Beulah Bondi makes familiar maternal parts worth watching, and her work with James Stewart is a good place to begin. We admire her conviction, though we wish she had been cast less predictably.
Fi1m perspective
Beulah Bondi makes it easy to believe that James Stewart is her son. She played his mother four times, including Ma Smith in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and Mrs. Bailey in It's a Wonderful Life (1946). Frank Capra asks a good deal of our faith in human decency, and credible mothers help. We rate Bondi for making those familiar parts emotionally persuasive, while regretting how often she was asked to play them.
Her screen career began with Street Scene (1931), repeating the role of Emma Jones from the stage. Supporting work through the 1930s and 1940s repeatedly put her in the older generation, sometimes playing women much older than herself. Make Way for Tomorrow (1937) gave her a leading role as Lucy Cooper, an elderly mother. It is a useful corrective to remembering her only as Stewart’s mother, and a chance to see that gift for playing older women given greater responsibility.
In Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the comedy does much of the work: Stewart and Jean Arthur keep Capra’s belief in personal goodness lively. Bondi’s Ma Smith gives that belief a family connection, although the film asks for more indulgence than we always want to grant. It's a Wonderful Life takes the strain of being good more seriously. We were moved by Stewart’s exhaustion, because he makes doing right look like something a person might struggle to keep doing. Bondi’s Mrs. Bailey helps make the family credible, even when Capra presses the whimsy too hard.
She described preparing a role by imagining the woman’s past, a useful discipline when the part is another mother or grandmother. We can admire how convincingly she played older women without pretending that so much repetition was ideal. Her later television work included Martha Corinne in The Waltons (1972). After the Capra films, try Make Way for Tomorrow for the chance to see her carry a leading part.
Biography
Beulah Bondi (born Beulah Bondy) was an American character actress whose career spanned stage, film and television from the late 19th century until the 1970s. She began performing as a child and made her Broadway debut in 1925. Her film debut came in 1931 with Street Scene, and she appeared in numerous supporting roles throughout the 1930s and 1940s.
Bondi was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, for The Gorgeous Hussy (1936) and Of Human Hearts (1938). She played the mother of James Stewart in four films, including Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) and It's a Wonderful Life (1946), and appeared in Make Way for Tomorrow (1937), Remember the Night (1940), Penny Serenade (1941), The Snake Pit (1948) and The Furies (1950). In 1976 she won an Emmy Award for a guest role on The Waltons.
