Take the most gentle, stuttering boy-next-door actor in Hollywood history and put him in the cockpit of a B-24 bomber over Nazi Germany, not for publicity but as a commanding officer leading combat missions. James Stewart later rose to brigadier general, the highest-ranking actor in American military history. This episode traces the gap between the folksy persona and the private man, from a Pennsylvania hardware store to an Oscar, a war, and a business deal that upended the studio system.

The conversation covers an accordion accepted as payment at his father’s store, a Princeton thesis designing an airport terminal, rooming with Henry Fonda in New York, and an MGM contract for a lanky actor no one knew how to use. It follows the hesitant delivery that made audiences trust him in Frank Capra’s films, the Oscar displayed in the hardware store window, his fight to get into combat rather than public relations, the toll of writing to the mothers of dead crewmen, the darkness he poured into It’s a Wonderful Life, his unsettling turn in Vertigo, and the Winchester ’73 profit-sharing deal that eroded studio power.

• Why unpressurized B-24 missions at 40 below zero were far from a publicity stunt
• The Distinguished Flying Cross, the Croix de Guerre and a rise from private to colonel in four years
• A 50-year friendship with the liberal Henry Fonda built on building model airplanes in silence
• The private grief of losing his son Ronald in Vietnam in 1969
• His testimony before Congress against colorizing classic films