JANE FONDA
DETROIT AIN’T KENTUCKY AND PARIS FRANCE AIN’T HOLLYWOOD BEL AIR
By PETER THOMAS BUSCH
Henry Fonda personified the good American after working all four corners of the stage and screen.
Fonda played American like no actor before and no actor after him from the young President Abraham Lincoln in the Young Mr. Lincoln (1939) to the aging retiree of America’s Greatest Generation in On Golden Pond (1981).
After a long, brilliant career, Fonda received the Honorary Oscar Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1981, and then his first Best Actor Award in 1982 before disappearing from the world stage, except in DVD and streaming replays, on August 12, 1982.
When Henry’s daughter, Jane, began to appear on the stage there was not much space her father had not already occupied. The challenge for the young actress to overcome her father’s iconic stature in global cinema was substantial.
Jane Fonda did find an unoccupied space in Paris, France, and after a few films settled in with the French cinematic world for an active decade of performances and celebrity appearances.
Still though, besides the desperate need to escape from the long shadow cast by her talented father, if Jane’s career wasn’t compared to the acting career of her father, Henry, in America, she was referred to Bridgette Bardot in France.
Jane was from the era of sexual liberation, and ever more gender emancipation, but she shied away from being compared to the international sex symbol from the French film industry.
Henry was from the Golden Age of Hollywood, appearing in such films as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Mister Roberts (1955) and The Longest Day (1962).
Jane was moving on by the end of the first decade in cinema, emerging from the cultural revolution as an icon for a generation that had broken free of their parents’ conservative cookie cutter nuclear family social structure and conservative minded expectations.
In The Chase (1966) Jane is cast in a supporting role as part of a back story that gradually merges with the main narrative that is compelled forward by the leading character, played by Marlon Brando. Brando had been considered by many in the film industry and the actors guild as the greatest American actor, although he received many unfavourable critical reviews.
The film featured what would prove to be a slate of the next generation of A-Listed Hollywood actors.
Fonda becomes incrementally more prominent in the film as does Robert Redford, while Brando’s character literally takes a beating as if director Arthur Penn is ushering in a new generation. Robert Duvall has a supporting role in the backstory.
Penn would go on to cast Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway in the culturally successful film, Bonnie and Clyde (1967). The anti-authoritarian tone of the biopic gangsters resonated around the world with the very same global audience that was rebelling against their parents like no other generation before them.
Redford would find feature film success again opposite Fonda in Barefoot in the Park (1967) before emerging at the front of the casting line on the marque with Paul Newman in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969).
Duvalle played a supporting role as Boo in the Gregory Peck film, To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). And then Duvalle went on to have significant supporting roles as uniquely composed characters, including in the Godfather (1972) as Tom Hagen and in Apocalypse Now (1979) as Col. Kilgore.
In They Shoot Horses, Don’t They (1969) Jane plays opposite her brother, Peter, and earns an Oscar nomination for her performance as one of many Americans so struggling financially that her character tries to get ahead by winning the cash prize of a dance marathon.
Jane still could not find her own footing. So, as the decade came to a close with America’s identity faltering around the world, the actor who has been looking inside herself to find her characters, decided to look outside herself in the real world to find personal inner definition.
That her father, Henry, took a role as a sinister gunslinger in the Sergio Leone’s film, Once Upon a Time in the West (1969), kind of fit as Jane gained greater perspective of the image of a nation that was becoming less flattering on the international stage and even less so at home.
This ruthless wild west killer, Frank, is binary opposite to the thoughtful juror in 12 Angry Men (1957). America never had so much integrity than when Henry Fonda played Juror No 8 and turned the minds of an angry jury to save the life of the falsely accused.
The Fondas and America would again move together on the world stage, but this time, with the next generation, in binary opposite to the nation’s traditionally accepted modus operandi.
A defiant waive of resentment within America had captured the nation’s attention, with protest just shy of rebellion in the streets rising up in opposition to the American military involvement in Vietnam and Cambodia in Southeast Asia.
And civil rights was on the agenda with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and the rising black power movement in the Inner Cities.
The first few steps onto the real world political platforms of activists were about as surreal as Jane’s character in the futuristic film Barbarella (1968). Director Roger Vadim animates with comic book caricature the street fight spreading around the world that was simultaneously challenging sexual barriers, gender inequality, racial bigotry and military involvement in foreign wars.
The wrestles tomboy, who grew up with a world famous actor who often worked away from home on film shoots, stepped away from dramatizations and into a special real world zone of political activism.
America’s illegal exploitation of native American land grants was a parallel narrative to the plight of Vietnam War veterans involved in the GI movement and the fight for civil rights by Black Americans.
In Klute (1971) a missing person investigation by private detective John Klute, played by Donald Sutherland, leads to Jane’s first Oscar win. Jane Fonda plays a New York call girl, after having embarked on the method acting process of interviewing and spending time with real life call girls.
Jane explores on film the emotional and intellectual composition of the character in detail, as John Klute and Bree Daniels become entangled in a personal relationship during the investigation. Fonda received her first of two Oscars for the film role.
But it would be Jane’s investigation of America’s image, which transcended her film career for the next two decades, that would forever brand her unique legacy as a great American icon.
Fonda joined sit-ins with Native American protests, such as at the Paiute Reservation in Nevada, where the government had begun a water diversion project that took water out of the reservation for use elsewhere by non-natives.
