THERE’S A REASON why so many people regard Ronald Reagan as America’s last great leader. The further the monolithic Hollywood of the storied past recedes into the fragmented fun house of the media present, the more mythic the stellar avatars appear. One such divinity: straight-talking, honorable, unassuming, heroic Henry Fonda (1905–1982).
A movie star who emerged in the mid-1930s, Fonda starred as Abe Lincoln, Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and the honest naval officer Mister Roberts. He played a “forgotten man” in the original “Bonnie and Clyde” film, You Only Live Once (1937). He was the protagonist of The Wrong Man (1956) and The Best Man (1964), and of 12 Angry Men (1957), which he also produced. He fought for democracy in the Spanish Civil War on-screen and in World War II in actuality. He personified New Deal democracy, Cold War liberalism, and—thanks to his rebellious children—the 1960s generation gap. Was he also, as more than one person puts it in Alexander Horwath’s erudite, entertaining three-hour meta-biopic, Henry Fonda for President, the “quintessential American”? Embraced by cinephiles at festivals from Berlin to Buenos Aires and beyond, HFFP more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary—what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life.
Fonda as landmark: Learned but never pedantic, Horwath finds him at strategic junctures in the American past, provides a Tocquevillian tour of historic sites, and links Fonda’s biography to his movies. (Did witnessing a brutal lynching as a boy inform his performance in the 1943 film The Ox-Bow Incident?) Not that the actor was self-invented. Thanks to director John Ford and mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, Fonda played his own ancestor in Drums Along the Mohawk and a future president in Young Mr. Lincoln, both 1939. The next year, Ford and Zanuck accorded Fonda his defining role as Joad in the quintessential New Deal film, The Grapes of Wrath.
According to Horwath, Ford also gave Fonda his way of walking, sitting, and dancing. What can explain the mystery of Fonda’s admirable everyman persona? Descended from seventeenth-century Dutch settlers who colonized the Hudson River Valley, he was born in Nebraska and raised in Christian Science. He abandoned that but never shucked his flat Nebraska accent. Was this paragon of civic virtue upright or uptight? A rebel or a prig? Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl refugee or the stoic farmer of Grant Wood’s American Gothic?
Fonda was neither a man’s man like John Wayne nor a ladies’ man like Cary Grant (witness his delightful incompetence in the 1941 screwball classic The Lady Eve). This cat walked alone. Fonda’s acting is described as “inward,” yet in the interviews threading through HFFP, he denies all introspection. Conveying depth, Fonda insists on emptiness: “I don’t feel I have good answers to anything.” Emotionally distant even to himself, he laconically proposes acting as an escape from that self. Piling metaphor on metaphor, Horwath is pleased to find that Fonda’s last western is called My Name Is Nobody (1973).
HFFP IS A PORTRAIT not only of Fonda but also of America. It’s even a sort of road film in which, always in connection with Fonda’s movies, Horwath visits sites ranging from the upstate New York village of Fonda and the actor’s Nebraska birthplace to the actual migrant labor camp that served as a set in The Grapes of Wrath (and still functions as one) and the hokey tourist attraction that is Tombstone, Arizona, mythologized in another Ford film, My Darling Clementine (1946).
Ford took Fonda into the Cold War. He was recruited as an honest lawman in Clementine and cast in Ford’s artiest effort, The Fugitive (1947), as an honest priest hunted by a totalitarian state. At what point does modesty become arrogance?
In Fort Apache, the dream-life masterpiece that merged western and combat film, Ford gave Fonda the role of an authoritarian jerk—a version of General George Custer—outclassed if not outacted by his liberal (!) subordinate John Wayne. The movie opened in New York on June 25, 1948—one day after the Soviet blockade of Berlin created a beleaguered fort in the midst of hostile Red territory.
By then, Fonda, one of the many Hollywood liberals who signed the anti–House Un-American Activities Committee ad organized in late 1947 by the Committee for the First Amendment, had decamped for Broadway, playing the honest naval officer Mr. Roberts for most of the blacklist period. In HFFP, Horwath illustrates these yearswith passages from the left-wing independent documentary Strange Victory (1948), made to support the quixotic candidacy of another plainspoken Mid-westerner, Henry Wallace. (Fonda almost surely backed Harry S. Truman.)
The thaw of ’56 saw Fonda in The Wrong Man (rarely appreciated as Alfred Hitchcock’s critique of Cold War America), followed by 12 Angry Men, a courtroom drama defending the jury system appreciated by Tocqueville as the schoolroom of American democracy, in which honest consensus-builder Fonda patiently forged a centrist coalition for acquittal.
Fonda was a prominent Kennedy supporter in 1960 and had a key role in the first of the political movies that reflected the glamour and anxiety of Kennedy’s so-called Camelot, Otto Preminger’s Advise & Consent (1962). Playing a onetime fellow traveler defeated in his bid to become secretary of state, Fonda appeared in that very position in The Best Man. There, having sacrificed his presidential aspiration to block the ascent of a Nixon-like demagogue, he returned in time for the 1964 election, as Fail Safe’s agonized doomsday leader, nuking New York to compensate for the unintentional obliteration of Moscow. (Opening less than two months before an election pitting “rational” Lyndon Johnson running against “atomic madman” Barry Goldwater, the movie was much appreciated by the Democratic campaign.)
