Henry Fonda

You find Henry Fonda in every corner of the mythic history and imaginative geography mapped by the movies. Like any star of such duration, he puts his name to many bad movies along the way; the career in total recalls John Berryman's remark about the collected works of Stephen Crane: "majesty and trash scrambled together." But in the fullness of time, he creates an image of the national man that is kaleidoscopic, frightening, and wildly improbable. His best performances—You Only Live Once, Young Mr. Lincoln, The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, The Wrong Man, Fail-Safe, Once Upon a Time in the West, even The Lady Eve—are animated by the dark energy of contradiction. Viewers sense a man living in public and private dimensions at once, and recognize a continuity of mysteries in the actor. Fonda becomes the body and voice of the satisfied man's paranoia, the good man's bad urge, the hero's despairing shade, and the patriot's doubting conscience. In him and through him, the hidden becomes visible, specters are raised, and shadows begin to move on their own.
"I suppose one human being never really knows much about another." Asked in 1966 to characterize Fonda, his friend of almost three decades, John Steinbeck offered this shrugging axiom. But read on: "My impressions of Hank are of a man reaching but unreachable, gentle but capable of sudden wild and dangerous violence, sharply critical of others but equally self-critical, caged and fighting the bars but timid of the light, viciously opposed to external restraint, imposing an iron slavery on himself. His face is a picture of opposites in conflict."
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the enormous spaces and silences of the heartland offered hints of the unseen. People out there had a different way of seeing—both more practical and more mystical. Middle Western practicality was founded in the uncertainties of soil, weather, money, movement. But mysticism—as is often the case in unsettled cultures—was practicality's hopeful ghost: Faith in the un-seen meant life might not be reducible to the dirt in one's hand. Legends of the Pawnee, Otoe, Sioux, and the decimated Ponca Nation were still on the plains around Omaha, while white mysticism went back to the pioneer trails and something called "seeing the ele-phant." Diaries, letters, and other reports of the day include references to this apparition, a Great Plains Moby-Dick invented by folk talk and Journalese. "To have seen the elephant," explains an 1889 dictionary of slang is to have had a full experience of life or of a certain subject or object... the popular symbol of the Great Adventure, all the wonder and glory and shivering thrill of the plunge into the ocean of prairie and plains... this creature seldom appeared except on the fringes of danger and then it was only a fleeting glimpse.