Tuesdays in February / 32 Movies
Henry Fonda, TCM Star of the Month for February, was a quintessentially American actor who captured the most endearing traits of the national character with his performances in such vehicles as Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Mister Roberts (1955), and On Golden Pond (1981).
Film critic Isabel Quigley once commented that, “When a good man was wanted, a man of obvious integrity, a ‘non-actor’ in appearance who could act everyone else off the screen, they used to say, ‘Fetch Fonda.’”
Fonda also was a versatile performer who had great successes on the stage as well as on film. His range encompassed comedy and villainy in addition to that capacity for playing earnest, plain-spoken and idealistic heroes.
He had a different image in private life, where he was often described as being cool, distant, and self-absorbed.
Henry Jaynes Fonda was born on May 16, 1905, in Grand Island, Nebraska, the son of printer William Brace Fonda and his wife, Elma Herberta (Jaynes). He had two sisters, Herberta Jane and Harriet Mcneil Fonda.
Young Hank, who was a Boy Scout, enjoyed skating, swimming, and running, and worked in his father’s print shop. After graduation from high-school he worked for a local telephone company and studied journalism at the University of Minnesota.
Fonda became interested in acting when he performed at the Omaha Community Playhouse under the tutelage of Dorothy (Dodie) Brando, Marlon’s mother. His career path was determined when he played the title role in Merton of the Movies at the Playhouse and discovered that when onstage he could “hide behind a mask.”
In 1928 Fonda headed to Massachusetts to pursue a career as an actor, working first at the Cape Playhouse on Cape Cod. He then joined the University Players, whose other famous alumni (and future Fonda associates) would include James Stewart, Joshua Logan, and Margaret Sullavan, whom Fonda married in December 1931.
Fonda and Sullavan lived together briefly in New York City, where their marriage ended in early 1933. For a time, Fonda, Stewart, and Logan shared an apartment as they tried to find breaks in Depression-era Manhattan theater.
Fonda’s early Broadway credits included The Game of Love and Death (1929), I Loved You Wednesday (1932), New Faces of 1934 (1934), and The Farmer Takes a Wife (1934). Also in 1934, in a move that would benefit him enormously, he signed with legendary theatrical agent Leland Hayward.
Fonda started at the top in the movie industry when, under Hayward’s guidance, he signed a contract with producer Walter Wanger at the then-generous salary of $1,000 per week.
His first film assignment was on loan-out to 20th Century Fox, where he repeated his leading role in the 20th Century Fox movie version of The Farmer Takes a Wife (1935), starring opposite Janet Gaynor.
Fonda would make a total of 83 films. Highlights are shown below, with the titles screening on TCM shown in boldface.
On another loan-out, this time to RKO, Fonda made I Dream Too Much (1935), opposite operatic soprano Lily Pons. His first huge success was The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1936), the first outdoor Technicolor film, produced by Wanger for Paramount.
At Warner Bros., Fonda starred opposite Bette Davis in That Certain Woman (1937), a melodrama about a loving couple forced apart by circumstances; and Jezebel (1938), the Civil War drama that brought Davis her second Oscar for her role as a Southern belle obsessed by a young man (Fonda) who rejects her.
Fonda had his first of three teamings with Barbara Stanwyck in RKO’s The Mad Miss Manton (1938). This is an entertaining little screwball comedy, but the best for this sizzling star combination was yet to come.
Three films in succession directed by John Ford brought Fonda a new level of dramatic stature. He played the title role in Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), bringing a natural and understated nobility to his portrait of Honest Abe as a young lawyer trying a murder case in Illinois.
Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), in which Fonda and Claudette Colbert play a frontier couple in New York during the American revolution, was described by The New York Times as “a first-rate historical film, as rich atmospherically as it is in action.”
The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Ford’s screen version of John Steinbeck’s prize-winning novel, features Fonda in an unforgettable, Oscar-nominated performance as part of a family of migrant workers during the Great Depression.
To get the role, Fonda (whose contract with Wanger had expired), had to sign a seven-year deal with producing studio 20th Century Fox. His other most notable films under this contract would be William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946).
Meanwhile, at Paramount, writer-director Preston Sturges brought out the best in the Stanwyck-Fonda combo in The Lady Eve (1941). This sparkling screwball comedy concerns a sexy fortune hunter and her rich, innocent, and bumbling prey.
