The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda (12 page)

Produced by Walter Wanger and directed by Fritz Lang, Fonda’s eighth film is the first to become a socially resonant hit. Pauline Kael will later write that it “expressed certain feelings of its time,” and place it among the best American movies of the 1930s. It may be that, but it is also ravaged by age and convention: Too much of the screenplay is dull homily, and there is insufficient charge in the filmmaking. What charge there is comes in nighttime exteriors that are unnaturally beautiful and vibrant with symbol.

You Only Live Once
comes alive in the dark. Walking with Joan in a lushly overgrown garden of night, Eddie describes his first arrest—for beating up a kid he caught torturing a frog. The lovers are shown upside down in a pool of water. A frog crouches on a pad. Suddenly it jumps—exploding the water, the reflection, the moment, the future. Of course, it is the frog Eddie once tried to save, come up in time to prophesy doom. Fairy-tale elements are at work, as if Lang could revisit in his mind and conjure with his camera the Grimm-fabled forests of his lost Germany. The moment is just as corny, poetic, and touching as John Ford’s fade from the Sangamon in spring to the ice of winter, from a girl’s lovely face to her snowy grave.

But unlike Ford, Lang cannot find an equivalent poetry for his more functional scenes; the movie stiffens when aiming for the topical feel of social drama. It is up to Fonda to inject the necessary sense of pain and failure. His Eddie has the incipient ghostliness of a man under a death sentence, but Fonda grounds his life and death in prosaic agony. Observe the scene in which Eddie, who has been driving a truck, is fired for making a late delivery. Eddie begs the boss for a second chance. The scene is as pathetic as life, because Fonda doesn’t stint: He squirms as a man must sometimes squirm. He martyrs himself to the dumb humiliation of the scene, the wretched office, the dead-eyed man behind the desk.

Most stars avoid portraying this kind of pain—the unglamorous, unviolent pain inflicted by power. How does it redound to a star’s glory to remind us too much of ourselves, especially ourselves as we squirm? Fonda’s offering is not to mime this scene, but to squirm it. And though we resent the absence of glamour, we can’t fail to accept that offering as a gift of the soul.

Later, Eddie is on death row. To set up an escape, he cuts his wrists. They are hidden behind his back as he bends a tin cup and cuts himself on the crease. Lang shoots it as a staring match between caged man and jailer. The guard leans back, smugly smoking a pipe; Eddie faces him, sweating and trembling. A vein rises in his forehead; his jaw grinds; his eyes fix on those of the guard as if he were cutting the man’s throat. And what is he doing with his hands? Fonda has found the
look
of murder, and it is all about presence as absence: the power of what is not seen.

The bravery and bitter clarity of this performance are striking next to its descendant of thirty years later, Warren Beatty in
Bonnie and Clyde.
The bank robbers of the 1967 Arthur Penn film are, in the bodies of Beatty and Faye Dunaway, pure creatures of pop, and when they are shot up at the end, the styling of the mayhem has enormous glamour. But Eddie’s end is only the release of a miserable creature from the curse of life. He is a loser, whereas Beatty’s Clyde is a winner, right down to his blazing exit: Clyde dies the kind of explosive death children imagine themselves dying.

But no child ever imagined dying like Eddie, nor any adult: sobbing, holding his dead lover, seeking an angel in the trees. Eddie dies quietly, pathetically. No one will remember him.

*   *   *

Fonda is a watcher, a skeptic; he loves America and often hates what it does to people, or what people do in its name. His ascension in the late 1930s as angry man and antihero suggests a through-line to the audience, an understanding of subtleties and of the swelling waves of bad feeling in the land. His performances of these years do not come from nothing.

Asked how the Great Depression affected him, Henry said, “I was barely aware of it. We were in a depression as actors all the time.” But he would have been in New York on October 29, 1929, near enough to the epicenter to hear the howls of alarm thrown up from the Financial District as the stock market crashed on Black Tuesday. Most likely, he was in glum rehearsal for his nonspeaking Broadway debut in
The Game of Love and Death,
which would open on November 25 to an audience with suddenly weightier preoccupations.

