Juror #8: Henry Fonda (Part 1)

You’re a sadist.

Henry Fonda’s “Juror #8” (or “Davis” as he finally introduces himself) is the ostensible hero of “12 Angry Men,” the individual who initially stands alone against derision, impatience, apathy and hate. All of this is true, but the real triumph of Fonda’s character is that he succeeds in bringing out the best in some of the men around him, allowing them to become heroes in their own rights. What is remarkable in Fonda’s performance is his rare ability to embody humble integrity, even in moments when the character is kind of being a pompous jerk. Next time you see the film, consider his actions from moment to moment rather than as a whole, and you will see a man who is willing to get his hands dirty in service to an ideal. Despite Juror #7’s pronouncement that he has the “soft sell,” Fonda’s character is neither subtle, nor kind when arguing his case with sledgehammers like jurors 3 & 10. If you want an omelette, you gotta break a few eggs.

Henry Jaynes Fonda was born to a family of Dutch extraction in Grand Island, Nebraska in 1905, which means that he was already 52 by the time he produced and starred in “12 Angry Men.” As we shall see, he had already had a very substantial career prior to that production, and would also do so after it. The breadth and depth of Fonda’s work is truly enviable.
His family was close-knit and religious, and young Henry lived the life of a prototypical American boy, skating, swimming, drawing, and participating as a Boy Scout (there is disagreement about whether he reached the rank of Life or Eagle Scout). His political and professional futures were strongly influenced when he witnessed the Omaha race riots of 1919 and the lynching of Will Brown, a young African-American accused of rape. After he graduated from high school in 1923, Fonda attended the University of Minnesota, intending to major in journalism. He held two jobs while also taking classes, and this stretch on his schedule is sometimes blamed for his dropping out after just two years.
Upon returning to Omaha, Fonda was asked to audition for a role at Omaha Community Playhouse by family friend, Dodie Brando, and he was instantly in love with the theatre. He took on all kinds of work at the playhouse, building sets, painting, ushering, and acting. Fonda found that his natural shyness and reticence could be overcome on stage while he was portraying another person and using written words. After five years in Omaha, Fonda decided to pursue acting professionally. He left the Omaha Playhouse and headed east, eventually landing in New York. Dodie’s 4-year-old son Marlon would follow in his footsteps several years later.
In a stop at Cape Cod, he had picked up a life-long friend in fellow actor James Stewart, and the two wound up as roommates during lean years in Depression-era New York. After several years doing summer stock and playing small roles on Broadway, Fonda’s big break came when he originated a lead role in the critically lauded “The Farmer Takes A Wife.” Fonda’s success in this play led to a film contract and the 1935 film version alongside Janet Gaynor. He received strong notices for the film, and immediately began working steadily in lead roles, including in “The Trail of Lonesome Pine” (1936), “Slim” (1937), and “That Certain Woman” (1937) with Bette Davis.

Davis requested to work with Fonda again in 1938’s “Jezebel,” and the film brought good reviews for both and made her a star. In a much later interview, Fonda would quip, “I’ve been close to Bette Davis for 38 years, and I have the cigarette burns to prove it.” Fonda made nine more films from 1938 to 1939, including roles as Frank James in “Jesse James” and Thomas Watson in “The Story of Alexander Graham Bell.”

His next big role came when he was convinced to take the part of Abraham Lincoln in a mildly fictionalized telling of the 16th President’s early life, “Young Mr. Lincoln” (1939). This film marked Fonda’s first work with legendary director John Ford, who turned his opinion on playing the role by letting him know that he would simply be playing a principled young lawyer and not “the great emancipator.” The pair made “Drums Along the Mohawk” together that same year, setting the stage for a massive success for both the next year.

Ford cast Fonda in one of the most iconic roles of his, or any actor’s, career in 1940’s towering Steinbeck adaptation “The Grapes of Wrath.” Fonda played the passionate young Tom Joad, giving one of the immortal speeches in American film history.

Well maybe it’s like Casy says. A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own. Just a little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody, then…then it don’t matter. I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere. wherever you can look-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. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there too.

It’s a thrilling few moments of quiet intensity, and it helped Fonda gain his first Oscar nomination for lead actor. If there were any previous questions about whether Fonda was a star, “The Grapes of Wrath” put them to bed.

Three more 1940 films followed, including another turn as Frank James in “The Return of Frank James.”