RKO’s The Big Street (1942) teamed Fonda with Lucille Ball in a touching Damon Runyon story about a busboy and the cold-hearted, crippled singer he adores. (Ball named this as her favorite among her films.)
Warner Bros.’ The Male Animal (1942), based on the successful Broadway play by James Thurber and Elliott Nugent, stars Fonda as a college professor involved in a debate concerning free speech and a marital crisis with his wife (Olivia de Havilland).
For 20th Century Fox he made The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), a powerful William A. Wellman Western about a lynch mob which was Oscar-nominated as Best Picture. With the onset of World War II, Fonda reportedly resented acting in Fox’s Immortal Sergeant (1943) because the studio arranged a deferment so he could make the film.
He enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1942 and served in Air Combat Intelligence, winning a Bronze Star for bravery. He remained on active duty until 1945 and served as a Navy Reserve Officer until 1948.
Fonda’s first postwar film role was Wyatt Earp in the John Ford Western My Darling Clementine (1946), with Victor Mature as Doc Holliday. With his Fox contract behind him, Fonda then appeared in the RKO film noir The Long Night (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak.
Ford’s The Fugitive (1947), RKO’s adaptation of the Graham Greene novel The Power and the Glory, stars Fonda as the fugitive priest.
Also for Ford at RKO, Fonda took on his first unsympathetic role as the unforgiving commander of Fort Apache (1948), a post-Civil War Western also starring John Wayne.
UA’s comedy anthology On Our Merry Way (1948) teamed Fonda with his old pal James Stewart for the first time on film. In their episode they play jazz musicians called Lank and Slim who reminisce about a colorful past.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Fonda revived his stage career with great success, starring on Broadway in a series of long-running hits: Mister Roberts (1948), Point of No Return (1951), The Caine Mutiny Court Martial (1954), Two for the Seesaw (1958), and Silent Night, Lonely Night (1959).
Fonda repeated his iconic role as the sympathetic junior officer in the film of Mister Roberts (1955), directed by John Ford and Mervyn Leroy and released through Warner Bros.
Although he had perfected the role in more than a thousand Broadway performances and won a Tony award, Fonda was not even nominated for an Oscar for Mister Roberts, which brought a Supporting Actor award to Jack Lemmon.
Warner Bros.’ The Wrong Man (1956), an atypical film from director Alfred Hitchcock, is a realistic docudrama starring Fonda as a New Yorker falsely accused of a crime.
UA’s 12 Angry Men (1957) is an ensemble drama based on the Reginald Rose teleplay about a conflicted jury. Fonda won a BAFTA award for his role as the most influential juror, and the film was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture.
Stage Struck (1958), RKO’s remake of Morning Glory (1933), has Susan Strasberg attempting to fill Oscar winner Katharine Hepburn’s shoes as an aspiring Broadway actress, with Fonda as her producer and lover.
Fonda also did considerable TV work in the 1950s, appearing in various anthologies and starring in his own well-received series, The Deputy, on NBC-TV from 1959 to 1961.
The 1960s were also a busy period on the big screen for Fonda, who appeared in 20 feature films for various studios during that decade. TCM is screening a dozen of them.
MGM’s How the West Was Won (1962), originally shot in Cinerama, boasts a lineup of two dozen star performers including Fonda as a weathered buffalo hunter.
Another all-star epic, Fox’s The Longest Day (1962), is an account of the D-Day landings during World War II, with Fonda as Gen. Theodore Roosevelt Jr.
Spencer’s Mountain (1963), from Warner Bros., is the screen version of the Earl Hammer Jr. novel about family life in the mountains of Wyoming, starring Fonda and Maureen O’Hara as the heads of a large clan.
UA’s The Best Man (1964) is a political drama by Gore Vidal adapted from his play of the same title, with Fonda as a former Secretary of State seeking a presidential nomination.
Fail Safe (1964), directed by Sidney Lumet for Columbia, casts Fonda as the U.S. President in a cautionary tale about an error that sends American bombers on a mission to destroy Moscow.
Sex and the Single Girl (1964) is a Warner Bros. comedy inspired by the Helen Gurley Brown book. Natalie Wood plays a fictional version of Brown, with Tony Curtis as a writer for a scandal rag, and Fonda and Lauren Bacall as an older married couple involved in their battle of the sexes.
Warners’ Battle of the Bulge (1965) is a highly fictionalized account of the WWII battle, with Fonda as a U.S. intelligence officer who sees the importance of the impending clash with the Nazis more clearly than his superiors.