The crash is not the cause of the Depression, only the harbinger of an impending collision—namely, the collapse of the enduring American myth that anyone with sufficient nerve can be a millionaire overnight. That collapse results in the anger of the 1930s, and in new forms of unity and awareness. People now have to figure out what they owe one another, what they are owed by their government, and how the present system will or will not allow them to live justly. The thirties are extraordinary in modern American history for being a time of sustained debate about capitalism, and of daily doubt about the assumptions and goals of the republic.

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal is a response to this. Within months of taking office in 1932, Roosevelt initiates a broad battery of social programs and agencies—from the Civilian Conservation Corps to the Soil Conservation Service, from the Social Security Administration to the Farm Security Administration—with short-term goals and long-term aspirations. There are successes and failures in the execution, inequities and flaws built into the New Deal, but it is a reformation in ideas of how American government can and should influence citizens’ lives. It tries to do what the government of a republic is meant to do—use the mechanisms and resources of bureaucracy to extend the democratic promise to those most in need of it.

Those most in need number in the millions. Miserable and disquieted, forced onto the open road of a doubtful future, they are searching, listening, asking, thinking—and meeting each other. In the mid- and late 1930s, a phantom allegiance of the dispossessed grows from the enforced proximity of divergent lives. As James Baldwin puts it, “In a way, we were all niggers in the thirties.… [I]t was harder then, and riskier, to attempt a separate peace, and benign neglect was not among our possibilities.”

Many Americans are recognizing themselves for the first time as part of a larger body, a mass of desperation and displacement. “And because they were lonely and perplexed,” John Steinbeck writes, “because they had all come from a place of sadness and worry and defeat, and because they were all going to a new mysterious place, they huddled together; they talked together; they shared their lives, their food, and the things they hoped for in the new country.”

*   *   *

But there have always been those Americans who decline to pose for the family portrait, or march in the patriotic pageant. These are the “Don’t tread on me” Americans, the loners whose lives are none of your business. Their desire is to live outside the apple-pie order—in a sense, to vanish—and the civil right they prize above all is the one Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis called “the right to be left alone.” They’re found on the margins of eccentric artworks arising from the dust of the 1930s: Woody Guthrie’s
Bound for Glory
; Edward Hopper’s paintings; the novels of James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, Nathanael West, and Tom Kromer; the music of Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta—all of them drawn again and again to murder, flight, homelessness, the open road as romantic dream or dangerous reality.

The best prewar performances of Henry Fonda belong in that class. The loner represents his darker aspect, as it does that of the American character—as, in Edmund Wilson’s words, “the America of the murders and rapes that fill the Los Angeles papers is only the obverse side of the America of the inanities of the movies.” Fonda offers two truths, sometimes at once: the grudging recognitions of souls on the open road, and the social revulsion of the born outsider. He alternates between self-reliant American and cooperative American, between forsaking the community and taking his place within it. Doing either, he embodies a critique of a foundering system, a new sense of what is absent in the public life of the nation.

*   *   *

As Depression deprivation gives the wage earner a thirst for economic alternatives, it gives the American moviegoer (often, of course, they are the same person) a desire for aesthetic alternatives—for escapist spectacle on the one hand and, on the other, for a granular simplicity and attention to something resembling ordinary working life.

Slim
(1937) is a drama about the new breed of electrical linemen engaged by the New Deal to rig live wires across the country. Though it’s not a hit, its attitudes are of the moment, and it exploits the associations an audience brings to Fonda: Evoking Dan Harrow, he appears, in the first scene, as a farmer with a horse team and plow. But Slim’s ambition is to get off the plow and scale the pole, hang wires and jolt America into its new age. Fonda goes electric! The choreography of man and technology incarnates the mechanical romanticism of the thirties: There is less feeling in
Slim
’s saccharine romance than in the single hair-raising shot of two WPA daredevils climbing poles in symmetry as a train shrieks across the limitless landscape behind them.

