“The son becomes the father, and the father, the son,” says Jor-El to his intergalactic offspring Kal-El in the original 1978 film version of Superman.
I thought of the wisdom of those words when I learned of the death last week of Peter Fonda. The actor, who was one of two children born to Henry Fonda and his second wife, Frances Seymour Brokaw, never exactly “became” his father on-screen. In fact, for much of his career, he seemed at pains to stand in opposition to his pop: Where Henry had become an icon for his expressions of manly dignity, Peter was known for boyish flamboyance in such films as The Trip (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and The Hired Hand (1971).
Late in his career, though, the son finally summoned the spirit of the father in Victor Nunez’s 1997 independent film Ulee’s Gold. Cast as an emotionally muted beekeeper beset by a good-for-nothing son and daughter-in-law, Fonda’s performance netted him his sole Oscar nomination as Best Actor.
A number of the reviews found traces of Henry in Peter’s performance. “With his intriguingly aged features, and a slow verbal delivery, he bears an uncanny resemblance to his famous father, Henry,” wrote Desson Howe in the Washington Post. In the New York Times, Janet Maslin referenced Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, too: “He conveys stubborn bitterness along with the inner strength of a man described by another of the film’s characters as ‘an old-fashioned, ties-that-bind kind of guy.’”
“Inner strength”? “Stubborn bitterness”? Well, that describes Henry, too. “When Henry Fonda said something,” wrote Peter Bogdanovich, “you believed it — whether spoken as a country boy or a playboy, college professor or criminal, sheriff, outlaw, architect, fisherman or hillbilly.” On the basis of such authenticity, Henry was the studios’ pick to play a gallery of noble icons, real and fictitious, including Abe Lincoln (1939’s Young Mr. Lincoln) and Tom Joad (1940’s The Grapes of Wrath). In fact, Henry was so synonymous with rectitude and restraint that his straitlaced ways were playfully parodied in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s comic Western There Was a Crooked Man … (1970), in which he starred as a high-minded prison warden mercilessly needled by a group of rascally felons.
In truth, Peter, along with his sister, Jane, frequently seemed to pick parts seemingly designed to shock fans of their father. Jane kicked off her career as a peppy ingénue in Sunday in New York (1963) and Barefoot in the Park (1967), but by the end of the 1960s, she had committed herself to radicalism, on- and off-screen. For his part, in films like The Trip and Easy Rider, Peter cast his lot with the drop-outs and druggies so effectively portrayed in Quentin Tarantino’s recent Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.
Perhaps the contrast between father and son can be seen in generational terms: As a member of the Navy, Henry served with honor in World War II; as an adherent of the counterculture, Peter got no closer to the American flag than the design of his famous motorcycle helmet in Easy Rider. To his credit, in an interview in 1975, Henry graciously denied the existence of familial rifts: “When a child decides to go into the father’s business, whether he’s a banker or in show business, there has to be a kind of rebellion.”
Alas, rebellion can have a short half-life. Even as the counterculture cooled down, Peter continued to bop from one anti-establishment film to the next, each weaker than the last: Two People (1973), Open Season (1974), Fighting Mad (1976), and so on. In the end, though, both came around to appreciating their legacy: Just as Jane had the good sense to eventually hitch her wagon to her dad, appearing alongside him in his final effort, On Golden Pond (1981), Peter eventually shaved the sideburns and gave a performance as commanding and careful as that in Ulee’s Gold and several other strong films he made in the wake of its success. In The Limey (1999), in fact, Fonda roasted his own generation with a performance as a morally detestable record producer as a rebuke to sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll. It was on par with his daughter Bridget’s portrait of a beach bum in Jackie Brown (1997).
If Peter Fonda was destined to come of age in an era that would cast him in service of the counterculture that was a reaction to his father’s era, we can at least take solace in the knowledge that he is in his company now.
Peter Tonguette writes for many publications, including the Wall Street Journal, National Review and Humanities.
