Recently we got a text from Elaine with this amusing avian portrait:
Looking to make a seasonally-appropriate response, we did an image search for "Christmas raven" and came across this:
It's been many (many) years since we saw the movie, and we had no memory at all of this bird. Our curiosity piqued, we did a little googling and were surprised to discover that Jimmy Stewart's feathered co-star was also named Jimmy.
It turns out that Jimmy The Crow (actually a raven) was movie star in his own right. Plucked from a nest in the Mojave desert by animal trainer Curly Twiford and raised by hand, Jimmy appeared in hundreds of movies in a career that lasted almost 20 years. Here he is in some of his other roles:
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| You Can't Take It With You (1938) |
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| The Secret Garden (1949) |
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| The Bride Came C.O.D. (1941) |
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| The Wizard Of Oz (1939) |
So, the next time you see a thespian of corvidian* persuasion in a movie from Hollywood's Golden Age, take a closer look. It might be Jimmy!
*We made that word up