1941 brought a change in roles for Fonda due to a seven-year contract he signed as part of his deal to play Tom Joad over Darryl Zanuck’s preferred Tyrone Power. He co-starred in the witty Preston Sturges romantic comedy “The Lady Eve” with Barbara Stanwyck and Charles Coburn. Fonda plays a naive young reptile scientist and heir to a brewery fortune who becomes the target of Stanwyck and Coburn’s confidence games. Of course their plans get upset when she falls for Fonda for real. It is a reasonably predictable, but very entertaining comedy. I wonder if 1940s audiences found it as predictable as we might today? Film was still a relatively young medium, so maybe those audiences were not as jaded. Anyway, “The Lady Eve” is far superior to 90% of the romantic comedies made over the past 20 years by any rate…and Stanwyck was never lovelier.

Fonda and Stanwyck teamed up for another romantic comedy, “You Belong to Me” later the same year in which he played another well-to-do and idle young man. The next year’s “The Male Animal” (above) featured Fonda as an English professor, with Olivia de Havilland as his wife. A continued string of comedies and romances followed in which Fonda was paired with Gene Tierney (“Rings on Her Fingers”), Ginger Rogers (“Tales of Manhattan”), and Lucille Ball (“The Big Street”).

1943 releases “Immortal Sergeant” and “The Ox-Bow Incident” returned Fonda to his wheelhouse in epic dramas. “The Ox-Bow Incident” in particular stands out as a signature project for Fonda, as it combines some of his preferred elements as a western, and a drama with a moral conscience. It is a tautly-told story that presages Fonda’s involvement in “12 Angry Men” and puts him in a cast that also features Dana Andrews (“Laura”), Anthony Quinn (“Zorba the Greek”), and Harry Morgan (“M*A*S*H”). Unfortunately, it would be Fonda’s last film released for three more years.

Despite Zanuck attempting to use his influence to retain him and keep him from the war, Fonda volunteered to serve in the United States Navy. Fonda was exempt from serving, but earned a Bronze Star and Presidential citation for his work in operations and air combat intelligence during World War II. He was discharged in 1945 at the rank of Lieutenant, JG.

Following a little time off after returning from the Pacific, Fonda rekindled his working relationship with John Ford. 1946’s “My Darling Clementine” featured Fonda as Wyatt Earp. It has been called Ford’s “greatest western” by film critic Roger Ebert, and listed as favorites by both director Sam Peckinpah and the fictional Colonel Potter of TV’s “M*A*S*H.”

Fonda’s next collaboration with Ford came two years later with “Fort Apache,” a U.S. cavalry drama also starring John Wayne, Ward Bond, and a disturbingly fetching 19-year-old Shirley Temple. Fonda’s role is uncharacteristically unsympathetic. His Lt Colonel Thursday is the kind of officer who would lead off an early interaction with his men by saying “I’m not a martinet,” and then spend the rest of the film proving otherwise.

After finishing off his seven-year contract with Fox, Fonda declined further long-term contracts to take on a project which would both severely curtail his film work for several years and make him an American film icon for another generation at the age of fifty.

Broadway welcomed Fonda back in the title role of the World War II comedy-drama “Mister Roberts,” co-written by Thomas Heggen and Joshua Logan. The play was a sensation, running for almost three years, and winning Tony Awards, both as “Best Play” and for Fonda as lead actor. Fonda wore his own Naval officer’s cap from his years in the Pacific while playing the role. Although rehearsing for and appearing in over a thousand performances of “Mister Roberts” precluded much film work, that does not seem to fully explain Fonda’s absence from Hollywood. He did appear in two other plays during the six-year film slump showing on his resume, and was going through a messy divorce, but his son Peter suggested in his memoir that a sort of “grey-listing” of his father due to his liberal views during the time of McCarthyism was partly to blame.

When he did finally return to filmmaking, it was to create a movie version of the award-winning “Mister Roberts” with long-time collaborator John Ford. But something happened between the men during the production which resulted in Ford sucker-punching Fonda and being relieved of his directing duties. The content of the arguments between Fonda and Ford has never fully come to light, but neither man has been renowned for being easy to work with, and there is some suggestion that Fonda disliked the direction Ford was taking the film in. Mervyn LeRoy stepped in and completed shooting the film, based largely on Ford’s pre-existing takes. When these shots were completed, Fonda asked Joshua Logan, who had directed the play on Broadway, to re-shoot major portions of the script, which he did, although his name does not officially appear beside Ford’s and LeRoy’s under “director.” Fonda and Ford never worked together again.

