she said. It was 8:20 A.M., Nagano time. "Well, I'm not beleaguered." But is she having fun? "Truthfully? I'd rather be in New York." But then she'd have to watch the Games on TV. [WCBS, 2, 8 P.M.]

Saturday, Feb. 21

Look, just because ABC avoids airing Nothing Sacred during a rating sweeps period (tonight, you get Harrison Ford in the 1994 semi-blockbuster Clear and Present Danger ) doesn't mean that someone in the executive offices doesn't like the show. Even though the show is not in the top 40 (actually, it usually finishes around 118th place), ABC has renewed the priest drama and will begin showing it at 9 P.M. on Saturdays when it relaunches on March 7 (that is, a week after sweeps is up).…

"It's very baffling to me how these decisions get made," said Kevin Anderson, the 38-year-old star of the show from his trailer on the set in Canoga Park, Calif. "So a couple of months ago, I decided to stop trying to figure it out and just enjoy myself. The feedback we get is 99 percent positive, including priests and nuns and spiritual people. It's very inspiring to feel that people who actually live that life kind of dig it. Bill Kane, who created the show, was saying that it's kind of a cathartic experience for people who are in these religious communities to see their lives revealed in a kind of artistic way, and that they appreciate the show's attempt to be authentic and honest.…

"So far it has stirred up a debate, and I think that's great and that as an actor that's what you want to do-make people talk about a certain idea. It has as much effect on people's lives as watching the mindless crap that you see all over the TV. You know, bathroom humor. I'm not a sociologist, but I would think it would have a dulling effect on someone if they watched it constantly."…

Mr. Anderson has appeared in a few movies ( Hoffa, Sleeping With the Enemy ), but he likes the grind of TV acting: "One of the pros is you never have time to get neurotic about what you're doing, particularly me, because I'm in, like, every scene. There's kind of an un-neurotic thing that's very nice. You have so little time you're just going with your instincts, and that can be kind of fun. One of the negatives is you can't be as thorough. You can't rehearse, and a lot of times you're basically remembering your lines and hitting your mark. It's relentless. I miss not being able to go back to my trailer after lunch and take an hour nap, but actors are such babies. I would say I'm getting more good out of this than bad, because you're just acting 12 to 15 hours a day, just like nonstop."…

What do you watch on TV? "I like to watch David Letterman, and I like that George-is it George?-or Charlie Rose. I shamefully admit that when I'm not working, I get a sort of sadistic pleasure out of watching those cheap shows like Hard Copy ."…

Michael Suman, author of a collection of essays, Religion and Prime-Time Television , thinks Nothing Sacred deals with religion better than any other show, but that basically religion has little place on TV: "TV isn't the best medium for religion because spiritual and transcendental issues aren't that entertaining. Whenever it gets into the public realm, one religion tries to cram its way of looking at religion down each other's throats. A lot of the criticism today is about the lack of religion on TV or when it's on, it's portrayed as negative; but it's all coming from the religious right, who really don't want to see religion in all its different realms but only their own view. They don't want to see an accurate reflection of religion in American life, especially if it's far removed from the Protestant conservative vision of the world. TV is a business. It's about entertainment, it's about removing people from the serious issues of life. It doesn't deal well with the subtleties, complexities and transcendental issues involved. I think Nothing Sacred is a good show, and one of the best examples of religion on television that I've seen because there's a bit of ambiguity-which is why it's doing so poorly in the ratings. It's too good of a show to be successful on network TV." [WABC, 7, 8 P.M.]