The Rounders (1965), a surprise success for MGM, is a nostalgic Western directed by Burt Kennedy about two aging modern-day cowboys (Fonda and Glenn Ford) who eke out a living by breaking wild horses.
A Big Hand for the Little Lady (1966), from Warners, is a comic Western with Fonda and Joanne Woodward as a couple involved in a high-stakes poker game in Laredo, Texas.
The MGM Western Welcome to Hard Times (1967), directed by Burt Kennedy, stars Fonda as the leader of a small, dying town who stands up to a brutish outsider (Aldo Ray) as he terrorizes local citizens.
UA’s Yours, Mine and Ours (1968) reunites Fonda and Lucille Ball, former costars of The Big Street, in a comedy about a widower with 10 children who marries a widow with eight. The film was a great commercial success.
With old friend James Stewart playing the hero, Fonda was the ruthless antagonist in the Warner Bros. Western Firecreek (1968). That same year he offered an even stronger portrait of evil in Sergio Leone’s Italian-made Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
Leone loved Fonda and would say of him, “I have never known an actor with such craft, with such professional seriousness; such a pleasant man, full of humor, so reserved and so keenly quick-witted.”
Fonda also would return to Broadway in the ’60s for distinguished performances in such plays as Critic’s Choice (1960), A Gift of Time (1962), Generation (1965), and Our Town (1969).
Fonda and James Stewart enjoyed their third and final costarring stint in The Cheyenne Social Club (1970), a comic Western directed by Gene Kelly and distributed by National General Pictures. The old friends play aging cowboy pals who must figure out what to do with a Wyoming brothel one of them inherits.
Warners’ There Was a Crooked Man (1970) is the only Western directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Kirk Douglas plays a thief who is jailed after a murderous robbery, and Fonda is the prison warden, a man of mixed motives.
The hard-working Fonda continued to appear in features and television productions throughout the 1970s. He also performed the one-man play Clarence Darrow on Broadway and on tour.
In 1979 he was feted at the Kennedy Center Honors. In 1981 he was presented with an honorary Oscar as “The consummate actor in recognition of his brilliant accomplishments and enduring contributions to the art of motion pictures.”
Despite his reputation as a congenial and dedicated professional, Fonda was sometimes depicted as a remote and authoritarian family man. His son Peter once said that, of all his father’s characters, in real life he was closest to the martinet of Fort Apache.
Through much of his Hollywood career, Fonda had a reputation as a womanizer. After his early marriage to Margaret Sullavan, he had four more wives: Frances Ford Seymour Brokaw (1936-her death in 1950), Susan Blanchard (1950-56), Afdera Franchett (1957-61), and Shirlee Mae Adams (1965-his death in 1982).
Seymour was the mother of Fonda’s two celebrated children, Jane (born in 1937) and Peter (1940-2019). Brokaw committed suicide in 1950 after Fonda asked for a divorce so he could marry Blanchard. With Blanchard, he adopted a daughter, Amy Fishman (born in 1953).
Blanchard once said of her former husband, “I think there’s a scream in Hank that’s never been screamed, and a laugh that’s never been laughed.”
Fonda’s valedictory, Oscar-winning performance was as Norman Thayer, the cranky octogenarian of On Golden Pond (1981). The Universal production also won Oscars for Katharine Hepburn (Best Actress as Mrs. Thayer) and Ernest Thompson (Best Adapted Screenplay for the film script of his stage play).
The highly successful film had seven other nominations including those for Best Picture and Supporting Actress Jane Fonda. Henry Fonda’s award made him, at age 76, the oldest winner of a Best Actor Oscar at that time.
Jane Fonda said she had bought the rights to On Golden Pond because she felt that, by playing his daughter on film, she and her father might be able to work through some of their own issues. In one scene (which remains in the film), she elicits an unexpected response from him by taking his hand, and he turns away in tears.
Fonda was too ill to attend the awards ceremony and his daughter accepted his Oscar for him. A few months later, on August 12, 1982, he died of heart disease at his Los Angeles home.
English critic John Russell Taylor summed up Henry Fonda’s appeal: “He is a better actor than almost anyone you can name in Hollywood, yet when you come down to it he has not played anything like a wide variety of roles…
“His quality has been demonstrated rather by the intelligence and authority with which he has explored various aspects of one basic attribute: decency.”
