BECAUSE Jane Fonda’s three dozen or so films compete for popularity with her noted social lifestyle over decades, we tend to lose our grip on coming to terms with what exactly those films and her roles in them have to tell us about nascent qualities of feminine power.
It is impossible to speak of some screen stars without taking into account the influence or effect of their family background, and Jane Fonda is one of them.
Daughter of the famous classic Hollywood actor, Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda was not a child star following in her father’s footsteps, or anything like that, but there seems no doubt that growing up under his influence or guidance, and seeing his films –which she most likely did – instilled in her a large dose of individual bravery and social commitment.
What examples of Henry Fonda’s influence can we imagine on his daughter’s professional acting, and real-life activities? If I remember correctly, it was Henry Fonda who once said that as a boy, his father took him to see the lynching of a black man, not of course out of support for it, but to show him an extreme example of mob rule and racial injustice, which existed in their American society, and which his father thought he from childhood show begin to be conscious of.
Of course, the experience had an indelible effect on Henry Fonda, and we see it translated into his sympathetic egalitarian role towards slaves in films like ‘JEZEBEL’ of 1938, his powerful role as the socially caring Depression farmer in John Ford’s classic film of Steinbeck’s classic novel, ‘THE GRAPES OF WRATH’ of 1940, or one of the cowboys victimized by a stubborn totalitarian lynch mob in ‘THE OXBOW INCIDENT’ of 1943.
Apart from these roles, almost all his other roles, especially in Westerns and social dramas, emphasize an individual personal integrity resisting domination, demagoguery, intolerance and injustice.

Social influence
So when in the turbulent international youth rebellion and Counter Culture strategies of the 1960s we see Jane Fonda defend the militant Afro-American Black Panthers, journey to Hanoi and support on documentaries the Viet Cong against her own society’s military aggression  (she recently recanted this), defend Native American causes and  US draft dodgers against the Vietnam war, we should understand the non-conformist North American tradition both her self and millions of Americans of her generation were coming from, and the relationship of her celebrated actor-father to such a radical conscientious American social tradition.                           
But something else about Jane Fonda, and subsequently about those women who naturally share her characteristics, becomes apparent when we consider her films. That something else is the intuitive quest for a feminine identity, not one based one-dimensionally on any extreme feminist exclusion of men, but naturalistically on a self-reflective relationship with men in their ‘man’s’ world.
I hasten to add that Fonda’s male interactions have not been dependent on emasculated men, whose masculinity the woman sucks like a vamp (vampire) in order to strengthen her own femininity, paradoxically via a usurpation of weak masculinity.
From the start of her career as a cinematic actress, Fonda has delivered stunning, complex feminine roles where femininity has honestly, unbiasedly asserted its biological or seductive power vis-à-vis the male as mirror.
This is nothing unusual of course; the male identity discovers its progenerative power vis-à-vis the female as mirror also. But in the actress’s profession, there is only a certain amount of space always left for a fresh angle on the evolution of the female identity, and its power to be explored and revealed. Fonda’s success and fame as a serious actress has been based on her ability to find and occupy that space.

Creative foundations
There are always autobiographical data which hints at an artist’s later development, and with Jane Fonda, there is the fact that her first step towards being a professional artist occurred when she went to Paris to study art. It was only on her return to New York that she took the second creative step, towards a modelling career, which helps to balance feminine confidence with physical poise and a fashion sense, both quite useful in promoting a rounded feminine sense of self and identity.
Her third step was studying at the ‘Actors Studio’ in New York, which led, typically, to her appearance on Broadway in 1960, and a first film called ‘TALL STORY’, directed Joshua Logan, which I have never seen, but which was significant enough to be rated in American film critic Andrew Sarris’s very judgmental book : ‘THE AMERICAN CINEMA: 1928 – 68’.
It was in 1962 that Jane Fonda made her first film, which hit the screen with unforgettable emotional power. ‘WALK ON THE WILD SIDE’, as far as I am concerned, was the best film Fonda could make her real cinematic debut with, and remains one of her best films to date. Which is not really surprising, since it was directed by Edward Dmytryk, the once blacklisted director of 1940s and 50s Hollywood classics of emotional thrust like ‘CORNERED’(1945), ‘TILL THE END OF TIME’ (1946), and ‘CROSSFIRE’ (1947), but who came back  with equal audacious structural artistry and emotional sharpness in 1959 with ‘WARLOCK’, a truly outstanding Western.
Significantly, ‘WARLOCK’ had starred Jane Fonda’s father, Henry, and even though in later years father and daughter were not on speaking terms, one wonders what influence Fonda must have had on Dmytryk, resulting in her memorable role under his direction.
I first saw ‘WALK ON THE WILD SIDE’ in my first teenage year, and my eyes popped right out of my head at Fonda in a tight dress, which accented her rear, which she certainly seemed conscious of, flaunting its obvious importance to the role via Dmytryk’s emotional cinematic build-up.
You can see and feel her real involvement with the role, which had roots in the actress’s enjoyment of her feminine power, despite its wild connotations. This is the film in which Fonda, as the runaway young woman, ends up in a New Orleans brothel with Capucine (that wonderful sensual French actress who once enhanced Hollywood), Anne Baxter, and Barbara Stanwyck as ‘Jo’, the Madame of the New Orleans ‘House of the Rising Sun’, where lone drifter, Laurence Harvey in pursuit of the girl he loves, joins them on the ‘wild side’.

Fonda throws her luscious head of hair around, walks with an undulating globular swing, and delivers her emotionally charged lines with fast diction, both abrupt and neurotically tense. This is Dmytryk’s memorable cinematic style, which no hiding behind definitive generic labels should distract viewers from admitting to its bold steps of creative freedom, where the work of art arrests our habitual comfortable judgement, and awakens our sense of truth as a necessity of emotional effect.
‘WALK ON THE WILD SIDE’ is a film like that, and Jane Fonda’s bold exciting acting helped make it that way, in a style she would develop.