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HENRY FONDA The perfect rustk
In The Seesaw Log, William Gibson tells of a moment in rehearsal when Henry Fonda drew director Arthur Penn aside and told him "that what he had to give the public was naturalness and ease, which this part did not let him feel, and that his nights were sleepless with worry. In all this there was aesthetic and personal honesty. Hank could not bear to deliver a line falsely, just as I never heard him utter a sociable insincerity to any of us . . ."
This comes from a man with whom Fonda had perhaps the most serious artistic disagreements of his career. Both before and after this unhappy experience Fonda demonstrated a shrewd and honest ability to judge the limits of his appealing talent and rarely, if ever, has he overmatched himself; rarely, if ever, has he failed to work strongly within his limits. He came to movies from the stage, where he had scored a hit, after the usual apprenticeships, in The Farmer Takes a Wife.
The flat accents of his native Middle West and the direct
honesty of his mien stood him in good stead in that bucolic gambol, and although Fonda has demonstrated a flair for farce, he has not lost the accent or its implications in the mythology of our time. It seems to stand for the rustic virtues— honesty, integrity, sincerity — and whether he is wearing a six-shooter, a naval officer's uniform or the well-cut attire of a banker, those virtues accompany his presence.
His first movie successes came in dramas of social consciousness, notably as Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath and as Frank James in Jesse James, a message Western in which the noted thieves were portrayed as Robin Hoods aiding poor farmers caught in the toils of rail and banking interests. There was need for his type in the films of the thirties and he made one of the last and best of the rural social dramas, Ox-Bow Incident (1943), an honest, dusty study of lynch law. He now operates mainly in city garb, but a little bit of what is best about the life of the land clings to his presence.
Frank James makes his getaway. The film is Jesse James (1939).
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