The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney Page B

Fonda begins to cultivate anger in his acting. As he achieves stardom, his protagonists seek anonymity. The more materially comfortable he becomes, the more his characters are defined by class conflict. Fonda’s acting continues to grow, mainly through a commitment to showing pain and doubt on-screen. It can’t be accidental that, with few exceptions, all of Fonda’s greatest work comes in the years he is married to Frances—or the years just after, as he deals with her specter.
    His persona splits in the late 1930s into two modes: that of the wanted man and the workingman. In the first group are films like You Only Live Once, Let Us Live, Jesse James, and The Return of Frank James; in the second, films such as Slim, Blockade, Spawn of the North , Drums Along the Mohawk , and The Grapes of Wrath. In either mode, Fonda projects anger over affirmation. Even playing Watson, assistant to the inventor in The Story of Alexander Graham Bell (1939), Henry pours a little acid on the refined sugar of costars Don Ameche and Loretta Young, implying the existence of another, realer world outside the frame.
    He is almost always more convincing, attractive, and memorable when at odds with something—the situation, the community, himself. Witness his pivotal success in Jesse James : As brother Frank, Henry injects the prestige Western of 1939 with the unstintingly mean style of a man born to hate. The Return of Frank James (1940), an inert and pointless sequel, opportunistically apes the ambience and even the plot of the recent Young Mr. Lincoln, contriving Frank’s rescue of an innocent man from lynching. Directed by an uninspired Fritz Lang, Frank James sacrifices the Jesse James sensation of Fonda as a bracingly bitter taste in a bowl of corn mush—which was all that gave the first film its savor and surprise.
    Two other films of this period— You Only Live Once (1937) and Let Us Live (1939)—star Fonda as the luckless modern man before the bar of justice, in whom simplicities of guilt and innocence are blurred. The character is wrongly accused, but he troubles the narrative and the audience by always seeming guilty: he wears a cloak of existential shame, and his redemption is deflated by feelings of futility.
    We are well out of Zane Gray country here, and brushing up against Kafka. In these two films—made prior to World War II but containing some of what that war was about—Fonda’s nervous, acidulous persona interacts with a modernist sense of defeat, and lays blocks in the foundation of film noir. Look at the era: The aftermath of the Depression wearies America, as do recurrent clashes among Communists, capitalists, and socialists. War brews overseas: Henry Fonda has seen Hitler’s Reich up close and made his hasty escape, as millions of Europeans in these years will not have the luxury of doing. The world pulses with horrors happening and waiting to happen. So You Only Live Once and Let Us Live —listen to those titles—have, whatever their flaws and evasions, a new urgency to press on their audiences, a new conviction about the value of life.
    The new dramatic setup, and the new popular fear it answers, force from Fonda new effects. The contrasts are exciting as the farmer goes to the city and turns fugitive, and the actor escapes Americana to emerge in the here and now of an explosive and terrifying time.
    Set in a nameless, sunless American city, Let Us Live centers on Fonda’s Brick, a hard-boiled cabbie with a devoted sweetheart (Maureen O’Sullivan), middle-class dreams, and a “representative” face. Brick and his friend Joe—whose pinko talk of social injustice affiliates him with John Steinbeck’s radical Okies—are erroneously fingered as the perpetrators of a fatal holdup. They’re marched through the legal system, past trial and conviction to the point of execution, before being rescued by chance. But rather than redeemed, Brick is made more cynical: The process of justice has been one of