Writing about Advise & Consent, Andrew Sarris deemed it “perverse” for Preminger to cast Fonda as the ambitious liberal with a guilty past. Fonda’s forte had “always been truthfulness and virile sincerity, and yet he has always served as one of the heroic paladins of the New Deal–Popular Front Left.”
He fought the Fascists in Spain in Blockade, fought organized society in Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once, and embodied the aspirations of the rural proletariat as the hero in the Ford-Steinbeck Grapes of Wrath. There is something a bit wicked, perhaps too wicked, in casting our most truthful actor as a liar.
That was then. Sergio Leone (left-wing son of a Fascist father) went much farther when, making Once upon a Time in the West (1968) at the height of the Vietnam War, he cast the liberal paladin as evil incarnate. That same year, son Peter appeared as a new, befuddled Tom Joad heading back east in Easy Rider. A year after that, daughter Jane came into her own as John Wayne’s nemesis, the most political star in Hollywood history. The disapproving dad may have suffered a bit of Advise & Consent guilt by association, placed, like his kids, under FBI surveillance.
Henry Fonda for President more than makes the case for Fonda’s centrality in the American imaginary—what Norman Mailer called the nation’s dream life.
HFFP TAKES TITLE AND CLIPS from a two-part episode of the Norman Lear sitcom Maude (CBS, 1972–78), the All in the Family spin-off starring Bea Arthur as a brassy liberal analogue to her cousin by marriage, played by Archie Bunker. “Maude’s Mood,” originally telecast in early 1976, concerns her attempt to launch a Fonda political bandwagon. She fails. But if too sensible to buy into Maude’s fantasy, Fonda (Fonda) is sufficiently credulous to visit her Tuckahoe, New York, home, mistaking it for a community theater.
Inspired by Ronald Reagan’s late-’75 decision to challenge President Gerald Ford for the Republican nomination, “Maude’s Mood” used Hollywood politics as a topical hook but not as its essential concern; in the socially conscious tradition of Lear’s issue-based sitcoms, it meant to illuminate bipolar Maude’s manic tendencies.
In the context of HFFP, “Maude’s Mood” is a poignantly counterfactual dream (within the dream). For another honest country boy was the big victor that month: Jimmy Carter won the New Hampshire primary en route to the Democratic nomination. Meanwhile, the dream life crescendoed not with Reagan’s election but with his taking a bullet in March 1981.
Horwath acknowledges this by evoking Taxi Driver (1976), which opened a week after “Maude’s Mood” and would inspire John Hinckley’s attempt on Reagan’s life. Fonda, Horwath makes clear, despised Reagan. But Reagan (who embodied Hollywood more perfectly than any American who ever lived) naturally liked and likely identified with his comrade star and fellow Midwestern transplant.
Months before it opened in late 1981, the new president secured a screening of On Golden Pond—a crucial film in Horwath’s Fondagraphy for featuring the seventy-six-year-old star and daughter Jane, along with seventy-four-year-old Katharine Hepburn. The film was a “doddering valentine,” per Pauline Kael, to Hollywood’s greatest generation and generational reconciliation, as well as to the eternal values of WASP America. Fonda’s cinematic apotheosis was America’s second-highest-grossing film of that year, topped only by the first true Reagan-era movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.
A masterpiece of applied cinephilia, HFFP is a melancholy reminder that the mass Hollywood-driven illusions that produced Fonda and Reagan et al. are no more. The spell has been broken. Not that we’re awake: We live the Total Cinema Bardo created by talk radio, cable news, reality TV, iPhones, and social media. Horwath implicitly acknowledges this fragmentation when, while discussing Fonda’s Broadway career, he plunges into the nightly carnival of contemporary Times Square, where tourists are panhandled by garish cartoon characters, celebrity impersonators, and all manner of flamboyant weirdos. Inevitably the camera focuses on an outsize glad-hander with a freakish orange conk. Sudden thought: Was Joe Biden—age fifteen when 12 Angry Men opened—the last Fonda wannabe?
Back in May 2023, conservative pundit and sometime movie critic John Podhoretz published an article in the New York Post noting that as President Biden scheduled events between 10 AM and 4 PM, the previous day’s press conference, held at 6 PM, was one of the few public appearances made “after his tea-time ‘lid.’”
“Here’s what we learned,” Podhoretz wrote. “Joe Biden after 4 PM looks like a movie star. The problem is the movie star he looks like is Henry Fonda in On Golden Pond.” Two epistemological certainties followed: Joe Biden would not be growing younger, and “the American people never elected Henry Fonda.”
Henry Fonda for President will play in select theaters across the US in early 2025.
J. Hoberman’s books include the trilogy An Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War; The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties; and Make My Day: Movie Culture in the Age of Reagan.
