ASH: Fonda’s choices as an actor in movies weren’t always his own. But he does seem to have been drawn to characters from the underclass—the unemployed, the falsely accused, the downtrodden, victims of the Depression. We learn in your film that Fonda, when he was 14, witnessed from his father’s office the infamous lynching of Will Brown, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman in Omaha in 1919, and that it left him with a profound sense of outrage that he carried through his life. Do you think that experience led him to films that included lynchings? Young Mr. Lincoln, The Ox-Bow Incident, The Male Animal, and Once Upon a Time in the West all deal, in one way or another, with innocent men being lynched or executed.
AH: I do. It's an event he often talked about in interviews. How it shocked him and that it was an important part of how his worldview was formed. But as becomes clear in my film, he would never publicly accept the notion that through his work as an actor he was able to transform such experiences and convictions into a kind of personal authorship. Part of it is the choice of roles, whenever he did have a hand in it, an inclination towards certain subjects. But what’s equally important is the way he acts, the delivery, as Isaac Stern tells him in our excerpt from The Dick Cavett Show.
ASH: The quote you include from James Baldwin is revelatory. How was it that Fonda could be seen as not-white when he is also the consummate WASP?
AH: That’s hard to say. But when I read this in Baldwin’s book about watching movies, The Devil Finds Work—recalling his conversation with a Black friend who thought that Fonda’s walk at the end of The Grapes of Wrath is not a white man’s walk—it chimed with my feelings about Fonda. There is a long passage Baldwin writes about You Only Live Once, where he already goes into his ideas about Fonda and Sylvia Sidney. That was an important film to him, and through that he comes to the part about his friend saying that about Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath.
These are all projections, of course, but like Baldwin’s friend in the 1940s I think there is more to Fonda than his Midwestern identity, the American Gothic type that friends and family often saw in him. He contains, as they say, multitudes, and I felt that some of these layers or souls that walk with him could be made visible.