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?