By Hal Drucker

1939 was a notable year in movie history, with such treasured titles as Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights, Stagecoach and of course … The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind. Since my sister and I went to the RKO Keith’s every Saturday afternoon for the double feature, the Flash Gordon serial, the electric organ sing-along and cartoons, it was impossible for me not to see every one of those flicks. Looking back on it from the perspective of an inveterate, albeit, eight-year old movie-goer, it is hard to conceive that Henry Fonda, owing to the old studio system, appeared in five movies that were released in '39. The first time I took any note of him was in the microscopic role of Frank James, brother of outlaw Jesse (Tyrone Power) who once domesticated, was gunned down by “that dirty little coward” Robert Ford, while hanging a Home Sweet Home sampler. However the studio fathers must have seen some promise in him since he appeared in a sequel the following year, The Return of Frank James. I never saw his next 1939 picture Let Us Live! (yes, it had an exclamation mark) which was drastically cut and released as a “B” movie. For his third release that year , The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, I took scant notice of Fonda, until he rushed in to see if Don Ameche, was in distress when he called out, on his newly invented telephone, ”Watson, come here, I want you.” For the next decade or so, the telephone was referred to by Bob Hope, Jack Benny and Fred Allen, as the “ameche.” Fonda’s fourth release was Young Mr. Lincoln, and his fifth, Drums Along the Mohawk. In ’39, Fonda had already been in movies for five years, playing opposite the likes of Bette Davis in Jezebel and Janet Gaynor in The Farmer Takes A Wife. One of the most engaging things about the 6’1” Fonda was his signature slump-shouldered walk; as idiosyncratic in its purposeful stride as Fred Astaire’s syncopated hand-in-pocket strut. Fonda, unlike his old Princeton roommate Jimmy Stewart and his first of five wives, Margaret Sullavan, never wavered in his commitment to the stage where he was as marvelous on the proscenium as on the big screen. I saw him in Mr. Roberts (with David Wayne as Ensign Pulver), First Monday in October (as a fictional Supreme Court justice), Two for the Seesaw opposite the ingénue Ann Bancroft, and perhaps the best one-person show ever, as the famed Scopes Trial barrister Clarence Darrow.

Hal Drucker’s 10 Favorite Henry Fonda Movies

1)   The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
If you asked 50 moviegoers which role they would most identify with Henry Fonda, it would be Tom Joad, hands down. Gone With the Wind, aside, has there ever been a movie more faithful to a novel? Along with Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country and Huckleberry Finn, I regard it as the most transforming piece of fiction I’ve read. From the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma to the grim journey of the migrant workers in their overly laden cars and trucks of worldly goods, to the fields of California, director John Ford, with the pictorial artistry of Walker Evans, has matched John Steinbeck passage by passage in a microcosm of the Great Depression. Among the many remarkable players who complemented Fonda, I’m fondest of Jane Darwell as Ma Joad – especially in the memorable leave-taking vignette with the soon-to-be activist Tom who assures his mothe: I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere … wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there … and when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they build - I'll be there, too.”

2)   Mr. Roberts (1955)The Mervyn LeRoy-helmed movie marked Fonda’s return to the screen after a seven-year absence, part of which he spent playing Navy Lieutenant Doug Roberts in the enormously successful stage version of Thomas Heggen’s novel. LeRoy replaced John Ford as director after he clashed with Fonda over changes in the script. As Cargo Officer of a WWII supply ship, Roberts is precluded from obtaining a desired combat role while playing whipping boy to the contentious Queeg-like Captain Morion (James Cagney). What it loses in an un-nuanced performance by Cagney, the movie gains in Jack Lemmon’s irrepressible, Oscar-winning performance as the wheeler-dealer Ensign Pulver and the crafty William Powell as “Doc” in his final distinguished movie role.

3)   The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
This unforgettable Western about the tyranny of lynch mob-rule was a pet project of Fonda and director William Wellman, both of whom worked on lesser 20th Century-Fox projects in exchange for doing the film. Though it bombed at the box office, which Fox’s head Darryl F. Zanuck never tired of pointing out to Fonda and Wellman, it gains in stature with each passing year. Cowboys Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan (a regular on Mash) ride into a small town for a drink and become involved in a barroom brawl, that earns them the enmity of the locals. When word reaches town that a rancher has been killed by rustlers, a lynch mob is formed under the urging of Major Tetley (Frank Conroy), a former Confederate officer. Worried that they'll face the hangman’s noose, Carter and Croft reluctantly join the mob but ultimately become sympathetic to the plight of a farmer named Martin (Dana Andrews), a Mexican (Anthony Quinn) and a senile old man (Francis Ford), who face the prospect of being strung up. Resolving himself to his fate, Martin gives Carter a letter to deliver to his wife. The three unfortunates die at the end of the rope, and the mob rides off, later to discover that in fact there never was a murder. Three reliable old-timers appear in the movie, the western perennial Harry Davenport, Margaret Hamilton (the cackling Wicked Witch of the West from the Land of Oz) and Jane Darwell in a far less sympathetic role than that of Ma Joad, but with “Ma”(Gier) as an appellation.

