12 angry men 1957 - The finest courtroom drama

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IMDB rating: 8,9

Director: Sidney Lumet
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Martin Balsam, John Fiedler, Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall, Jack Klugman, Edward Binns, Jack Warden, Joseph Sweeney, Ed Begley, George Voskovec, Robert Webber

"Twelve Angry Men is a tightly wound top of a movie. Each scene ratchets up the tension another notch as Henry Fonda's character tries desperately to open the minds of his fellow jurors. The setting - a claustrophobic jury room in the dog days of summer - superbly augments the suspense. Operating within the constraints of a small budget, first-time director Sidney Lumet tightens the noose by accentuating the throbbing pulse of the ceiling fan and slowly narrowing his shots on his characters as the film approaches its climax. Based on Reginald Rose's well-known play, which had been adapted to the television screen three years earlier, Twelve Angry Men boasts a series of excellent performances by young actors who would soon become household names, including Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam. However, it is the film's established stars - Lee J. Cobb, E. G. Marshall and most importantly Fonda - who play the leads, delivering the goods like seasoned pros. The film has instructional value as a study of the inherent strengths and weaknesses of the jury system, but its real value is how it allows each member of the cultural mosaic of a jury to develop into distinct, damaged, and interesting characters. In a well-crafted metaphor for the broader outline of society, the jury members must confront their prejudices in order to see that justice prevails.
A pet project of Henry Fonda's, Twelve Angry Men was his only foray into film production; the actor's partner in this venture was Reginald Rose. A flop when it first came out (surprisingly, since it cost almost nothing to make), Twelve Angry Men holds up beautifully when seen today.
Nominated for three Oscars, Twelve Angry Men ran into the juggernaut of Bridge on the River Kwai and came up empty handed.
It was remade for television in 1997 by director William Friedkin with Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott." - www.allmovie.com

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Mister Roberts 1955 - Petty tyranny and the man who fights it

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IMDB Rating: 7,9

Directors: John Ford, Mervyn LeRoy
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, James Cagney, William Powell, Jack Lemmon, Betsy Palmer, Ward Bond, Philip Carey

"Mister Roberts was one of the more thoughtful, reflective films from the 1950s to deal with World War II. It was a reflection of the distance filmmakers as well as the public had come from the war, a distance which allowed for a more sophisticated dramatic treatment of the conflict and the people involved. Other films during this era also reflected the new maturity, among them, The Caine Mutiny, Between Heaven and Hell, and The Naked and the Dead. Mister Roberts was the most successful of them all, and for good reason - though getting it made properly took real work. It stood to figure that John Ford was ideal for the project, since he loved the United States Navy more than almost anything else in his life (he retired from the reserves as a rear admiral). With Mister Roberts, however, Ford may have been too close to his subject to do justice to the script, and he butted up against the competing personality of star Henry Fonda. Fonda had scored a huge hit on Broadway in the stage version of Mister Roberts, but he'd given up hope of ever doing the movie, since he hadn't been on-screen in eight years and major studios weren't convinced that he was still a box office draw. As a condition of directing the film, Ford insisted on Fonda to star - but the two were at loggerheads from the beginning of the production, mainly over the director's tendency to inject rough-house comedy into his movies. Such an approach breathed life into Ford's somber cavalry movies, such as Fort Apache, but Mister Roberts was a character-driven story with very little real action, and Fonda thought the director's emphasis on laughs would destroy the integrity of the material. Ford's demanding, dictatorial directing style - exacerbated by his excessive drinking - created tension between the two, which erupted into a fistfight after only a few weeks' work. Ford left the production and was replaced by Mervyn LeRoy, who essentially asked the cast to use their best judgement and make the kind of movie Ford would've made. The end result is a finely textured character study that captured the best dramatic moments of the play as it interspersed an effective, new comic element. Fonda, who'd previously performed in four films for the director, would never work with Ford again; the director would only make one more navy film after Mister Roberts, the successful Donovan's Reef.
One of the finest service comedies ever made, Mister Roberts spawned a less amusing sequel, Ensign Pulver (1964), as well as a 1965 TV sitcom." - www.allmovie.com

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My darling Clementine 1946 - One of the greatest classic Westerns, but an idealized version of the shootout at OK Corral

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IMDB rating: 7,8

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Linda Darnell, Victor Mature, Cathy Downs, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt

"One of the greatest movie Westerns, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is hardly the most accurate film version of the Wyatt Earp legend, but it is still one of the most entertaining. Shot on location in Monument Valley in crisp, deep-focus black-and-white, the film opens as Henry Fonda's upstanding yet slightly (and humorously) awkward Wyatt Earp arrives in Tombstone to settle a family score with the murderous Clantons, staying long enough to make the untamed town safe for the new church and schoolmarm-to-be Clementine and enable corrupt, tubercular Easterner Doc Holliday to find a bit of redemption. Yet even as Ford celebrates the possibilities of the new West, he also engages the post-war tendency for Westerns to examine their own myths: for instance, in the expressionistic photography and in Earp's contradictory place between civilization and the wilderness. He knows the way Tombstone ought to be, but he can't settle there himself; the final shootout begins as an orderly ritual but becomes a chaotic montage of death. The 'director's cut' discovered in 1994 contains several minutes of excised footage; the ending was reportedly changed due to the reaction of a 1946 preview audience." - www.allmovie.com

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The Ox-Bow incident 1943 - A brilliantry structured classic western-noir about vigilante justice

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IMDB rating: 8,1

Director: William A. Wellman
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes, Anthony Quinn, William Eythe, Harry Morgan, Jane Darwell, Matt Briggs, Harry Davenport, Frank Conroy

"This now-classic indictment of mob rule was a pet project of both star Henry Fonda and director William Wellman, both of whom agreed to work on lesser 20th Century-Fox projects in exchange for this film.
The Ox-Bow Incident was an anomaly at the time it was released. Produced in the middle of World War II, when Hollywood was concentrating on movies that either boosted morale or entertained, it did neither: it was a major studio release, with a hot young star (Henry Fonda) in the lead, about an unjustified lynching in the 1870s West. Walter Van Tilburg Clark's novel had been kicking around for years, but Hollywood had never had much luck making movies about mob violence and vigilante justice (Fritz Lang's Fury had been a box-office disaster for MGM before the war, despite the presence of Spencer Tracy), and no one was anxious to film it. Twentieth Century-Fox production chief Darryl F. Zanuck agreed to do the movie only because Fonda and Wellman agreed to do other films for the studio, and the result was a movie that was singularly unpopular during its initial release but which has aged magnificently. It was a labor of love by all concerned, a chilling indictment of American justice and America's past in which there are no heroes, just participants who are less guilty than others. Once the war was over, and the movie made it to television, it began to find an audience; the belated response from critics and viewers, as well his pride in having made it, inspired Fonda's similar effort 14 years later to make 12 Angry Men, a movie built on a similar theme. Ironically, 12 Angry Men also took decades to find its audience and begin recording a profit. For all its lack of recognition at the time, The Ox-Bow Incident has become, along with Otto Preminger's Laura, perhaps the most distinctive and well-remembered film issued by Fox during the first half of the 1940s." - www.allmovie.com

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The lady Eve 1941 - An outstanding romantic comedy showing Sturges' perfection

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IMDB rating: 8,0

Director: Preston Sturges
Main Cast: Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda, Charles Coburn, Eugene Pallette,William Demarest

Preston Sturges wrote and directed this classic romantic comedy starring Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck, who are involved in a scintillating battle of the sexes, as Sturges points up the terrors of sexual passion and the unattainability of the romantic ideal. The Lady Eve is among the funniest films of the World War II era, and one of the few comedies whose humor has survived both cultural changes and shifting audience demographics. Directed by Preston Sturges with his usual efficiency, the battle-of-the-sexes story allows star performers Henry Fonda and Barbara Stanwyck to shine, though supporting performer William Demarest often steals the show. As was common in the censorship-laden war era, Sturges resorted to several clever sexual symbols. Fonda's character is an expert on snakes, and there is a funny moment when the audience catches the phallically suggestive book title, Are Snakes Necessary?. The dialogue is consistently bright and peppy. - www.allmovie.com

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The grapes of wrath 1940 - A heartbreaking, compelling American classic