The 1938 Henry Hathaway actioner
Spawn of the North
, about salmon fishermen, likewise belongs to the now-dormant tradition of films about men engaged in dangerous, important work in out-of-the-way areas. Second-billed to George Raft, Fonda is convincing when throwing ropes and pulling nets; his body is made for controlled, efficient action. He is less adept at macho boisterousness: Shouting is unnatural to his fine voice, and his roaring laughter sounds false. But
Spawn of the North,
while not political, is prole-sympathetic by virtue of being work-centered; it’s a stage in Fonda’s movement from laborer to labor organizer, working man to union man.

Out of the apolitical worker develops, in due course, the radical.
Blockade
(1938) begins as a collaboration between playwright Clifford Odets and director Lewis Milestone. It’s a drama of the Spanish Civil War—a war begun in 1936 between Republican Loyalists on the left and the Falangist forces of the dictatorial Francisco Franco on the right. There is significant Franco support in the United States, most of it Catholic; meanwhile, the Loyalist cause has become a preoccupation of engagé artists and intellectuals like Ernest Hemingway, Jean Renoir, and
Blockade
’s producer, Walter Wanger—still a social-climbing liberal crusader, and still Henry Fonda’s putative owner.

Worried about offending the Catholic moviegoer and the spirit of U.S. neutrality, the Hays Office, which administers the Motion Picture Production Code, instructs Wanger to remove any direct references to the Spanish war. Milestone and Odets drop out, to be replaced by William Dieterle, a director with more passion in his heart than in his eye, and screenwriter John Howard Lawson. Identifying detail is expunged, until the screenplay is as potted and inert as the dwarf palm in an executive’s office. “The story does not attempt to favor any cause in the present conflict,” a studio disclaimer assures the public.

As it happens, the message comes through plainly enough—but no one cares. Fonda, cast as a Spanish farmer who becomes a guerilla leader, makes a peculiarly stringy revolutionary hero, lacking virility in movement or nobility in speech. “We’re a part of something, something greater than we are,” runs his closing exhortation. “Those people out there—we’ve given them hope again—you and I.” Then a pompous cymbal crash, and Fonda’s cry: “Where’s the conscience of the world?”

That speech is not so different from the parting words of Tom Joad. Yet we regard the one blankly and are held rapt by the other.
The Grapes of Wrath
will be an infinitely better film than
Blockade,
largely because it has men like John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Gregg Toland behind it, but also because everything strong and true in it—its socialism, humanism, and skepticism—will come to us through Fonda. As Tom Joad, he can express that part of himself that wishes to be an engaged American, a part of the big soul, as well as that other part, the one that would like to vanish.

*   *   *

No American novel quite like
The Grapes of Wrath
had been written before, its style freighting newspaper headlines with the grandeur of eternal odysseys. Its protagonists, the Joads—a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers displaced by exhausted soil and bank foreclosure, driven west to California—were a clan of homeless hicks; they were also the Israelites. Tom Joad, oldest son and defiant soul of the family, freshly paroled on a manslaughter charge, was a mythic avenger, purified by hunger and politicized by the raw deal. There was color, poetry, and panorama to the Joads’ long story, and that sense common to all ambitious popular fictions that an entire society had been put in orbit around a set of recognizable but remarkable figures.

The dust bowl resulted from western soil that had been parched and depleted over decades by a market demanding overcultivation of cash crops, particularly cotton. Croppers went so deep in debt to banks that they became tenants on land they’d once owned. When the Depression came, the banks sold the land, tractors flattened homes, and the exodus began: Approximately one million people headed west, drawn by handbills claiming a shortage of fruit pickers in the California valleys. At journey’s end, most of the Okies—the migrants’ collective name, no matter where they came from—were greeted only with the usurious practices of migrant camp operators, deputized thugs, and the resentments of pickers already in place.

The Grapes of Wrath
was published in April 1939, when the Depression was already considered, prematurely, to be over and rumors of war in Europe were the new focus of mass worry. But the book rang chords of controversy. Some dismissed it as Soviet propaganda, while others were convinced the nation had its great novel at last. The book’s impact reached the highest level of American influence. “I have read a book,” President Roosevelt told a White House conference in January 1940. “It is called
The Grapes of Wrath
and there are five hundred thousand Americans that live in the covers of that book.” It became a bestseller, won the Pulitzer Prize, and was sold, days after publication, to Twentieth Century–Fox for $100,000.