Jane was eventually arrested for trespassing on an army base in support of the GI Movement that was protesting the American Military involvement in the Vietnam War.
Fundraising among her network for the Black Panthers didn’t help her profile that was being compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Jane at times became her father’s screen characters in real life vignettes.
After a few years of political activism, in Julia (1977) Jane shows how she incrementally became a political activist. Julia is approached by an acquaintance to move money from Paris to Berlin for the Jewish underground in Nazi Germany. Initially, Julia has not put any thought into participation in the underground, but by the time she delivers her package, she has become entirely immersed in the cause.
And then in Coming Home (1978) Jane Fonda costars with Jon Voight, as a volunteer at a Veterans Affairs Hospital rehabilitating severely disabled veterans who had returned from the Vietnam War, all broken up inside and out.
Sally volunteers after her husband, Captain Bob Hyde, played by Bruce Dern, ships off for a tour of duty in Vietnam. Luke is transitioning, while inside the VA hospital, back to the world he left behind to become a soldier.
Jane Fonda won a second Oscar for her performance that brought attention to the poor conditions of the hospitals and the neglect of the veterans. The film was a direct challenge to the image of America at home and on the global stage by focussing attention on the brutality of the war and the horrible treatment of returning soldiers by the American people.
Jane’s character’s incremental attachment to a veteran in the hospital turns to love serendipitously as Jon Voight’s character takes up political activism, once he was well enough to leave the hospital and after a fellow VA patient commits suicide inside the hospital’s pharmacy.
Sally gets emotionally attached to the idea of defiance, which ultimately affects her demeanor and irrevocably changes her inner character by the time her husband returns from the war.
Dern shows how the soldier has become deconstructed by the war, physically and emotionally, while Luke channels his activism into public service by speaking to young soldiers and potential recruits
Home Coming won three Oscars in total. One more for Voight and one more for Best Writing.
In China Syndrome (1979) the nuclear power industry becomes an environmental sidebar to the tumultuous decade of political activism in America after the partial meltdown of a reactor at Three Mile Island Nuclear plant in Pennsylvania that same year as the film’s theatrical release.
The theme underscores the plight of the whistle blowers as Americans begin to question the good will of unbridled capitalists.
Jane plays investigative television reporter, Kimberly Wells, costarring, Michael Douglas and Jack Lemmon. Jane received another Oscar nomination for the role, as the film, produced by Michael Douglas, received four nominations in total.
Just when Jane had defined herself and created space between her acting art and the acting art of her father, she confronts the inevitability of comparison in On Golden Pond (1981) where she plays a supporting role to her father.
Henry Fonda plays Norman, with Jane Fonda playing his daughter, Chelsea, who comes to the family’s lakeside retreat to visit for Norman’s birthday. Norman is a retired college professor whose mental faculties have begun to faulter, and the once strong character personifying academia becomes a vulnerable member of the country’s retiring generation.
The film won three Oscars, one for Katharine Hepburn for her role as Norman’s supportive spouse, and one for Henry Fonda for his leading role as a faltering personality. On Golden Pond also won an Oscar for Best Writing by Ernest Thompson.
Everything should logically come to a conclusion now, with the iconic lives and screen personalities of Henry, as father, and Jane, as daughter, finally merging on screen with the greatest of success and international acclaim.
The acting art of Henry Fonda helped define Americana as the America everyone else wanted around the world. Juror No 8 had the greatest of integrity in his relentless pursuit of the truth and justice inside the jury room.
In a way, Jane’s activism defends this image of the Fondas being integral to the American way of life by challenging unjust deviations from what America had become respected for.
Not content to live inside her father’s shadow, Jane Fonda moved forward into the gritty gorilla war transpiring inside the homeland to re-revolutionize politics.
In Comes a Horseman (1978), Jane reconciles her past with her present by playing a lonesome ranch owner. James Caan plays a competing neighbour who comes to the realization that him and Ella will not survive another year on their own on their respective ranches.
Director Allan J. Pakula brings the two characters together, as a bigger brand than they would have been as individuals, to fight the ruthless land holder, Ewing, played by Jason Robards. Jane creates the character of a down to earth generational ranch owner who personifies the struggle between the family rancher and the independent farmer against corporate America and the oil companies.
Henry Fonda had become a cinematic institution who had created a screen character with unwavering integrity, especially after growing up in the nation’s heartland, Omaha, Nebraska, where the myth of rural purity drove the day as much as the Ford Motor Company.
For a time, especially as a child, Jane had become a tourist of the American history that her father had helped define, often finding the most joyous moments when her father, the personification of Americana, would come home from a film shoot, after a long absence, and take her swimming at a public swimming pool.
As Henry’s acting legacy grew, so did America. The great life came to an end with an Oscar worthy acting performance.
This cache helped Jane for a while as she developed her own rapport with the public. But when Henry’s final act came to an end, Jane would continue on with her political activism for another decade, and still continues her acting career during her final act, just as her father did.
Jane had come to realize that the real America existed underneath more than a few surface layers.
In all respects, Jane is Jane Fonda, known in her own right, and not simply as her father’s daughter.
Jane had to work hard for this self definition and independence, but she has become more clearly defined as a result of this on-screen and off-screen struggle for individualism.
For Jane, this struggle required immense personal courage and, as a result, simultaneously defined her, while also setting her free.
Jane Fonda: My Life So Far, by Jane Fonda, New York, Random House, 2005.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost, by Devin McKinney, New York, St. Martin Press, 2012.