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IMDB rating: 8,2

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin, Dorris Bowdon

"John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath is arguably the director's greatest movie, and the rare Hollywood film superior to its literary source (a view shared by the novel's author, John Steinbeck). Indeed, it is the movie that sums up the impact of the Great Depression, at least on rural America, better than any other film of its time (and there were hundreds that tried, by everyone from Frank Capra to Preston Sturges). From the opening shot of Tom Joad's return to the ruined land where he grew up, the movie is a study of people whose dreams and hopes wither away like the drought-stricken crops. Yet Ford managed to make a movie that wasn't utterly pessimistic, despite its story and setting: the performers and script availed him of indomitable characters, convincingly portrayed, with the result that even the most cynical viewers were persuaded of Ford's artistic vision. Henry Fonda, who'd been an up-and-coming leading man, solidified his image as an upright hero with an almost mystical bent in his portrayal of Tom Joad; Jane Darwell became the archetypal rural matriarch; and even the bit players, such as Ward Bond and Grant Mitchell, got relatively rare opportunities to play against their usual types as beneficent characters. The movie became a strange case of fiction transcending fact, as Ford's images (photographed by the great cinematographer Gregg Toland) became more representative of the period than most documentary photography. Countless filmmakers have quoted from The Grapes of Wrath (there's a very funny audio-visual reference in Close Encounters of the Third Kind), and Ford himself never made a more compelling social statement despite several attempts (The Sun Shines Bright, Sergeant Rutledge, and others) over the next 20 years." - www.allmovie.com

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Young Mr. Lincoln 1939 - Great Ford, great Fonda, authentic American film-making

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IMDB rating: 7,7

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Alice Brady, Marjorie Weaver, Arleen Whelan, Eddie Collins, Pauline Moore

"More hagiography than biography, Young Mr. Lincoln took such outrageous liberties with historical fact that its value as a portrait of the nation's sixteenth president remains questionable. Nevertheless, the performance of Henry Fonda and the assured, fully engaged direction of John Ford placed Young Mr. Lincoln among both men's best work. Indeed, 1939 came to be regarded as Ford's annus mirabilis, the year in which he began his ascent to legend status, directing not only Young Mr. Lincoln but also Drums Along the Mohawk and Stagecoach. It is ironic that Young Mr. Lincoln came to be so well regarded, since neither Ford nor Fonda initially wanted to do the picture. A pair of plays about Lincoln's younger years had just enjoyed success on Broadway, so a reluctant Ford was pressured by Fox producer Darryl F. Zanuck to tackle what was essentially a studio assignment. On reading the script by Lamar Trotti, however, the zealously patriotic Ford became more enthusiastic about the film's all-American subject matter, even persuading a reluctant Fonda to take the lead role. Intimidated by playing such an august historical figure, Fonda at first rejected the part, but he changed his mind during a meeting in which Ford reportedly told the skittish star that he would be playing not 'the Great Emancipator' but 'a jack-legged lawyer from Springfield, Illinois - a gawky kid still wet behind the ears who rides a mule because he can't afford a horse'. When Ford clashed with Zanuck over the film's slow pace and grew fearful that the studio would ruin his film in post-production, he destroyed the negatives of every take he disliked and did in-camera editing. The studio disappointed Ford anyway, excising a scene in which Lincoln and a young John Wilkes Booth have a friendly encounter. Like that scene, most of Young Mr. Lincoln is pure Hollywood balderdash, resting on only the slimmest tissue of truth. For instance, the real murder trial depicted in the film was based not on one tried by Lincoln but on a real-life courtroom drama witnessed by Trotti, who had covered it as a reporter. Though it was not in any way an authoritative view of its subject, Young Mr. Lincoln was a masterpiece of cinema, showcasing a writer, director, and star at the top of their games. In a supreme irony, Young Mr. Lincoln was a major inspiration for master Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the creation of his propagandistic classic, Ivan the Terrible (1944)." - www.allmovie.com

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Jesse James 1939 - A highly romanticized account of the infamous criminal

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031507/?ref_=fn_al_tt_5
IMDB rating: 7,1

Director: Henry King
Main Cast: Tyrone Power, Henry Fonda, Nancy Kelly, Randolph Scott, Henry Hull, Brian Donlevy, John Carradine, Jane Darwell

"Historians will shudder at Jesse James, a biopic which is much more interested in the legend of the famous outlaw than in the facts, but viewers looking only for entertainment will be quite happy with this rip-roaring adventure tale. While the story has been whitewashed, credit should be given to the creators of Jesse for at least not making the title character as pure as the driven snow. Though the motivation they have devised for his first forays into crime make him out to be something of an avenging angel, as time goes on they show that greed does enter into his continued career. Still, with matinee idol Tyrone Power playing the part, there's only a certain amount of 'sullying' that can come into play. Power does very well with the part, turning in a powerful performance that anchors the film and handling his dramatic scenes with aplomb. As brother Frank, Henry Fonda's role is much smaller, but he makes a terrific impact; granted, the part is written as a bit of a scene stealer, but Fonda really runs with it and his scenes are especially memorable. Nancy Kelly is only so-so, but the rest of the supporting cast is right on target. Henry King's direction is nimble and deft, staging the action sequences in glorious outsized fashion, notably the famous bank-robbery scene in which Jesse rides his horse through a plate glass window. Jesse James was filmed largely on location in Missouri, resulting in crowd-control nightmares for the picture's beleaguered assistant directors." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/jesse-james-v26071/

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Drums along the Mohawk 1939 - Three-strip Technicolor in all its glory!