4)   12 Angry Men (1957)
I saw the initial Reginald Rose-scripted version of this courtroom potboiler with an indecisive jury on, the “live” Studio One in 1955. Robert Cummings had the role that Fonda eased into more adroitly, with the street-smart Sidney Lumet making his directorial debut. The splendid ensemble cast included Lee J. Cobb, Jack Warden, Jack Klugman, Martin Balsam and Ed Begley. In his illuminating list of favorite lawyer movies on these pages, guest critic and lawyer Robert Feinberg wrote: “There are no lawyers, just 12 jurors sent to deliberate murder charges against a young Hispanic man accused of stabbing his father. Immediately, 11 of the jurors vote to convict, opposed only by a soft-spoken juror ( Fonda) who believes that before a man is convicted and executed, there should be some discussion of the matter. Over the course of the deliberations, he persuades the others to re-examine the evidence, and, in doing so, to reveal their own motivations, prejudices and fears.”

5)   The Lady Eve (1941)
The vivacious Brooklyn-bred Barbara Stanwyck was equally at home in film noir and comedy. As a double dealing conniver, Double Indemnity best represents the former. Preston Sturges, a master of screwball comedy, teams her here with Charles Coburn as her unflappable father who set out to fleece wealthy but socially inept Charles Poncefort Pike. As an heir to a brewery fortune and an expert in snake zoology, Fonda appears, not as comfortable in pratfall comedy as - say – Cary Grant in The Batchelor and the Bobby Soxer. Fresh from an expedition in the Amazon, he boards an ocean liner where he becomes easy prey to the con-artistry of Coburn and his card-shark daughter. When Stanwyck ultimately goes ga-ga over Fonda, he becomes wise to their scheme. Stanwyck then goes all-out to recapture Fonda's heart, disguising as an English royal, Lady Eve Sidwich. The cast includes some of the most formidable comedy practitioners in moviedom: Eugene Pallette, William Demarest, Eric Blore and Melville Cooper.

6)   Yours, Mine and Ours (1968)
Twenty-seven years after The Lady Eve, Fonda shows a deftness for comedy, honed by the directorial shills of Mel Shavelson and enhanced by his pairing with Lucille Ball whose Chocolate Factory bit on I Love Lucy rivals Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times assembly line. My wife and I viewed it on Turner Classics Movies the other night and guffawed at the notion of Fonda as Naval officer Frank Beardsley, a widower with 10 children, dating Ball as nurse Helen North, a widow with eight children. With the matchmaking assistance of Beardsley's bachelor friend, Darrell Harrison (Van Johnson), Helen and Frank eventually decide to marry, despite the unsettling prospect of tending to such a large family. Household chaos ensues as they all learn to share the same space. When flu season hits, the family doctor, played with measured doses of gusto by a very funny Tom Bosley, finds himself a busy maker of house calls to the Beardsley’s growing abode.

7)   Advise and Consent (1962)
Coincident to the selection of prospective cabinet choices by President (-elect) Obama, I re-visited this riveting and timely examination of party politics and Washington mud-slinging. Based on Alan Drury’s popular novel and directed by Otto Preminger, it holds its own vis-à-vis such genre movies as 1964’s The Best Man with Fonda as a Kennedy-like presidential aspirant, State of the Union, and –yes- the treacly Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Fonda as Robert Leffingwell, the president’s controversial choice for Secretary of State, Franchot Tone as the commander-in-chief, Lew Ayres as the vice-president and Walter Pidgeon as the senate majority leader who seeks to shepherd through the nomination, have limited on-screen roles, but they are all superb. The key figure is Don Murray who as Senator from Utah, is anti-Leffingwell, but whose long-ago homosexual one-night stand is dredged up as a blackmail chip. Charles Laughton, in his final movie role, is a Bilbo-esque senator who is determined to sink the nomination at any cost. Vis-à-vis Fonda’s restrained, modest mien, Laughton’s unabashed scenery-chewing and faux Dixiecrat drawl cries out for the powdered wig he sported in Witness for the Prosecution.

9)   On Golden Pond (1981)
Katherine Hepburn with Spencer Tracy? With Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant? Pity she didn’t hook up with Fonda years earlier. What a team that would have been. Hepburn was awarded her record fourth Oscar –possibly for sentiment’s sake, for On Golden Pond, which my wife and I have viewed – and enjoyed - through the prism of our golden years. This elegiac overview is fostered by a brilliant turn by the return of Jane Fonda, as Norman and Ethel Thayer’s long-absent daughter.

10)   Immortal Sergant (1943) 
There will be those among you who may be indignant that I have l left off The Longest Day, in which Fonda played Brig. Gen Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., in favor of a low-budget WWII movie directed by the prolific, almost obscure John (Magnificent Obsession) Stahl. The reason is two-fold: The Longest Day, especially the Normandy Beachhead landing, pales against Saving Private Ryan. Secondly, in a part that in other hands might be played with a gung ho, take-no-prisoners slant, Fonda is a diffident Canadian infantryman, Colin Spence, in a British Eighth Army platoon in the Libyan desert. Casting him as a Canadian, precludes the incongruity of that familiar Fonda timbre with the patina of a jolly-well-done accent. Eschewing officer training, Spence enlists in the infantry, serving as corporal under Sergeant Kelly, a longtime military man who is greatly admired by his men. As portrayed by Thomas Mitchell, he affects a serviceable Irish brogue. The avuncular character of Kelly who takes a liking to Spence, suggests to me the influence on Stahl of Louis Wolheim as Sergeant Kat Katczinsky towards Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front. Kelly stresses to Spence that he indeed has the right stuff to take over the platoon in the event he is incapacitated or killed. Spence is clearly shaken when Kelly says that he must assume command if anything happens to him, admonishing him to get the patrol home safely. The beauteous Maureen O'Hara plays Spence's sweetheart in a series of gratuitous, but mostly effective flashbacks.