The FBI Story

Not a very well known movie, but one that I found on the shelf at the library. And I'm a sucker for old movies.

The FBI Story stars Jimmy Stewart as Michael "Chip" Hardesty who joins the FBI just prior to J. Edgar Hoover's reign. The movie then unfolds through his years in the FBI and how it affects his family. His wife Lucy, played by Vera Miles, is torn with his career and her fear of losing him and the constant hopping from one town to another and her desire for a stable happy family.

Stewart is giving a lecture to a new class of recruits and tells his story, which is a narrative of his life. He has run-ins with the Chicago mafia, Nazi's in South America, oil busters in Oklahoma, and bank fraud.

In one interesting scene, indicative of the time, he is chasing the communists. These communists were being un-American, trying to unionize workers to help increase living standards and wages and stand up against the exploitative big businesses. In the 1950's, this was a communist activity. Today, we call this collective bargaining. So it appears that even Jimmy Stewart was anti-working man back in the day.

The movie is a bit long at 2 1/2 hours, but for the time, many movies were that long. (think Lawrence of Arabia and Ben-Hur.) The movie is not rated because it's older than the MPAA and their stupid little rating system, but I would suspect that it would get a PG or PG-13 rating. Jimmy Stewart was caught saying, "Shucks", "Gosh", and the ever explicit "Darn" several times. And there is some gun violence, but no blood, but the victims grasping themselves as they are shot and falling to the ground could be disturbing to some mild-mannered church ladies.

I give this movie 4 stars, because despite the things that I mentioned, it does tell a good story and the story for the most part is accurate. And it's classic Jimmy Stewart. I don't think movie critics are allowed to give Jimmy Stewart movies a rating of less than 4 stars.