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031252/?ref_=nv_sr_1
IMDB rating: 7,2

Director: John Ford
Main Cast: Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, Edna May Oliver, Eddie Collins, John Carradine

"The first of many collaborations between director John Ford and Henry Fonda, this fine, typically Fordian vision of community life also features the director's first use of the then recently developed Technicolor process. A visually appealing slice of Americana, the film places a youthful, yet stoic Fonda in a series of iconic poses as he and his new wife, an incongruously soigné Claudette Colbert struggle to maintain their farm during the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in the Indian-infested Mohawk Valley. As the farmers fight off Indian attacks, with the well-born Colbert learning to adapt to a difficult new environment, the director links self-sacrifice with heroism. As with much of Ford, the characters' behavior is concerned with the enactment of rituals and the display of pageantry, and the main characters, essentially types. He's more willing to allow the character actors, like Oscar-nominated Edna May Oliver, who plays a feisty widow, to indulge in some theatrics. Despite the hardships the farmers must endure, the film's bright look signals an optimism characteristic of the director during this period, perhaps addressing his Depression-era audience about the grit and cohesiveness required to survive in difficult times. 1939 was a stellar year for John Ford; along with this highly successful adventure tale, which was nominated for three Academy Awards, Ford also released the ground-breaking western Stagecoach." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/drums-along-the-mohawk-v14871/

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You only live once 1937 - One of Lang's best American films

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029808/?ref_=nv_sr_2
IMDB rating: 7,5

Director: Fritz Lang
Main Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Henry Fonda, Barton MacLane, Jean Dixon, William Gargan

"Like his American debut Fury, Fritz Lang's second American feature traces the fate of a man struggling to clear his name after being accused of a crime he didn't commit. A powerful one-two punch, these films both feature a strong sense of social justice, and suggest that Lang was disturbed by the injustice and intolerance he found in the country he adopted after fleeing Nazi Germany. Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda) is an ex-con truck driver, a 'three-time loser' whose next crime will send him to jail for life. He is determined to go straight, but finds resistance at every turn. His boss fires him over a minor misunderstanding, and he and his new bride Joan (Sylvia Sidney at her most heart-tugging) are kicked out of a motel on their honeymoon when the proprietor recognizes him from a true crime magazine. Things go from bad to worse when he becomes the chief suspect in an armored car robbery and finds himself back in prison again. After being convicted of the crime, he attempts a jailbreak in a fog-enshrouded scene that is one of Lang's most horrific depictions of the cruel ironies of fate. Throughout the film Lang is careful to withhold from the audience whether or not Eddie actually is guilty, but also makes it absolutely clear where his sympathies lie. Eddie is continually at the mercy not only of the mistakes in his past, but also of an uncaring justice system and a frenzied news media that can't wait to see him convicted. Folded into all of this is the desperate, doomed love he and Joan share. A perfectly constructed thriller with a strong social conscience, You Only Live Once is considered one of Lang's greatest American films." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/you-only-live-once-v55916/

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The trail of the lonesome pine 1936 - A tear-jerker with fine performances

IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0028401/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
IMDB rating: 6,9

Director: Henry Hathaway
Main Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Fred MacMurray, Henry Fonda, Nigel Bruce, Beulah Bondi

"Paramount's first outdoor Technicolor feature, Trail of the Lonesome Pine was the third film version of John Fox Jr.'s novel. Inspired by the Hatfield-McCoy feud, the story is set in the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia.
Pine is a somewhat dated but still enjoyable backwoods melodrama. Still, the basic conflict definitely has power, there's plenty of 'down home' atmosphere to add flavor to the story, and individual moments pack a great deal of power. The beautiful Technicolor lensing may have a few flaws, but overall, the color and photography create a visual feast. Sylvia Sidney's delectable looks are a feast unto themselves; if her performance is occasionally shrill, it's still effective. Even better are Fred MacMurray and Henry Fonda, both of whom were pretty boyish at the time but deliver performances that are man-sized in their power and presence. Fonda, in particular, makes the most of his dramatic moments, partially because his role is a bit showier than MacMurray's. Of the supporting cast, Beulah Bondi is all stubborn pride and strength, Nigel Bruce is gruffly appealing, and Spanky McFarland makes the tear-jerking climax work well." - http://www.allmovie.com/movie/the-trail-of-the-lonesome-pine-v114282/

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