The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney Page B
Book: The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda by Devin McKinney
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Authors: Devin McKinney
Tags: Reference, Humor & Entertainment, Biographies, Biographies & Memoirs, Movies, Arts & Literature, Actors & Entertainers, Actors & Actresses
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license from the New York State Department of Health. (Under “Occupation,” Henry puts “Artist”; Sullavan enters a dash, as if waving off a silly question.)
When the University Players are invited to Baltimore for a nine-week season of repertory in the fall of 1931, Sullavan—fresh from the road company—rejoins as a minor star. Fonda initially objects to Sullavan’s return but soon the two are, to no one’s surprise, again a hot item. They are noted by gossip columnists and become minor Baltimore celebrities. But Henry has grown more combative and self-protective, and their battles are epic: “They fought so terribly,” says one witness, “that you’d have to get out of the room.”
And so, following the logic of doomed couples throughout history, they decide to get married. They apply for a new license, this time at Baltimore City Hall, and then lie about it: When the application is exposed in a local gossip column, Sullavan denies it exists. But the lie is revealed soon enough, and the two marry in the dining room of the Kernan Hotel on Christmas Day, 1931.
H. W. B. Donegan of Christ Episcopal Church officiates, and the Falmouth gang is in attendance. But it’s a glum affair, with no blissful effusions from the couple. Nothing is said about eternity—they know themselves at least that well.
* * *
If the young, raw Henry can be found anywhere on film, it is in his romantic comedies of the later 1930s. They are themselves malformed, irrational, stupefying, full of pratfalls and low comedy. Fonda’s strangled voicings and desperate gestures are often less hysterically funny than simply hysterical.
Conceived as a gilded chariot for French opera star Lily Pons, touted by RKO as a high-line import item, the musical-comedy romance I Dream Too Much (1935) has a proto-Cassavetes scenario about a volatile marriage capped by an elaborately wacko musical climax. As a struggling composer whose wife becomes a singing sensation, Henry is intense, controlling, and dangerously jealous. It’s not all script, either: The character as written is insane, but Henry makes him more so. His mood swings are out of balance with the air of triviality, and they are not eased by a climax that turns the composer’s wretched opera into an orgy of Deco production, leaving behind scenes from marital hell and memories of emotional violence bobbing like body parts.
Often a Fonda comedy’s only tension comes from what is repressed. That Certain Woman (1937) is, as well as a comedy, a morbid soap opera highlighted by premature death, an illegitimate child, and a crippled wife named Flip. Yet it’s dull for all that, except in flashes, here and there, of Fonda playing one of his very few weak-willed characters. What he represses, and therefore expresses, are doubts about himself—about his power. Is he a match for Bette Davis? Is he a match for any woman, let alone her master? Henry is most endearing when the butch Davis teases him for not being rugged enough, and the Fonda voice, that classically placid and soothing instrument, tightens to a near shriek.
A better-worse example is The Mad Miss Manton (1938)—a terrible movie, but one in which gremlins of repression and expression run rampant. “You are a nasty creature, aren’t you?” Fonda asks Barbara Stanwyck. “But in time I’ll beat it out of you.” Tremble, temptresses! But Henry’s efforts at masculine dominance are only funny. In one scene, he is bound, gagged, and stuffed in a bed next to a pop-eyed China doll; elsewhere, he plays a comic death scene as a cop warbles “Home on the Range.” The Mad Miss Manton is broken at intervals by piercing screams; they might represent the cri de coeur of Fonda’s hapless man in a world of willful women who force him into silence, a suffocating bed, a dishonorable grave.
These films are painful, but they are in varying degrees alive, because they draw on the tension between Fonda’s challenged manliness and the
When the University Players are invited to Baltimore for a nine-week season of repertory in the fall of 1931, Sullavan—fresh from the road company—rejoins as a minor star. Fonda initially objects to Sullavan’s return but soon the two are, to no one’s surprise, again a hot item. They are noted by gossip columnists and become minor Baltimore celebrities. But Henry has grown more combative and self-protective, and their battles are epic: “They fought so terribly,” says one witness, “that you’d have to get out of the room.”
And so, following the logic of doomed couples throughout history, they decide to get married. They apply for a new license, this time at Baltimore City Hall, and then lie about it: When the application is exposed in a local gossip column, Sullavan denies it exists. But the lie is revealed soon enough, and the two marry in the dining room of the Kernan Hotel on Christmas Day, 1931.
H. W. B. Donegan of Christ Episcopal Church officiates, and the Falmouth gang is in attendance. But it’s a glum affair, with no blissful effusions from the couple. Nothing is said about eternity—they know themselves at least that well.
* * *
If the young, raw Henry can be found anywhere on film, it is in his romantic comedies of the later 1930s. They are themselves malformed, irrational, stupefying, full of pratfalls and low comedy. Fonda’s strangled voicings and desperate gestures are often less hysterically funny than simply hysterical.
Conceived as a gilded chariot for French opera star Lily Pons, touted by RKO as a high-line import item, the musical-comedy romance I Dream Too Much (1935) has a proto-Cassavetes scenario about a volatile marriage capped by an elaborately wacko musical climax. As a struggling composer whose wife becomes a singing sensation, Henry is intense, controlling, and dangerously jealous. It’s not all script, either: The character as written is insane, but Henry makes him more so. His mood swings are out of balance with the air of triviality, and they are not eased by a climax that turns the composer’s wretched opera into an orgy of Deco production, leaving behind scenes from marital hell and memories of emotional violence bobbing like body parts.
Often a Fonda comedy’s only tension comes from what is repressed. That Certain Woman (1937) is, as well as a comedy, a morbid soap opera highlighted by premature death, an illegitimate child, and a crippled wife named Flip. Yet it’s dull for all that, except in flashes, here and there, of Fonda playing one of his very few weak-willed characters. What he represses, and therefore expresses, are doubts about himself—about his power. Is he a match for Bette Davis? Is he a match for any woman, let alone her master? Henry is most endearing when the butch Davis teases him for not being rugged enough, and the Fonda voice, that classically placid and soothing instrument, tightens to a near shriek.
A better-worse example is The Mad Miss Manton (1938)—a terrible movie, but one in which gremlins of repression and expression run rampant. “You are a nasty creature, aren’t you?” Fonda asks Barbara Stanwyck. “But in time I’ll beat it out of you.” Tremble, temptresses! But Henry’s efforts at masculine dominance are only funny. In one scene, he is bound, gagged, and stuffed in a bed next to a pop-eyed China doll; elsewhere, he plays a comic death scene as a cop warbles “Home on the Range.” The Mad Miss Manton is broken at intervals by piercing screams; they might represent the cri de coeur of Fonda’s hapless man in a world of willful women who force him into silence, a suffocating bed, a dishonorable grave.
These films are painful, but they are in varying degrees alive, because they draw on the tension between Fonda’s challenged manliness and the
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