Henry Fonda

The Lady Eve

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Charles and Jean cheek to cheek

The Lady Eve is a brilliant piece of writing by Preston Sturges, and playing by Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck. Screwball comedy you could call it, or a comedy of remarriage, maybe, except nobody remarries. But that is the guiding idea – two people who have been together and possibly will be again, if fate can be encouraged to remove the many obstacles in their path. Fonda plays a wealthy brewing heir who meets a young woman and her father on board a ship sailing back from the Amazon, where he’s just spent a year indulging his passion for snakes. Jean (Stanwyck) and the “Colonel” (Charles Coburn) are a pair of con artists … Read more

The Long Night

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A contemplative Joe

The Long Night is a remake of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Lève hoping to do for American audiences what Carné’s film had done for the French – wow them. It was a flop, in spite of having a good cast, a fine director and top flight technical team. In case anyone wanted to make a direct comparison, before it came out RKO took the precaution of buying up all the prints of Carné’s film and destroying them. Luckily, not absolutely all of them, so now we can enjoy the Carné original and watch it alongside the remake to work out what went wrong. I’ll just say it here – timidity is the … Read more

Fail Safe

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Translator Buck and the US president

The dark twin of Dr Strangelove, Fail Safe came out the same year as Kubrick’s film and was sued by him over copyright infringement. There wasn’t any, but for a quiet life Kubrick’s studio, Columbia, played along and released his film first in January, then Sidney Lumet’s film later in the year. Both films are reactions to the Cuban Missile Crisis two years before, a point in history when events seemed to gain a traction all of their own and humans seemed powerless to prevent what looked like a slide towards nuclear war between the USA and USSR. Both Strangelove and Fail Safe ask the question: what if humans really hadn’t been able … Read more

The Return of Frank James

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A dignified Henry Fonda as Frank James

So The Return of Frank James it had to be, what with Frank’s brother Jesse James having died at the end of his eponymous 1939 movie. No sequel featuring hotshot outlaw Jesse being possible, how about one all about his more grounded older brother, the big sell being that Henry Fonda had been persuaded to return to the role? Boring Frank to sexy Jesse, on the face of it that’s not much of a proposition. And yet director Fritz Lang squeezes a good movie out of it, by focusing on the film’s looks. This is one of the handsomest westerns ever made. Shot in Technicolor and using locations Lang had scouted while prepping … Read more

The Wrong Man

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Henry Fonda in hat

Atypical and yet very typical, 1956’s The Wrong Man is Alfred Hitchcock’s tilt at those noirish ripped-from-the-headlines crime dramas that were all the rage when people still said “all the rage”, films sold on authenticity and with a dedication to telling it how it was. That’s what’s behind Hitchcock dropping his usual comedy cameo early in this movie and settling instead on a moody, backlit intro in which the man himself informs us that what we are about to see is stranger than all the films he’s made before, and yet… “this is a true story. Every bit of it.” He is pretty much as good as his word. This is the story … Read more

Daisy Kenyon

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Joan Crawford and Henry Fonda

Let’s just get this out of the way. Daisy Kenyon isn’t a film noir, even though it features on many noir “best of” lists. It’s a romantic melodrama of a very peculiar sort – “High powered melodrama surefire for the femme market” is how Variety described it on its release in 1947, in their odd, truncated way of communicating. More up-to-the-minute viewpoints can be found on Amazon – “NOT a true example of film noir”… “certainly not a film noir”… “DEFINITELY NOT FILM NOIR” – three of many. However, the tagging persists. It’s in the Fox Film Noir series of movies, its Amazon page pegs it as “Mystery & Suspense/Film Noir”, which is doubly, … Read more

You Only Live Once

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Joan and Eddie on the run

Fritz Lang’s second Hollywood picture, You Only Live Once, was released in 1937, three years after the death of Bonnie and Clyde, and was the first movie to tell their story – sort of. A tale of bad luck and trouble rather than one of bad people doing bad things, it stars Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney as a couple in love – she a sweet girl who works for the Public Defender, he a threetime jailbird determined to go straight and make an honest woman of his wife-to-be but finding that society won’t give this sucker an even break. Blocked at every turn, Eddie (as Clyde is called here) turns back to … Read more

Once Upon a Time in the West

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Henry Fonda is the baddie in Once Upon A Time In The West

By 1967, after countless Italian sword and sandal epics and three astonishingly successful spaghetti  Westerns (A Fistful Of Dollars, A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad And The Ugly), director Sergio Leone was tired of men in period costume and was eager to try his hand at something more contemporary. It wasn’t to be. Paramount studios prevailed upon Leone to make one more western for them. In return they promised to fund his four-hour, four-decade overview of organised crime, Once Upon a Time in America. Leone’s fourth Western could easily have turned out to be a 90-minute contractual obligation, with Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and whoever was available squinting hard into the … Read more