In 1959’s The FBI Story, veteran FBI agent Chip Hardesty (James Stewart) delivers a lecture to a group of new FBI recruits.  He tells them the story of both the FBI and his time as a member of the agency.  Somewhat implausibly, it turns out that Chip was involved with nearly every major FBI operation, as we discover while watching this flashback-filled, episodic film.

Battling the Ku Klux Klan in the Deep South?  Chip was there.

Investigating the Oklahoma Indian murders?  Chip was not only there but he was also the one who solved them through handwriting analysis!  (Decades later, the crimes and the investigation would serve as the basis of Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon.)

During the public enemy era, Chip was there.  He was there when Baby Face Nelson killed several unarmed FBI agents, including Chip’s best friend (Murray Hamilton).  He was there when John Dillinger was gunned down in Chicago.  He was there when my distant ancestor “Pretty Boy” Floyd was killed in Ohio.  He wasn’t there when J. Edgar Hoover personally arrested Alvin Karpis or when “Machine Gun” Kelly said, “Don’t shoot, G-Man!” but Chip still makes sure to tell the recruits about it.  He also talks about the gunfight that killed Ma Barker, presented her as being a machine gun-toting madwoman.

Chip investigates subversives during World War II and helped to round up Americans of German and Japanese descent during the internment era.  (Chip insists that they weren’t rounded up because of their ancestry but because the FBI had gotten reports that they might be disloyal.)   When the war wraps up, Chip turns his attention to fighting the international communist conspiracy and good for him.  (Communism sucks!)

Strangely enough, it appears that Chip also tells the recruits a good deal about his personal life because we certainly do see a lot of it.  Chip marries a librarian named Lucy (Vera Miles), who struggles with the demands of being an FBI agent’s wife but who ultimately accepts that Chip has to do his duty.  Sometimes, Lucy wants Chip to quit and sometimes, Chip is tempted to get out.  But they always remember that Chip and the FBI have a job to do.  They raise a family.  They lose a son at Iwo Jima.  Their faith in God and country remains undiminished.

The FBI Story was made with the full cooperation of the FBI, with J. Edgar Hoover personally approving the script and making suggestions.  Hoover even appeared as himself in the film, accepting a report about an airplane bombing with a grim look on his face.  At one point, Chip is prepared to quit the FBI until he hears a speech from Hoover and he’s so inspired that he keeps his resignation letter tucked away in his suit pocket.  Since this film came out in 1959, there’s no details of the FBI tapping the phones of Martin Luther King or Hoover collecting dirt on his political opponents.  Instead, The FBI Story is pure propaganda, your reminder that law enforcement never makes mistakes and civil liberties can be always be sacrificed for the greater good.

It’s simplistic propaganda and it’s overlong and it promotes a few falsehoods as facts.  (Despite what the film says, Pretty Boy Floyd had nothing to do with the Kansas City Massacre and most historians agree that Ma Barker was not the criminal mastermind that Hoover made her out to be after she was caught in the crossfire between her sons and law enforcement.)  The film rather casually dismisses the concern over the World War II internments of American citizens.  To me, something like that is a big deal but the film insists to us that it was all blown out of proportion.  That’s the one moment when not even the film itself seems to be totally sold on what it’s selling.

Fortunately, the film stars the ever-reliable James Stewart, who brings his natural mix of charm and gravity to the role of Chip Hardesty.  Stewart was a bit too old to play Chip as a bumbling young man in the early part of the film but, as the character grows up, so does Stewart’s performance.  The scene where he and Vera Miles learn that his son has been killed in combat feels like it’s from a different and far better movie.  I guess my point here is that James Stewart was one of those actors who could make even questionable material watchable and that’s certainly what he does with The FBI Story.  The FBI, at a time when Hoover was aging and the excesses of the McCarthy era had left many Americans uneasy about the government, decides to borrow James Stewart’s credibility to boost their own.  You may not like the FBI but how can you not love Jimmy Stewart?

The FBI Story came out the same year as one of Stewart’s best films, Anatomy of a Murder, a film that was a complicated as The FBI Story was simplistic.  Stewart gives one of his best performances in Anatomy of a Murder, playing the type of character that Chip Hardesty probably wouldn’t want to have much to do with.  With these two films, Stewart showed us both sides of the American justice system, the men who are tasked with enforcing the law and, even more importantly, the men who are tasked with making sure that law was enforced fairly.  Whichever side your on, you have to be happy to have Jimmy Stewart there.