The monumental Henry Fonda for President doc is an all-American political epic.
Both fascinating and infuriating, Henry Fonda for President, by Austrian filmmaker Alexander Horwath, examines the dark-browed, blue-eyed stoic Hollywood actor Henry Fonda as more politically significant than his infamously radical daughter, Jane.
Yet Henry Fonda for President itself is a work of leftist radicalism. Watch and listen as Horwath gives away his political leanings throughout the documentary’s three-hour running time. It’s a European’s extrapolation of American popular culture, funneled into the biography of one of Hollywood’s most enigmatic figures. Over five decades, Henry Fonda represented an American ideal whose hidden complexes differentiated him from his peers Gary Cooper, John Wayne, James Stewart, and Joel McCrea.
Horwath’s need to politicize Henry Fonda surely comes from the influence of daughter Jane’s prominent, controversial activities; he solves that annoying riddle by exploring its probable source. How does the genealogical and artistic legacy of the widely admired Henry Fonda figure in his offspring’s anti-American provocations? And what does that legacy mean to us today?
Those questions arise from our current lack of movie stars — truly a phenomenon because Millennial media content is sold through celebrityhood rather than glamour or personality. Henry Fonda belonged to a bygone Hollywood era of stories and role models geared to delighting moviegoers’ curiosity. Speaking of movie stars, Horwath notes: “They are prototypes, robust models for coping with reality.” Fonda was not a crowd-pleasing box-office draw, but he had physical and temperamental appeal that made him familiar.
Conveniently for Horwath, Fonda chose many projects and roles that “support leftist, anti-fascist” sentiments (You Only Live Once, The Grapes of Wrath, The Male Animal, 12 Angry Men). This bolsters the doc’s auteur theory. “The actor Fonda is an author even if he doesn’t perceive it that way,” Horwath says of Fonda’s modesty. (“I’m an agnostic,” Fonda told an interviewer. “I don’t know the answers; that’s all that means.”) The doc begins with an episode of the Norman Lear feminist sitcom Maude in which Fonda, in a guest-star cameo, refused a fame-struck housewife’s request that he run for political office; it peaks with a startling Dick Cavett Show appearance in which patriarch Fonda abides wild-eyed ravings by offsprings Peter and Jane. This public generational saga goes from ancestral investigation (the Fonda clan migrated from Holland to upstate New York in 1654, then Nebraska, where Henry was born) to cultural exegesis. Here’s Horwath’s thesis:
Fonda’s cinema revolves around the wronged man. A legal system that allows prejudice to influence decisions. A media system that caters to popular sentiment rather than supporting the rule of law. Fonda senses that U.S. justice discriminates on the basis of politics and class.
In this, Horwath takes the leftist Frankfurt School perspective that dominates so much film scholarship and curatorship. (Henry Fonda for President is being showcased at New York’s redoubtable Anthology Film Archives.)
More than a career review, Horwath’s clips feature political nuggets that make a leftist interpretation of Fonda’s career: personifying nascent proletarian communism in The Grapes of Wrath; reading a letter from the Sacco-Vanzetti case in The Male Animal; citing Cold War reticence in Fail Safe; opposing lynching in The Ox-Bow Incident; upholding the criminal-justice system in 12 Angry Men (the only film Fonda produced); reflecting his own social and personal experience in the military comedy Mister Roberts; and the existential Hitchcock thriller The Wrong Man.
The latter film allows Horwath to muse wondrously on cinema as an art form where “reality borders on dreams.” It’s gratifying that Horwath rescues Otto Preminger’s great, underrated Daisy Kenyon (1947) from obscurity, noting Fonda’s characterization of a traumatized World War II veteran’s romantic struggle. But Horwath also succumbs to the worst political clichés of a Marxist film scholar when he situates the actor inside liberal Hollywood’s superstructure, contrasting Fonda’s steady careerism to the election of “a Hollywood reactionary” — meaning Ronald Reagan – “as governor.” Horwath even minimizes Fonda’s troubled friendships during the Blacklist era: “Such are the mild sacrifices made by liberals.”
Horwath’s ideological biases notwithstanding, Henry Fonda for President makes a monumental plea for those films and filmmakers that reflect a nation’s essence. He raises a fascinating conundrum about Fonda’s own character: Campaigning for his alter ego Adlai Stevenson (“a progressive intellectual with a sense of humor . . . the cool moralist with an air of superiority”) appeased Fonda’s own nature: the signature hand-over-face gesture to hide emotional exposure.
It exceeds the bounds of bio-essay when Horwath quotes the third of Fonda’s five wives: “There’s a scream inside Hank that’s never been screamed. A laugh that’s never been laughed.” But recognition of Fonda’s trademark remoteness — that singular seething Tom Joad portrayal — almost justifies the intrusion. It’s an insight into what smug, contemporary performers lack. Movie actors once took seriously a commitment to honorably represent America.