Quick Plug: Fonda's mulish withdrawal

by Ryland Walker Knight

Fonda's defensiveness (he seems to be vouchsafing his emotion and talent to the audience in tiny blips) comes from having a supremely convex body and being too modest to exploit it. Fonda's entry into a scene is that of a man walking backward, slanting himself away from the public eye. Once in a scene, the heavy jaw freezes, becomes like a concrete abutment, and he affects a clothes-hanger stance, no motion in either arm.
      — Manny Farber ["Rain in the face, dry gulch, and squalling mouth" (1966)]

TCM will be showing Henry Fonda movies all day. It's damned tempting. In the past year or so, he's become one of my favorite actors, though for a very different reason than my attraction to Cary Grant, or Mathieu Amalric; in fact, it's an opposite pull. Fonda's always working against a movie, somehow, and the fun is seeing him winding gears inside his head, plotting his pattern through a picture, and then watching that plan realized. Other times, I like seeing his surprise. Further: it's wonderful to see how much he changed over the course of his career, how age lined his performances with more violence. This is why we miss people like Guillaume Depardieu, or James Dean, too.

Looks that scar. Or, Once there were eyes.

by Ryland Walker Knight

If you've seen Once Upon A Time In The West before, you'll recognize these dazzling blue eyeballs as some of the most sadistic peepers to hit a screen. If you remember this flashback, you will remember that they are alarmingly gleeful, and their appearance is blink-quick, punctuated by a slow-mo fall into dust by the younger version of Charles Bronson's Harmonica. You will also remember this flashback is the clue to why he's named Harmonica; or, at least, why he wears a harmonica. What's cool about a harmonica is that it's a wide instrument split into sections, or frames, of sound. You could say the same thing about cinema. Also, Fonda gets his comeuppance in a splendid composition.

Spoiler? Not really. This is Leone we're talking about here. You don't watch it for the plot, really. Or, you shouldn't; you should watch for how wide screen it is, how super saturated the frame is with color and activity and blood. I watch it for the geometry.