Despite all the trouble and intrigue on set, the film version of “Mister Roberts” was a huge critical and financial success. Audiences flocked to see it, making it #2 at the box office in 1955, and each of its top four leads, including Fonda, William Powell, James Cagney, and Jack Lemmon added iconic characters to their filmographies. The film was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, and Lemmon won his first statuette for Best Supporting Actor. It was a triumphant return to the big screen for Fonda, and he became a bigger star than he’d been before.

A film version of Leo Tolstoy’s epic Russian historical novel “War and Peace,” co-starring Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer did good box office receipts in 1956, but critics still can’t agree on how good it is. For his part, Fonda believed that script changes made by King Vidor and his wife during shooting degraded the film and “all the genius of Tolstoy went out the window.”

Later that same year, Fonda appeared in director Alfred Hitchcock’s pet project “The Wrong Man,” in which he played a man accused of burglary who cannot prove that he didn’t do it. The story was based almost fact-for-fact on a real life case which had fascinated Hitchcock, who had a pathological fear of being locked up in a jail cell himself due to a bad experience as a child. Perhaps because of its strict adherence to the true case, “The Wrong Man” drags in places and doesn’t really pay off as a crime film, but more as a psychological study of one of the supporting characters.

Fonda took on the big job of producing a film for his next project, deciding on a big screen adaptation of the Reginald Rose teleplay “12 Angry Men.” Fonda also starred in the story of a tense jury deliberation over a seemingly open-and-shut murder case. Directed masterfully by Sidney Lumet and featuring Lee J Cobb, Ed Begley, and a group of then largely unknown actors, “12 Angry Men” was critically lauded and won multiple honors. This included winning the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, a listing for Best American Film by the National Board of Review, and Oscar nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Fonda himself won the British Academy Award for “Actor (Foreign)” for his portrayal of “Juror #8.” Despite all of this acclaim, “12 Angry Men” was initially a box office bomb and a financial disaster mediated only by its small production budget. Fonda swore he would never produce another film, and stuck to his word. Only when the film began running regularly on television (and in high school classrooms) did it begin to attain its current status as a classic. The later success of its cast must be factored in its hindsight appeal.

Two more westerns, “The Tin Star” (1957) co-starring Norman Bates and Jason Vorhees’ Mother, and “Warlock” (1959) with Richard Widmark and Anthony Quinn had to stabilize things for Fonda after the financial failure of his producing debut “12 Angry Men.”

The same cannot be said for 1959’s utter rat turd “The Man Who Understood Women.” In preparing for these articles, I have watched plenty of disappointing or even boring films. None of them has been as inept and nonsensical as writer/director Nunnally Johnson’s searingly unfunny romantic comedy about terribly stupid and immoral, but somehow successful people. Leslie Caron is a beautiful leading lady, but I am left thinking that even craft services must have somehow dropped the ball on this one. Why else are the proceedings so listless and flat? Do yourself a favor and NEVER see “The Man Who Understood Women.”

I mean…jeez…the title doesn’t even seem to have anything to do with the film, I…okay okay, I’m done. I’m done.

Despite Fonda’s vow never to produce a feature film again, the same promise was never made about television, and he was soon co-producing and starring in the western show “The Deputy.” It ran for 76 episodes, from 1959 through 1961, and it appears that Fonda concentrated almost exclusively on “The Deputy” during its production time. He did not reappear on the big screen until 1962, by which time the show had run its course.

That’s when another winning streak began.

Read about all 12 Angry Men here-
Martin Balsam
John Fiedler
Lee J Cobb
E G Marshall
Jack Klugman
Edward Binns
Jack Warden
Henry Fonda 2
Joseph Sweeney
Ed Begley
George Voskovec
Robert Webber

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lebeau
Admin
11 years ago

Wow! Epic article. You have really outdone yourself!
I love the little details. I had no idea Fonda and Stewart were friends. I went through an intense Hitchcock phase in high school, so I know the childhood incident you referenced. I wondered if you would and then there it was. You don’t miss a thing.
Great as always. Can’t wait for part 2.

Danielle Charney
Danielle Charney
11 years ago

Covered and well- the early history of the great starts is always of interest to me- where they came from and what motivated them- this is a great post – thanks

Anthony.Strand@gmail.com

I’m so happy this series is back. It’s been such a delight, and this is maybe the best one yet. Can’t wait for the last four!

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